Celebrating Decades in Fostering

Debbie and Dave Wallace have been foster carers well before I became involved in the independent fostering sector way back in 1998.

At the time they worked in Foster Care Services, a small independent fostering agency based in Stockport, where I met them for the first time.

I became a director of the agency in that same year, just a couple of months after the birth of The National Teaching & Advisory Service.

My co-director, Linda Jones, introduced me to Debbie & Dave Wallace. She spoke of them first and foremost as her friends, and then latterly about their talents as foster carers.

They were, I soon learned, a truly remarkable couple. I have known many exceptional carers throughout my career, and l recognised, all those years ago, that Debbie & Dave were up there with the best of them.

They possess almost the ideal characteristics for this most difficult of all professions, as individuals both singularly, and in combination.

Debbie, the spokesperson of the family, gregarious, the crusader, the advocate, a talker par excellence, passionate, insatiable for knowledge and information, always willing to improve her understanding of children and their needs.

That in itself makes Debbie stand out; it takes a special and highly dedicated and selfless person to recognise you never stop learning.

Dave, l recognised, was the much more languid and quieter one of the partnership: strong, dependable, happy to play second fiddle, but no one’s fool. His sense of humour is not so much dry, as barren; it’s what endeared him to me all those years ago, along with an intellect he has always sought unsuccessfully to disguise. I have always enjoyed his company. He is a man I genuinely regret not being able to spend more time with.

Their relationship as a couple works. They have been as resilient and as successful a fostering combination as I have known, but it is equally evident that their success would have been unthinkable without each other; their mutual love and respect is the foundation for everything they have ever brought to this most difficult and challenging of professions.

And through it all there have been an infinite number of children whose lives they have touched and changed forever.

These children and adults will all have their own much more intimate stories to tell about life with the Wallaces than I am able to detail.

My story is very much a second hand one, proxy, better described as that of an observer colleague, whose contact with them has been memorable, but through circumstances,  intermittent.

As a result l am aware this tribute cannot possibly do justice to all the children they have loved, helped and shared their personal and professional lives with. I am forced to address them ‘in the abstract’, as those children with conditions so complex they require qualities from their foster carers that are as rare as they are remarkable. 

These, in the main, are often children who have been unable to speak or communicate in ways which the rest of us outsiders take for granted. These are children whose basic physical needs require 24 hour a day action, attention, compassion and dedication.

Dave & Debbie will not like these generalisations of their children and young people. They are right, too, as these children should never be defined by the challenges or difficulties they face.

These are children, with names, individuals with their own unique personalities, gifts, talents, and, yes, often facing extreme challenges too. But first and foremost they are precious individuals, each with their own precious lives.

This has been Dave & Debbie’s instinct throughout the decades, and is the hallmark of their outstanding service over so many years.

These two would have benefited from thousands of training courses, read an infinite number of research papers, regularly attended countless professional meetings, travelled thousands of aggregate miles in routine visits, advocacy, contact with birth families, and so much more besides.

But for all the expertise this will have afforded them throughout their exceptional and illustrious careers and for which I have the utmost respect, I shall personally remember and value one characteristic they share above all others.

It is a quality that cannot be taught, learned, or acquired through any external process, however rigorous.

Debbie & Dave have always known how to love.

For that, and for everything they have worked so tirelessly to achieve, they deserve the best of everything in their retirement.

Finally, a special thank you from Dave Edwards who has known you even longer than I have, as well as from your colleague carers and staff who comprise our Yorkshire Team. I know how highly you are regarded by each and every one of them. 

You will always be considered permanent members of our family at Three Circles.

All our love,

Tim Walker x