National Fostering Group
106 episodes listed below
Foster care, told through lived experience.
Voices of Fostering is a steady interview series about what fostering asks of families and what it can change. Its conversations stay close to real experience, from nervous first placements to long-term resilience, support, and belonging.
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Voices of Fostering is a warm, interview-led series about foster care as it is lived inside families. It moves slowly enough to let people think. Recent conversations feature foster carers, family members, leadership voices, and care-experienced guests describing the daily reality behind a life-changing decision. The show is not glossy. Its strength is in plain speech, repeated thoughts, small corrections, and guests gradually finding the point inside their own memories. Foster carers talk about children arriving at their highest emotional point, about teenage insecurity, and about the resilience needed to stay calm, firm, and therapeutic. The practical side matters too. Training, agency support, mentoring, male foster carer groups, and accountability all appear as part of the work rather than as background administration. Family life is treated with similar care. Erin Edwards describes becoming an older sibling through fostering, giving space while staying available, and watching a young person become part of the family from the beginning. John Davison describes an initially empty home becoming active again, with his grandson learning to share family space with foster children. Carol and John look back on years of fostering together and the quiet achievements that sit inside long relationships. Anne’s episode places fostering inside a wider family pattern, with relatives fostering, adopting, mentoring, and specializing in different forms of care. Ashley John-Baptiste widens the frame from the perspective of someone who grew up in care, speaking about instability, resilience, leaving care, and the human stories that files cannot capture. The show often turns personal memory into practical meaning. A child opening up on a staircase becomes a lesson in safety. A kitten becomes a sign of belonging. A difficult placement becomes a conversation about boundaries and consistency. Voices of Fostering suits listeners who want honest, compassionate accounts of fostering without distance or performance. It is advocacy by attention: steady, humane, and grounded in people who have lived the subject.
Made for: For prospective foster carers, fostering families, care-experienced listeners, and anyone trying to understand what stable adult care can mean in practice.
What sets it apart: The show’s value is its unhurried closeness to real voices: foster carers and care-experienced guests are given room to describe ordinary details, hard moments, and lasting change without polish.
Voices of Fostering brought to you by National Fostering Group. Everyone’s life takes a different path. As children and young people decisions can be made for us that shape our lives forever – whether for good or bad. As adults, we have the opportunity to make our own choices. And what we choose can have a positive impact on us and the world around us. Particularly if one of those choices is fostering. When you listen to the stories of children and young people whose lives have been touched by foster carers, you start to see the impact that fostering can h...
A staircase becomes the safest seat in the house when you need fostering stories with lived detail.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A humane, practical look at the steadiness fostering asks of adults.
The episode centers on what foster care demands of the people who take it on, with Travis, Marisol, and Tim Barkley moving through experience, support, and the steady work of keeping children feeling secure.
A warm, practical account of fostering as patient, everyday work.
The piece frames fostering as a shared, ordinary commitment, not just a decision made on paper. John and Carol connect family history, a radio show, and Carol’s wish to foster to the life they built around the work, then settle into the practical side of making space for…
A steady, grounded account of fostering, family change, and the value of consistency.
John Davison's account keeps its focus on how fostering changes the shape of family life. The empty nest, the radio advert that started the first call, and the long application process all feed into a patient picture of making room for a child.
A grounded care story about instability, resilience, and support that can last into adulthood.
Ashley John-Baptiste's story of growing up in care gives the episode a steady center. He speaks about five placements before 18, including four foster homes across southeast London and time in residential care, and the conversation keeps returning to what that kind of movement…
Faithful fatherhood for hard family moments.
Real-life health for busy moms.
Catherine Bennett describes a social-work career that began in 1986, moved through children's units and young people's drug-and-alcohol services, and led to National Fostering Group in 2010.
Tim joins Travis and Marisol for a conversation about foster care, support, and what steady adult care looks like in practice.
Carol and John share how fostering became part of their life together.
John Davison begins with an empty house and a radio advert that nudged him and his wife toward fostering.
Anne discusses her 20+ years as a foster carer and how her family's involvement in fostering inspired her to pursue this path.
Ashley John-Baptiste describes moving through five foster and residential care placements between ages two and 18, including a home where repeated school suspensions gave way to stronger educational outcomes.