A fostering profile platform for a UK children’s charity
Foster carers use it to introduce their home and family to a child before the child moves in. I was main developer on the platform and led its technical development.
Why fostering services needed it
Children going into foster care often move in with people they have never met. Social workers do what they can to prepare them, but a child may arrive knowing little more than a name and an address, at a point when a great deal has already changed.
A UK children’s charity wanted its foster carers to introduce themselves properly before a move: who lives in the house, which room will be the child’s, what the family does at the weekend. Its digital team set out to give carers a simple way to do that, and to give social workers something they could look through with the child.
How a profile reaches a child
A foster carer builds a profile of their household: a written introduction, photos of the home and the people in it, and a caption for each photo in the carer’s own words. Before a new child arrives, the carer updates it so it shows the house as it is now.
The child’s social worker then opens the profile with the child. They look through it together, talk about it and can come back to it as often as the child wants. On the first day, the faces and rooms are already familiar.
Hundreds of families
across dozens of fostering teams have built a profile for the children coming to live with them.
How carers and staff use it
A carer joins when their fostering team invites them. From there they build the profile at their own pace, usually on a phone, adding pictures of the house, the family, and friends and relatives who are part of daily life.
Fostering staff work alongside them. They help carers get a profile ready, keep an eye on which carers in their team have one, and share a profile with a child’s social worker when a move is being planned.
The profiles hold personal information about real families, so privacy shaped every feature from the start.
My role and the team
I joined the project after its first release. At the time the team was a designer, two other developers and me, working with the charity’s digital team, who owned the product and set its priorities.
Over the following years I became the main developer and led the technical development. I planned the work with them, turned their priorities into releases, built most of the features myself and kept the platform healthy between releases.
Growing beyond one charity
The platform began with the charity’s own fostering teams. Other fostering services then adopted it, including a local authority children’s trust, an independent fostering agency and fostering services in Wales. Each works with its own carers, staff and profiles on the same platform.
Wales brought a new requirement: profiles had to work fully in Welsh as well as English. Carers can now write their introduction in both languages, and each photo carries a caption in each, so a child can read about their new family in the language they use at home.
Challenges along the way
Much of the difficulty came from the range of people and devices involved. Foster carers use whatever they have at home: an older Android phone, a shared family tablet, a laptop. Social workers open profiles on their organisation’s own laptops and phones. Photo uploads, page layouts and sign-in all have to work across that mix of devices, browsers and operating systems.
A steady part of the job was working through user issues as they reached the charity’s team, finding the pattern behind them and fixing the cause, so the next carer would not meet the same problem.
Where it is now
The platform is live and in use by fostering services across England and Wales. It has grown from one charity’s tool into shared infrastructure for several fostering providers, with each new feature added without disturbing the profiles families were already using.
How it was built
The platform is an Elixir and Phoenix web application on PostgreSQL, deployed on AWS infrastructure, with photos stored in Amazon S3. Pages are rendered on the server, which keeps them light on older phones and slow connections.
Elixir and Phoenix suit a long-lived service run by a small team: they are predictable in production and safe to change years after the first release. Automated browser tests cover the journeys carers and staff depend on, from signing up to building and sharing a profile.
Built with: Elixir, Phoenix, PostgreSQL, AWS, Amazon S3, AppSignal.
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