Children of Foster Carers’ Week 2026: Celebrating the Children in Our Fostering Families

Children of Foster Carers’ Week runs from 12th – 18th October 2026. At Credo Care Fostering, we’re taking this moment to shine a light on the incredible young people who share their homes, their parents, and their hearts with some of the most vulnerable children in the UK.

When people think about fostering, they naturally picture the foster carer,  the adult who opens their door, offers their time, and provides safety and love to a child who needs it most. But there’s another group of people who make that door possible to open. They didn’t apply to foster. And yet, without them, the fostering family simply couldn’t function.

They’re the children of foster carers, the children who choose, day after day, to share their home and their family with a child who has come from a place of vulnerability.

This Children of Foster Carers’ Week 2026, we at Credo Care Fostering want to say: Thank you. You are extraordinary.

What Is Children of Foster Carers’ Week?

Children of Foster Carers’ Week is an annual initiative run by  The Fostering Network , the UK’s leading fostering charity, held every October. The week is dedicated to recognising and celebrating the birth children, adopted children, and wider young family members of foster carers, the people who share their homes and their lives as part of the fostering journey.

This year, the week runs from 12th to 18th October 2026. It’s a moment to pause and to remember that fostering is never a solo act,  it’s a whole-family commitment.

What Makes This Even More Special at Credo Care

At Credo Care Fostering, we’re not a general fostering agency. Since 2000, we’ve worked with children and young people who have disabilities, complex medical needs, and life-limiting conditions,  the children who need the most skilled, dedicated families to support them.

That means the children of our foster carers face something that goes beyond the everyday fostering experience.

They may share their home with a child who uses a wheelchair, who communicates through alternative methods, who requires medical interventions through the night, or who lives with profound autism, severe learning disabilities, or palliative needs. The adjustment required, the empathy, the flexibility, the sheer big-heartedness  is genuinely remarkable.

The Reality of Growing Up in a Specialist Foster Family

Being the child of a foster carer is a genuine act of generosity and when that fostering is specialist disability fostering, the experience is uniquely rich and uniquely demanding.

A specialist foster placement can bring equipment, appointments, care routines, and the presence of support workers into the family home. Children of foster carers navigate all of this. They learn to be flexible, to share attention, to hold space for a child whose needs may be far greater than their own on any given day.

Children in disability fostering families sometimes witness profound things, a child’s first smile after years in hospital, the joy of a child who has never experienced Christmas in a home, or the grief of a placement that comes to a natural end.

A Note to the Children of Our Foster Carers

Here you are, sharing your home, your parents’ time, your family life with a child who needed all of that more than you might ever know.

You have shown, in the most practical and everyday of ways, what it means to include someone. To treat a child with a disability not as different or difficult, but as family.

The children who have come through your door carry a piece of your kindness with them. Some of them arrived from hospital settings, from residential care, from situations of profound instability and your home was the place that changed things. That’s not a small thing. That’s enormous.

Thank you.

About Credo Care Fostering

Credo Care is the UK’s first independent specialist fostering agency dedicated exclusively to children and young people with disabilities, complex medical needs, and life-limiting conditions. Since 2000, we’ve been placing children from residential and hospital settings into loving family homes across the South, Midlands, and Eastern England.

We are proud to be:

• The first fostering agency in the UK to receive the National Autistic Society’s accreditation

• Winners of Best Independent Fostering Agency 2025 at the SME Awards

• Rated ‘Oustanding’ by Ofsted

• A trusted partner to local authorities for over 26 years

To find out more about fostering with Credo Care, visit  www.credocare.co.uk .