Hannah Gray finds out who can apply what kind of impact foster carers can have.

KATY Hawkins, from Peterborough City Council, is in no doubt that being foster carer is a rewarding and fulfilling role.

"Even if you only have a child for a short period of time and that child then goes home, your influence is still with them," she said. "There's not many careers that make that much of a difference to a child's life."

Katy is the service manager for children in care services at Peterborough City Council (PCC), and passionately believes that both the child and the adult benefit in a foster home.

"I think carers get an incredible sense of achievement," she said. "The ability to make a difference in a damaged child's life is just beyond any kind of payment or reward we could offer. Watching a child grow and develop that has had the sort of start in life we wouldn't want for our children is just phenomenal."

There are around 300 children in the care of PCC at the moment, and about three quarters of those are in foster homes.

The council is keen to recruit new carers all the time so that it has a pool of adults ready to be matched with children as they come into the system.

Fostering can sometimes suffer from a bit of an image problem, as it's easy to imagine it would involve a stream of troubled youngsters coming through your door for short periods of time.

But modern fostering is not necessarily like that. Although shorter placements can and do happen, foster carers can also be matched to a child who they then commit to care for until that child is 18.

The criteria to become a foster carer also tend to be misunderstood, and Katy warned Peterborough residents against assuming they can't apply.

"I think sometimes people rule themselves out for a whole host of reasons without checking it out first," she said.

After residents have applied, they undergo a number of checks, including with the police and the NSPCC, but initially the rules regarding what you need to have and be are very simple.