REALITY VERSUS THE ASSUMPTIONS OF TEMPORARY FAMILY FOSTER CARE. RESEARCH REPORT

One of the basic assumptions for the operation of the contemporary foster care system is the temporariness of caring for a child deprived of proper living conditions in their own family. This means that the stay of a child in foster care is primarily to create conditions for effective support for the child’s biological family seeking to improve their life circumstances or – should that emerge to be impossible – to regulate the child’s life circumstances and provide them with a permanent family environment (preferably in the form of an adoptive family). The research objective is to determine to what extent family foster care forms fulfil the assumptions of temporariness of foster care and to define mutual relations between variables significant for the fulfilment of the assumption of foster care temporariness, as well as to determine differences between towns with district rights and country districts in respect of the indicators of temporariness of foster care. The study was conducted on the basis of financial and material reports on the performance of tasks in the field of family support and the system of foster care in the province of Silesia. Research results show that, on average, family reintegration occurs in the instance of one in twenty-five children placed in family foster care. Professional foster families demonstrate the highest effectiveness of reintegration work. In those instances, every tenth foster child returns to their family home. A disturbing phenomenon is that in the group of foster children leaving family foster care, the largest percentage are those who become independent. This contradicts the principle of the temporary nature of a child's stay in foster care. Research has also shown that the indicators of deinstitutionalisation and intensity of foster care do not bear a statistically significant impact on the fulfilment of the assumption of temporariness in family foster care forms. The type of district is also void of statistical relationship with the reintegration and adoption indicators.