Foster care for adolescent entrants: Navigating fragmentation and growth through enduring fostering relationships

Speer, Emma Louise (2025) Foster care for adolescent entrants: Navigating fragmentation and growth through enduring fostering relationships. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

Preview

PDF Download (3MB) | Preview

Abstract

Adolescents are the largest group of young people in the care system, and the largest cohort entering care each year (Department for Education, 2024b). Adolescent entrants, in this research, are defined as young people who enter, or re-enter foster care aged eleven or older. However, there remains a lack of sufficient research acknowledging the challenges and the opportunities for support of adolescent entrants to foster care and their foster carers.

This qualitative research aims to deepen understanding of the experience of foster care for adolescent entrants. The study developed conceptual and theoretical insights into how relationships are experienced by adolescent entrants and their foster carers, in order to reframe and reconceptualise foster care as an intervention for adolescent entrants.

Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with adolescent entrants (n=11) (both adolescents in foster care and adults with care-experience), and foster carers (n=12) with experience of caring for adolescent entrants. Data collection took place prior and during the COVID19 pandemic, therefore interviews include face-to-face and via virtual technologies. Constructivist grounded theory methodology guided the research process.

Findings identified eleven conceptual categories of the experience of foster care for adolescent entrants, grouped into three contexts: navigating the foster care system; negotiating adolescence and emerging adulthood; and navigating enduring fostering relationships. The overarching grounded theory model developed from the empirical data suggests that an adolescent entrant’s experience of foster care is underpinned by the concepts of fragmentation, growth and endurance. Fostering relationships are central to how adolescent entrants navigate fragmentation and growth across adolescence, the effects of which are seen well into adulthood. The impact of quality, committed and supportive relationships between adolescent entrants and their foster carers, even if the relationship itself does not endure, was the central concept bringing all the findings together.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Social Work
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	18 May 2026 12:32
Last Modified:	18 May 2026 12:32
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/103070
DOI:

Downloads

Actions (login required)

View Item