With foster parents now coming in many differenet guises, those once excluded from the system can find a more receptive attitude. Women's Ediotr Sarah Foster talks to a mature couple who feel that grandparents lik them have much to offer children in care.

THE scene in the kitchen looks quite typical. There are some flowers on the worktop and a pre-teen boy with dark brown hair is helping gran with their arrangement. He seems quite shy, his eyes not quite engaging yours, but with his grandma for protection, he knows he won't go too far wrong.

Except this isn't what she is; in fact, the two are unrelated. The woman standing in the kitchen is his foster mum. She may be older than the norm but this is clearly not a problem and with her matriarchal bearing, she seems well suited to the job.

Where once the guidelines were quite strict, now many different sorts of people can be considered as foster parents. For Sandra Carter and her husband Ted, at 56 and 63 now firmly in the retirement bracket, this means their caring can continue. Although they do have natural children - their two sons Paul, now 34, and 32-year-old Mark - the couple always wanted more, so when the boys were still quite young, they made the choice to enter fostering.

"At the time we lived on the Isle of Wight, where Ted was in the prison service and basically, it was something we just wanted to do," recalls Sandra, now living in Darlington. "We'd had our own children and unfortunately I couldn't have any more. I wanted a bigger family so we decided we would foster. We thought we could actually long-term foster with a view to adoption."

The couple applied to the local authority and were accepted into the system. Their very first child - a boy called David - was one they still remember clearly. "He was mixed race and there were very, very few mixed race or black children on the Isle of Wight at the time," says Sandra. "We had no problem fostering David. The problem came with people who looked at my own children, then looked at him, then looked at me. I could see all sorts of things going through their minds. I didn't have a car and I had a few racist comments thrown at me on the buses - nothing too desperate, just people being ignorant."

They weren't put off by the experience but took on many other children. As Ted found work in other places, the family followed as a unit, with equal value being attached to every member. "When they come to your family, they're very much part of the family - they're not a separate entity," says Sandra. "You've got to integrate them into your family, otherwise it just wouldn't work. Whatever we did, we did as a family and the foster children were included, whether it was camping in France or going on a day trip."

Yet how did her natural children feel? Were they not jealous of the others? "To give them their due, my family have always been really supportive of anyone who's come in," says Sandra. "They've never been jealous. They've actually enjoyed it. My youngest son and his wife want to foster and two of my daughters want to foster."

Although just two are natural born, when Sandra is asked, she always says she has six children (one daughter, Joanne, has been adopted, and all the rest have just stayed close). This means that mealtimes can be busy at the Carters. "We still have a full house on Christmas Day - there's about 16 of us," says Sandra, contentedly. "There are usually about ten or 11 for Sunday lunch. We've got friends who've said 'I think you're daft' but it's not a one-way street. You get such a lot back from them, especially children who you have long term because you see such a lot of progress."

But then, of course, there are the downsides. With all the energy required, you would think it might be time for Ted and Sandra to think of bowing out of fostering, but they insist their age is something of a benefit. "Probably if we'd started off at the ages we are now, we wouldn't have got a look-in - they wouldn't have considered us - but at the end of the day, we've got 34 years of child-rearing experience," says Sandra. "We had a little break about four weeks ago and we were lost. When there are only two of us in this house, it's just unbelievably quiet."

"There's no age restriction on applying to be a foster carer," adds Ted. "I think what they say is 'if you're fit enough and you want to do it, you can'."

In fact, for many older people, it could prove mutually attractive - while children in care could gain a lot from their experience and their time, they could themselves find rich rewards in their support of these young lives. A crucial point that Sandra makes is of the need some have to nurture. "There are a lot of women who suffer from empty nest syndrome, who don't know what to do once the children have left home, and if they don't want to go out to work, this is an ideal opportunity for them to put all that experience to good use," she says. "And if you get to our age and you don't want to take babies or anybody under five, you can say that."

Though they began in the public sector, now Ted and Sandra do their work through the private agency Team Fostering. This gives them access to support they weren't used to in the past and now they wouldn't dream of going anywhere else. "The big bonus is you've got 24-hour cover," says Ted. "If you need advice or help, you can pick the phone up in the middle of the night and you've got a human voice on the other end, not an answering machine."

With each new child, the Carters receive some information then have to say if they will take them. While there's no pressure to say yes, they've only ever turned down one. "It was just purely because of the background and bearing in mind that we have very young grandchildren and things like that - but we would be very reluctant to turn anybody down," says Sandra. "We've had children with severe disabilities, children with learning difficulties and children who we thought we would have had major problems with but who turned out to be not quite as bad as we expected. People automatically assume that if a child is in care they've done something wrong and that isn't always the case - in many cases, they haven't."

In 30 years of foster parenting, the couple have had their share of trials - one boy they cared for wrecked his room yet Sandra says he was "delightful" and that her heart broke when he left. What both convey is just how much they love the job, how much their lives have been enriched by it. As Ted expresses rather eloquently, the joy of watching a child blossom is all the thanks they'll ever need.

"I went to pick up one from school and he'd got the class trophy and you would have thought he'd won the World Cup," he says. "He was so pleased that somebody had recognised him. It was wonderful to see."

For more information on Team Fostering, ring the Newcastle branch on 0191-262-8855 or the Darlington branch on 01325-368600, or visit www.teamfostering.co.uk