big update

February 2026

A lot has happened for us over the past month, from new courses, new companion apps, new partnerships with a fostering agency and a local authority and new members to our voluntary associate team.

I also had the pleasure of virtually dropping into a meeting with carers at Bespoke Fostering. It was great to show them the Academy and officially welcome them aboard. I'll be doing similar with the carers of Hope Fostering Services and To the Moon and Back Foster Care over the next month.

We also became Cyber Essentials Certified, which is a government-backed scheme for companies to show they are taking the safeguarding of data seriously.

So, let's dive in.

A practical, trauma-informed money rehearsal app for young people aged 11 to 18.

Young people can practise in a Real World setting or choose an Adventure World, where the same skills are developed through a narrative lens.

The structure stays steady. The skills stay strong. The entry point adapts.

Pocket Wise is not financial advice and should not be relied upon for real world decisions. Always check official sources before making important financial choices.

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Children who have lived with domestic abuse often carry its impact long after the abuse has stopped.

This practical, trauma informed course helps foster and kinship carers understand how those experiences shape behaviour, emotions, and relationships, and guides you through realistic scenarios, disclosures, recording, and reporting with clarity and confidence.

Grounded in UK safeguarding guidance, it offers clear, real world support to help you respond calmly in the moment, protect trust, and strengthen your professional practice alongside your existing training and supervision.

Thank you, really useful bite-sized course. These are always helpful to consolidate knowledge.

samantha

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This course supports carers to understand not only what children are carrying, but also what kinship carers themselves are holding, and why care can feel so heavy even when love is strong. Shaped by the Handle With Care Report 2025 and the voices of over 1,900 kinship carers, it brings the realities behind the statistics to life.

It explores the different starting points of foster and kinship care, particularly the impact of stepping in during crisis.

Lovely to hear Kinship voices. It’s lovely to hear a good explanation of kinship. A lot of people have never heard of Kinship before.

sharon

New Partnerships

We're pleased to announce that To the Moon and Back Foster Care and Herefordshire Council have partnered with us.

Through these partnerships, their teams, foster carers, and connected carers will soon have access to our full offer, including courses, companion apps, and the Knowledge Hub.

For us, this matters. It reflects a genuine commitment from agencies who want to provide carers with learning and support that truly speaks to the realities of fostering.

If you feel the Academy would be helpful for your own fostering service, we would really appreciate you recommending us.

Alison Kindred Byrne

Alison is an experienced social worker and therapeutic services leader with more than thirty years working alongside children, young people, and the families who care for them.

She is one of the co‑founders of To the Moon and Back Foster Care, an award‑winning therapeutic fostering service.

Katie Pullin

Katie is a Fostering Team Manager at Herefordshire Council, leading the Fostering Recruitment and Assessment Team with a clear vision for improving support for foster carers and outcomes for children.

Rose Lord

As the founder of My Best Mood, and a Women in Tech Awards Finalist, she combines lived experience as a neurodiverse mum of two with positive psychology and trauma-aware learning design.

Samantha Wilkinson

Katie is a Fostering Team Manager at Herefordshire Council, leading the Fostering Recruitment and Assessment Team with a clear vision for improving support for foster carers and outcomes for children.

Dr Amanda Stephenson

Before becoming a foster carer, Dr Amanda Stephenson worked for 20 years as a university lecturer at the Arts University Bournemouth teaching contextual studies to degree students on a variety of courses.

Carers & other professionals

Short, practical courses for foster & kinship carers

Companion apps for in-the-moment support

'What to do when' guides in our Knowledge Hub

Understanding Kinship Care: Insights from the Handle With Care Report, 2025

Lovely to hear Kinship voices. It’s lovely to hear a good explanation of kinship. A lot of people have never heard of Kinship before.

Creating a Healing Home: Becoming the Calm Anchor

So simple to follow. The 10 steps are great and not difficult to put in place and achieve. I love the way that it gives clear outcomes and advice on children who maybe reluctant to engage too. Love this.

Podcast: Children in Care & Lying

Loved that it was brief but really explained well the reasons behind lying. Breaking it down has helped me understand why a child may be lying and how we can move forward together therapeutically.

Creating Consequences That Teach, Not Punish

This has helped me a lot to understand my children and what choices I can offer. The course is fantastic!

Shame in Traumatised Children

We have received so much training in PACE over our fostering career but this is the first course which has directly linked shame as the primary emotion driving most of our three girls’ behaviours so thank you for giving such a clear, concise explanation.

Toxic Masculinity and the Manosphere

Great course and good insight into what children and young people have to navigate in a modern online world on a daily basis.

Sibling Rivalry & Trauma

Simple, straightforward and PACE based advice. All of the scenarios were so relatable. Resources are brilliant and will be so useful, without being tricky or expensive to source. I love the modelled 'script' approach which provides useful phrases when things escalate.

Podcast: Children in Care & Lying

It opened my eyes to Therapeutic parenting and opened my mind to PACE.

Creating Consequences That Teach, Not Punish

Very good course! You put across the point about achieving the natural way to set consequences in a child friendly way.

I liked the three R’s and the way to put it into a table. This shows how well it can work with the young person.

When Children Have Lived with Domestic Abuse

Thank you, really useful bite-sized course. These are always helpful to consolidate knowledge.

Podcast: Children in Care & Lying

It opened my eyes to Therapeutic parenting and opened my mind to PACE.

Podcast: PACE, DDP & the Five Pearls

Very well put together course. Easy to follow and understand despite the amount of information; explanations about earlier life traumas children carry within, and the therapeutic manner, DDP and PACE, foster carers can adopt to help children and young people learn self-regulation and improve their self- esteem.

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Children in foster care don’t usually lie in the way adults think of lying – not with the cold calculation of a fraudster in a Netflix documentary. More often it’s a kind of survival tactic, almost automatic. Trauma specialists even talk about it as a “fourth F.” You’ve heard of fight, flight, freeze… well, lying becomes another option. Not to get one over on you, but to dodge the sting of shame, or the dread of being punished, or simply the awful feeling of being powerless.

That’s where the Curiosity Lens comes in. Imagine putting on a pair of invisible glasses or holding up a magnifying glass. Instead of seeing the fib at face value, you start to see what’s underneath it – the fear of rejection, the nervous energy, the shame the child doesn’t know how to name. With PACE in mind – curiosity and acceptance especially – you suspend the moral outrage, the urge to shout “just tell me the truth,” and you lean in gently instead.

It’s not about catching them out. It’s about keeping the conversation alive. As one parenting guide wisely put it: stay exploratory, keep wondering aloud. If you shame them, they’ll close the door. If you stay curious, they might just leave it ajar.

And when you respond with genuine interest – “I wonder what made it hard to tell me…” – you send a message that’s bigger than any single lie: I’m not here to trap you, or humiliate you. I’m here to understand you. That, over time, is how trust grows. They learn you’ll meet their honesty with compassion, not punishment. And that changes everything.

“Hmm, that’s an interesting story you’ve told me. I wonder if maybe it feels safer to say that than what really happened? If you’re worried about getting in trouble, you don’t have to be – you are safe with me. Whatever happened, we can sort it out together. Can you help me understand what’s going on?”

(This phrasing invites the child to explain, without outright accusing them of lying. It uses "I wonder" instead of "You’re lying", signalling curiosity. You might even playfully put on “magic truth glasses” with your fingers, if age-appropriate, to lighten the moment and show the child they’re not angry.)

Many children in care carry a kind of hidden script in their heads. It says: I am bad. It’s my fault. They don’t usually say it out loud, but it’s there, humming away. It comes from years of early hurt, of being rejected again and again. Some even learn that if they show real feelings – sadness, anger, longing – it might lead to punishment, or worse, abandonment. So they tuck those feelings away, and the shame festers.

This is where the Acceptance Shield comes in. It’s less superhero cape, more everyday armour. You hold it up, deliberately and consistently, to protect the child from those shame-arrows. It means making a very clear distinction: I don’t always like your behaviour, but I always accept you.

In PACE terms, it’s acceptance and empathy working in tandem. You meet the child’s feelings as they are, even the messy ones. You empathise with the shame they’re drowning in. And practically, it means tempering your own response. No harsh telling-off. No thunderous disappointment. Instead: “You’re not a bad kid. I get why this happened. And I still care about you.”

Because here’s the thing: children watch closely for whether their inner world is safe with you. If you counter their self-criticism – “I’m stupid, I’m bad” – with calm, believable truths – “You’re good, you’re worthy” – you’re teaching them a new script. One where they’re not discarded for messing up. One where they’re covered.

And when you hold that shield day after day, the child starts to believe it. Their sense of self stitches back together. They start to grow resilience against shame and rejection. And in that, the bond between you becomes their secure base – something solid, at last, in a life that’s often felt shaky.

“I know you feel really bad about this. It’s okay – we all make mistakes, but I want you to hear this: I’m not angry and I’m not leaving. I love you no matter what. Nothing will change that. Let’s figure out how to make it right together when you’re ready.”

(This script explicitly assures the child of your enduring acceptance. Phrases like “no matter what” and “nothing will change that” directly address fear of rejection. You might literally open your arms like a shield or put an arm around the child if appropriate, to physically reinforce the feeling of protection and safety.)

Defiance in children can feel like a brick wall. They cross their arms, scowl, and say “No!” with the kind of finality usually reserved for magistrates. And you feel that surge of frustration rising – the urge to push back harder. But there’s another option.

The Playful Pause is about puncturing that tense balloon with a bit of silliness. A ridiculous face. A pretend dragon lurking in the room. A mock-serious “emergency” about socks refusing to cooperate. It sounds daft, and in a way it is. But daftness is often what works.

The magic of playfulness is that it pauses the power struggle. It shifts the dynamic from “me against you” to “me with you.” For a younger child, it might be full-on theatrics. For a teenager, maybe a raised eyebrow and a wry, self-deprecating joke. Either way, it says: I’m not your enemy. We can reset this together.

It doesn’t mean ignoring the behaviour. It just means you’re smart enough to know that humour can sneak past defences that sternness never will. And once you’ve both laughed, even a little, the wall crumbles. Suddenly there’s room to carry on. Together.

In a mock-serious narrator voice: “Oh no... the Defiance Dragon has entered the room! It’s making us both all grumpy. Quick, I have an idea – I’ll make a funny face to scare it off… 😜 See, the dragon is laughing! Can you give it a try? [Child pulls a face] Hooray, we scared it away together!” (Both laugh, tension breaks) “Alright, shall we give (the task) another go now?”

In this playful script, you create a tiny imaginative game (“Defiance Dragon”) to externalise the child’s defiance as something we can team up against playfully. The exact script can vary widely by age (for a teenager, humour might be more understated, like you suddenly doing a goofy dance and saying “Ugh, what a morning – shall we hit reset and start over?” with a grin). The essence is to surprise the child out of the stuck position with levity. Your willingness to be a bit silly shows the child it’s safe to drop their guard. Once the child smiles or giggles, even briefly, the emotional climate shifts – we (you and the child) are connected again, and the task or issue can often be revisited with less resistance.

When a child withdraws – shuts the bedroom door, curls up silent on the bed – it’s tempting to take it personally. To knock loudly, or to storm off yourself. But here’s the truth: often what’s happening is less about you and more about the child drowning in feelings they can’t quite put words to. Shame, sadness, fear.

The Empathy Bridge is about reaching across that gap. Not forcing them to talk, not demanding eye contact, but sending a quiet signal: I see you. I understand. And I’m here. Maybe it’s a few calm words through the door. Maybe it’s leaving a note or a favourite snack outside. Maybe it’s just sitting nearby, available.

The visual is a bridge of hearts or hands. You stand on your side, they on theirs. And you extend something across – empathy – so when they’re ready, they can walk back over. The bridge is patient. It doesn’t collapse if they don’t use it straight away.

This says to the child: Even if you push me away, I won’t give up on you. And in time, that’s how trust is built. They learn that silence won’t scare you off. That feelings won’t break the relationship. And that you are a steady presence on the far side of the cliff, always waiting, always ready to welcome them back.

(You speak through the door or next to the withdrawn child, calmly and kindly): “I know it’s been a really upsetting day. If I were you, I might want to hide under the covers too. Just wanted to say I understand why you feel that way, and it’s alright. I’m here whenever you feel like talking or even if you just want a hug. Take your time – I’m not going anywhere.”

(In this script, you're naming and normalising the child’s likely feelings, showing empathy: “I’d feel the same if I were in your shoes.” There’s also an explicit assurance of presence: “I’m here… I’m not going anywhere,” which is crucial for a child worried about being given up on. The tone is gentle, not demanding a response. You might sit quietly nearby, or leave a soft toy or drawing materials as an invitation. The child then knows the bridge is there whenever they are ready to cross back into interaction. Even if the child doesn’t respond immediately, such messages sink in and over time the child will trust that the carer truly cares and empathises with them.)

February 2026

Pocket Wise

Building financial confidence and independence, together.

When Children Have Lived with Domestic Abuse

Understanding Kinship Care: Insights from the Handle with Care Report, 2025

New Partnerships