The coordinator of the National Foster Care Association for Dobrich area, Iliya Iliev, provided NFCA with a letter addressed to him, which reiterates the obligations of foster families and foster care providers for ensuring quality care for children. The reason for this letter, which was sent to all foster parents in the area, was a meeting held between the deputy Minister of Justice and the Agency for Social Aid, which provided information about cases where the foster family did not look after children in foster care adequately. The letter contains recommendations for children, regardless of their ethnic origin, to study the Bulgarian language, to attend school, and for the foster parents and providers to work to ensure that the child acquires independent life skills.

The National Foster Care Association welcomes the concern of social services regarding the rights and interests of children, living outside their families.

At the same time, however, we are obliged to remind of the following:

1. Foster care in Bulgaria has started developing in a conveyor-belt fashion. Despite the positive aspects of the “I Too Have a Family” project, it is the set quantitative criteria in it that have led to a drastic lowering in the amount of work and effort invested into the recruitment, assessment, training and approval of the candidates for foster parents.
    
2. Once again, the error in the applied project is in the municipalities hiring inexperienced social workers who are not familiar with family dynamics or the work involved in the provision of foster care. At the same time, these foster care teams must recruit, train and support the foster families.
    
3.  We observe an alarming administrative behaviour towards foster parents, and the crucially important and valuable support is replaced by control. The lack of self-help groups, the opportunity for individual counselling, as well as formal work on the monitoring of foster families, is flawed. Where there are services in help of foster care, another flaw can be observed - social workers, who should be controlling the quality of the service, play the role of supporters, which is a prerequisite for a conflict of interest. There is no logic for the people who are meant to control your work, to support you.

If in places there is noticeable decrease in the quality of foster care, the blame must be shared between the departments for child protection, the foster care teams and the Commission on Foster Care on a municipal level, which are the three parties, engaged with the approval of foster parents in the country. We will continue to insist that criteria for foster care are needed, and furthermore, that accumulated experience already exists and opportunities for drawing important lessons and insights from it exist.

NFCA would like to remind that quality foster care is a result of the people involved in it, rather than of regulations. On the contrary, with concern we note that the rules for the implementation of foster care are on a very high level but the competence of those implementing them, mainly social workers, has been drastically lowered or absent