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The government has committed £25m to boosting foster care recruitment and support in England from 2026-28.

The money was announced in the government’s spring statement last month, when the Treasury said it would be used to recruit a further 400 fostering households.

Further details were provided last week by children’s minister Janet Daby, in response to a written parliamentary question from Liberal Democrat MP Tom Gordon.

Daby said the money would be available over two years – 2026-27 and 2027-28 – and was also designed to fund peer to peer support for foster carers, as well as bolster recruitment.

The funding builds on £36m allocated from 2023-25 by the previous government and £15m for 2025-26 provided by the current administration to tackle shortages in England’s fostering capacity. There was a 10% drop from 2021-24 in the number of mainstream foster carers – a category that excludes kinship carers approved to look after specific children.

Investment in regional fostering schemes

The investment to date has been designed to roll out regional fostering recruitment and retention programmes, set up by clusters of local authorities. These comprise three elements:

1. A fostering recruitment support hub, providing an information and support service to help prospective carers from their initial enquiry to making an application.
2. A communications campaign to drive interest in fostering across the region and increase the number of enquiries received by the hub.
3. Expanding the ‘Mockingbird model’, developed by the Fostering Network in the UK, under which “constellations” of fostering households provide mutual support to one another, led by an experienced carer who provides a ‘hub home’ for the others. A 2020 evaluation of the scheme for the DfE found that households who participated in Mockingbird were 82% less likely to deregister than households who did not.

In her answer to Gordon, Daby did not confirm whether the £25m for 2026-28 would provide further funding for these regional programmes or a different purpose.

Foster carers ‘lack authority to take decisions’

Alongside the increased investment, the DfE is also planning to enable foster carers to take more day-to-day decisions about children in their care.

Currently, a child’s placement plan must set out where authority to make decisions has been delegated from parents and councils, where they share parental responsibility, to carers, in relation to matters including healthcare, education, leisure, home life, faith and social media use.

Statutory guidance states that foster carers should have delegated authority in relation to day-to-day parenting decisions, but the Fostering Network has warned that this is not borne out in practice.

The charity worked with Green MP Ellie Chowns to table an amendment to the current Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to give foster carers delegated authority over these decisions by default.

Celebrate those who’ve inspired you

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Do you have a colleague, mentor, or social work figure you can’t help but gush about?

Our My Brilliant Colleague series invites you to celebrate anyone within social work who has inspired you – whether current or former colleagues, managers, students, lecturers, mentors or prominent past or present sector figures whom you have admired from afar.

Nominate your colleague or social work inspiration by filling in our nominations form with a few paragraphs (100-250 words) explaining how and why the person has inspired you.

*Please note that, despite the need to provide your name and role, you or the nominee can be anonymous in the published entry*

If you have any questions, email our community journalist, Anastasia Koutsounia, at anastasia.koutsounia@markallengroup.com

Pledge to reform delegated authority rules

Though this was not accepted by the government, it has pledged to consult on amending the Care Planning, Placement and Case Review (England) Regulations 2010, which set out the current rules around delegated authority, to achieve the same result.

In her response to Gordon, Daby said: “The department has also begun conversations with the sector about proposed changes to delegated authority, ensuring that all foster carers have delegated authority by default in relation to day-to-day parenting of the child in their care.”

The minister added that the DfE was “committed to improving practice and guidance” in relation to the handling of allegations against foster carers, which she said was “a key contributor to high levels of…deregistration”, but did not set out further details.

Fostering body urges greater focus on retention

Daby’s statement came as fostering information service Foster Wiki released a report about carer recruitment and retention, based on analysis of data and its research with carers.

While praising the DfE’s investment in regional recruitment hubs as “a crucial and commendable step” in addressing fostering’s workforce challenges, it called for a sharper focus on retention to prevent experienced carers from leaving the sector.

This should include greater professional recognition of foster carers, backed by ongoing training and nationally recognised qualifications, a remuneration system based on skills, specialism and experience, and an independently managed allegations process, with representation and advocacy for carers.

The support of supervising social workers is critical to foster carer retention, amid deepening shortages of capacity in the sector, research has shown.

All but one of 114 UK fostering services surveyed in 2024 for the Fostering Network’s latest State of the Nations’ Foster Care report said there was a shortage of carers to meet local needs, down from all but six at the time of the charity’s last such report, in 2021.

Four in ten of the services had seen a decrease in their number of approved mainstream (non-kinship) carers in the previous year, with just 19% reporting an increase, in line with year-on-year declines in the number of approved households in England recorded in official data.

Lack of service support key factor behind resignations

At the same time, six in ten of 2,883 current foster carers questioned for the study said they had considered resigning (46%) or were currently considering doing so (14%).

Among this group, the most common reasons were a lack of support from their fostering service and a lack of respect from other professionals in the team around the child (54%).

Among a separate group of 169 former foster carers surveyed, a lack of support from the fostering service was the most common reason they had left the role, being cited by 41%.

However, the Fostering Network found significant differences between former and current foster carers’ views of their supervising social workers.

Differing perceptions of supervising practitioners

While 74% of current foster carers rated the support of their supervising social workers as good or excellent, this was true of 47% of former carers.

Similarly, 51% of former foster carers said they always or usually felt treated as equal and valued by supervising social workers, compared with 76% of current foster carers.

Having positive relationships with social workers was cited as the one thing working well in fostering by 21% of current carers, the most popular of all answers.

However, while 96% had an allocated supervising practitioner, less than half (44%) had had a consistent social worker over the previous two years, with carers having an average of 2.2 over this time.

Views of children’s social workers

Foster carers were less positive about children’s social workers, with 53% saying that they always or usually felt treated as equal and valued by them, down from 57% in the Fostering Network’s 2021 survey.

There was a similar fall – from 45% to 41% – in the proportion who felt that the support they received from children’s social workers was good or excellent.

One specific issue around this relationship related to foster carers’ authority to make decisions about children, with just 31% saying that social workers were always clear about which decisions carers were able to make.

In cases where they had not been given authority, less than half of carers – 48%, down from 55% in 2021 – felt social workers always or usually responded to requests for decisions in a timely fashion.

Celebrate those who’ve inspired you

Photo by Daniel Laflor/peopleimages.com/ AdobeStock

Do you have a colleague, mentor, or social work figure you can’t help but gush about?

Our My Brilliant Colleague series invites you to celebrate anyone within social work who has inspired you – whether current or former colleagues, managers, students, lecturers, mentors or prominent past or present sector figures whom you have admired from afar.

Nominate your colleague or social work inspiration by filling in our nominations form with a few paragraphs (100-250 words) explaining how and why the person has inspired you.

*Please note that, despite the need to provide your name and role, you or the nominee can be anonymous in the published entry*

If you have any questions, email our community journalist, Anastasia Koutsounia, at anastasia.koutsounia@markallengroup.com

Levels of burnout

Behind lack of support and respect from practitioners, burnout or poor wellbeing related to fostering was cited as the next most common reason why current carers had, or were, considering resigning, with 53% reporting this.

Overall, 58% of current – and 73% of former – carers had experienced burnout or poor wellbeing, with this group of current carers being seven times as likely to have considered resigning than other respondents.

The network also found that just 48% of carers felt able to ask for support for their wellbeing when they needed it, without fear of negative consequences for them or the children they were looking after.

Carers struggling more financially

The charity also found that carers were increasingly struggling financially, with a third saying their fostering allowance and any expenses they could claim met the full costs of looking
after the children they foster, down significantly from the 56% recorded in 2021.

Allowances reported by carers largely fell short of the Fostering Network’s recommended rates.

This led to children missing out on activities, holidays, birthday and Christmas celebrations, clothing and education costs, while most foster carers (72%) said they used other personal income to cover deficits.

This included foster care fees, which fostering services are not required to pay, unlike allowances, and are designed to recognise carers’ time, skills and experience. Over half (56%) of carers received a fee, though only a quarter of foster carers said it was sufficient to cover their essential living costs.

National recruitment drive

Across the UK, less than half (48%) of foster carers said they would recommend fostering to others who may be considering it, down from 54% in 2021, with 17% saying they would not, up from 12%.

The report comes with the UK government striving to recruit more carers in England by funding regional fostering hubs, which are designed to provide a single point of contact for people interested in fostering and support them through the process from initial enquiry to application.

Recommendations for reform

On the back of its study, the Fostering Network urged governments across the UK to:

• Address sufficiency issues within children and families social work teams, prioritising and financing targeted social work recruitment and regulation of caseloads.
• Increase allowances to meet the charity’s recommended rates and introduce and fund a national minimum fee framework, with fees paid 52 weeks a year, and a national pension scheme for foster carers.
• Develop a register of foster carers to increase foster carers’ status, support matching of children with foster carers and take responsibility for decisions about removing carers.
• Introduce, by law, maximum delegated authority for foster carers to make day-to-day decisions on behalf of the children and young people.
• Invest in the creation, implementation and monitoring of a standardised framework for pre- and post-approval training for foster carers.

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Anyone who has read Hope Daniels’ first book, The Sunday Times bestseller Hackney Child, will know that when she was nine, she walked into Stoke Newington police station with her two younger brothers and asked to be taken into care.

What readers will not know from reading Hackney Child is that Hope was a victim of child sexual exploitation, abuse and rape. This is because Hope herself didn’t realise it at the time.

The publication of Hackney Child led to Hope being invited to talk at events across the country for professionals from social services, police, health and education about being a child in care. And it was, ironically as it turned out, at a safeguarding conference in 2016, that Hope went off script and talked about “an affair” she had had with a married man when she was 14.

The lens of realisation

A police officer approached her afterwards and gently explained that there had been no affair or relationship: she had been groomed, sexually exploited, abused and raped by this man. She was the victim.

In that moment, Hope’s world “jolted and shifted” and “a single atom of the shame and blame which had weighed on me, and bent me double throughout my life, was lifted. From me. To him. This was the start of my healing”.

And so the second part of Hope’s autobiography, This Isn’t Love, retells her childhood through the lens of that realisation.

With a few exceptions – the teacher, social worker, and residential care workers in Hope’s life who showed compassion – this is a story about a care system that spectacularly fails to deliver anything approaching “care”.

It is a care system that makes a girl spend her childhood repeating the mantra: “I am a whore. I am a little slag, I am a slut.”

An uncaring care system

This book made me angry on Hope’s behalf for so many reasons, including at:

• Social workers and teachers who either failed to notice or do anything about what was going on in Hope’s family home. Her parents were alcoholics, neglect was obvious – the children were often hungry and wore dirty clothes. Wherever they lived reeked of urine, sometimes there were rats. Hope’s dad stole a variety of items including food, things for the house and goods which he peddled out of a suitcase at the local market to make money. Hope herself stole food so that she and her brothers could eat. Their mum had stints in prison for soliciting and her dad was convicted twice for living off immoral earnings. Knowing this alone, at the very least, why did it not occur to any professional to question how many bedrooms there were and where Hope’s mother took clients? A walk upstairs would have revealed that Hope slept in her parents’ bedroom and saw everything. The family was moved multiple times, often because of complaints from neighbours. And yet, there were no interventions, as if by moving the family on, the responsibility for what was happening would also be passed on.
• The person responsible for replacing the staff at Hope’s children’s home with no explanation or warning. The children woke up to find a new team in place, denying them the opportunity of saying goodbye to anyone they had become attached to. Yet again, they were given no control over anything in their lives, which left Hope thinking they left because of something she’d done.
• The professionals who not only turned a blind eye but, in some instances, colluded to allow neglect and abuse to continue in children’s homes, secure units, and foster placements. Hope was self-harming by 11, drinking and sniffing aerosols; staff knew but did nothing.
• A system that selected completely unsuitable people to become foster carers and then allowed them to continue when it must have been apparent they were cruel at best, abusive at worst.
• A system that, to this day in some places, gives children bin bags for their possessions when moving between placements. What message does this give?
• The head of the children’s home who told Hope she was disgusting for seducing a married man – when she was 14.
• The construct of secure units – for Hope, these placements were the complete opposite of therapeutic, and to this day traumatised children, young people and adults can be further harmed in such settings. In one secure unit staff encouraged an atmosphere where children fought and then watched rather than intervened – except to physically hurt them under the pretence of restraint. And in another secure unit, a residential youth worker openly sexually abused the girls.
• The fact that some of these people are still working as foster carers and in social care.
• The male doctor who after Hope gave birth to her first baby, didn’t stop to think why a woman would scream at him, “Don’t come near me”. With the pain and drugs, Hope delusionally thought he was the man who groomed and raped her. How many women who have been abused or raped go through childbirth with no thought from professionals about the lack of control and position of vulnerability they are in, lying there with an unknown man over them? All this doctor said to Hope was: “If you don’t settle down, we’ll leave you unstitched. Stay still.”

One of the most heartbreaking stories in this book is when Hope receives an email, not long after Hackney Child is published. It was from the couple that she thought were going to foster her but whom she never met. They were also never told why the placement fell through and were so badly affected that they never reapplied to foster. Hope went to meet them and saw the bedroom that would have been hers.

Adult legacy of childhood trauma

The adult legacy of childhood trauma runs deep. In 2022, to the outside world it looked like Hope was thriving: she was married, had successfully raised two children, had become a grandmother, had a job she loved and had been sober for many years. But a catalyst of events led to her drinking again and then making a serious attempt to end her life.

Fortunately, she was found in time and it finally led to her getting the help she had needed as a child.

It can be no coincidence that the author chose Hope as her pseudonym. Her story ends with hope: she is free from addiction, working and happy. In Hackney Child, Hope feels a lot of anger towards her mum and blames her more than her dad for her childhood.

At the end of This Isn’t Love, Hope has reconciled with her mum after not seeing her for 20 years, and realised that she too was a victim of the care system (as was her dad). After hearing her mum’s story – much of which mirrored Hope’s own – she gradually begins to forgive her and recognises that they are both strong women and survivors.

And so the story comes full circle.

More change needed

Every professional who works with children in care can learn so much from reading This Isn’t Love. It is only because of brave, resourceful, resilient people like Hope that these stories are written. There are signs their voices are being heard, but more change is needed for the care system to live up to its name.

Hope is inspiring and courageous, and so it feels fitting to end this review with her own words from her author’s note at the beginning of the book:

“Since Hackney Child I’ve had a major breakdown and I’ve come to terms with all these issues. I’ve also learned that my mother, whilst she made mistakes, was a victim herself. This book addresses all of this, once and for all. For me, it’s closure; it’s my full stop. There is no more shame, no more secrets. This is my everything. I hope you can enjoy it – it’s a bumpy ride but there is so much light at the end.”

• Jenny Molloy writes under the pseudonym Hope Daniels. To learn more about Jenny’s story and the adult legacy of childhood trauma, you can listen to our Learn on the Go podcast if you subscribe to Community Care Inform Adults or Community Care Inform Children. Or you can subscribe to the series through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
• This Isn’t Love is published by Mirror Books. ISBN: 9781915306722. £9.99.

It is no secret that there is a shortage of foster carers and residential placements across the country, meaning children are often placed too far away from their families, networks and communities.

Norfolk County Council has been working hard to recruit, support and retain foster carers, while also revamping some of its in-house residential provision to make sure far more children remain in Norfolk, either with their families or within family-based care, wherever possible.

Using the Mockingbird fostering approach

The Mockingbird approach aims to provide foster families with support and create a community for them through different social activities.

Often children in care do not know other children with similar backgrounds and, likewise, foster carers do not always know other foster families, and this model is designed to change that.

It also aims to help overcome potential problems before they escalate or lead to placement breakdown.

It does this by developing a cluster of seven to 10 families, referred to as ‘satellite families’, where one foster carer is the ‘hub carer’.

The hub carer will offer their home or another venue for ‘get togethers’ and organise a WhatsApp group for all the foster families to communicate with each other. Social activities such as sleepovers, laser tag or picnics can be organised for the families to get to know each other.

Rachel, Mockingbird liaison practitioner

Rachel, Mockingbird liaison practitioner in Norfolk County Council, points out that children in care may not have an extended family network they can lean on, and the Mockingbird model provides a community for them.

“There are like-minded children [there],” she says. “They don’t ever have to have that conversation that their family isn’t quite built like other people’s families, like I suspect they would encounter at school. So it’s building a big family network.”

Rachel has noticed that new foster carers may often begin with a support network, but it can often fall away when a child comes into the family.

“I think, in terms of [extended] family members, not that they don’t want to support, but sometimes the family members do not have the skills to give the children the support they need,” she adds. “Knowing other foster carers enables them to get that support with people who just get it, and they can be in an environment where people understand what they’re going through.”

Families are matched carefully, making sure there is a diverse range of foster families.

“If we’ve had a carer who’s been in crisis with one of their children, they’ve just popped something on the group chat and said, ‘I’ve had a really bad day, this has happened’,” Rachel adds. “And other carers will say, ‘I feel you, I hear you’.”

Clinical support for foster families

As well as this, a specialist fostering clinician and a clinical psychologist are available for social workers to refer foster carers or children to.

Kevin, a senior social worker who has worked in Norfolk’s children services for 36 years, says having this service in-house helps speed up the support he can offer his foster families.

Kevin, social worker in Norfolk

He can just make a Microsoft Teams call and set up an appointment with the psychologist, whereas previously a referral to child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) or another team would have been required.

“Having two people that we can go to for advice and support issues around trauma, and supporting foster carers to manage challenging behaviour or anything they’re struggling with, is a radical change from where we have been over the last few years.

“We’re very fortunate to have that kind of clinical and psychological support, embedded within our service.

“Sometimes what we need as social workers is the opportunity to say, ‘This is what we’re seeing, this is what we’re experiencing and I need to know how best to manage that’, or [know] what advice to give so we can support our foster carers and, ultimately, the children,” he says.

Another way of supporting and training foster carers has been through the use of virtual reality headsets, to show them the abusive experiences children may have faced and demonstrate what they can do in response.

Reducing the number of children in care

Two of the residential homes in Norfolk were converted into New Roads hubs. The New Roads service aims to reduce the number of children in care by providing dedicated multi-agency support, family outreach and short residential stays to keep young people at home, reunify them with their family or step them down to foster care, where safe and sustainable to do so.

One of the features of the hubs, which are for 12 to 25-year-olds, is that people who have applied to be foster carers can volunteer to support the children there. The volunteers have an opportunity to gain experience and build relationships before fostering any children.

In addition to supporting foster care recruitment and retention, this means less reliance on private placements, fostering or residential, therefore a cost saving for the council.

Emma, who organises respite and emergency care at one of the hubs, says it is really valuable for potential foster carers to volunteer in this way.

“We have a lady who has been volunteering with us for over two years and she’s now a respite carer,” Emma says. “She fosters other young people because of the support that we’ve given her and the experience we’ve given her by being able to relate to other young people in the same situation,” she says.

How Emma became a foster carer

Emma met Lizzy* (aged 16) in June 2021 and built a good relationship with her as her key worker. Lizzy had been in foster placements since she was 10 and, because of many placement breakdowns, it was hard for her to trust anybody.

The plan was for Lizzy to move to semi-independent accommodation, but she wanted to be with a family. Emma knew Lizzy was not happy with the plan and was frustrated that Lizzy’s wishes could not be carried out.

Lizzy had no family that she was in contact with and one of the biggest fears she had about living alone was being alone on her birthday or at Christmas.

Coincidentally, Emma had a spare room (her eldest son had recently moved out) and, after a casual comment from a colleague, and many conversations with her own family, Emma decided to become Lizzy’s foster carer.

“They talked about having foster carers work alongside us within the hub so they could get to know the young people and if there was a connection, take them home,” she says. “I just never thought of it as me, because I wasn’t the foster carer coming in, I was the practitioner!

“The management within New Roads gave me the support and even the idea of [fostering] being a possibility, because I didn’t even know that that was a possibility.”

Lizzy is now 19 and still lives with Emma and the family despite having the option to move out. She has recently bought a car and is in a stable job, looking to gain further qualifications.

“We’ve taken her in as our daughter, as our sibling, like adoption, but not adoption. We’ve even got matching tattoos, mother-daughter tattoos!”

*name changed for anonymity

Are you interested in a career at Norfolk County Council? Check out the latest vacancies.

If you are considering becoming a foster carer, you can find more information on Fostering East.

The care population in England has fallen for the first time in 16 years but remains at historically high levels, Department for Education (DfE) data has shown.

The number of looked-after children in England fell by 0.5%, from 83,760 to 83,630, in the year to March 2024, the first reduction in the care population since 2008.

However, the total is 5,500 more than was the case in 2019, when councils were looking after 78,140 children, while the DfE figures also showed growth in the number of those placed out of area.

Fall in number of unaccompanied children entering system

The rises in the care population in 2021-22 and 2022-23 were driven by increasing numbers of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children  entering the country.

The DfE estimated that the number of unaccompanied children joining the care system fell from 6,180 in 2022-23 to 5,300 in 2023-24. It calculated that, overall, 31,090 children joined the care system in 2023-24, down 3.1% from the 32,060 who joined in 2022-23.

The department calculated that 31,490 children left care during 2023-24, up 3% on the year before, with the average duration of time spent in the care system among leavers declining from a peak of 907 days in 2020-21 to 864 in 2023-24.

The numbers of children leaving care through adoption in 2023-24 (2,980) was similar  to 2022-23 (3,000), with the same number leaving the system on special guardianship orders in each year (3,860).

Decline in mainstream fostering

The data reinforced the decline in mainstream foster care evidenced by separate statistics released last week by Ofsted.

Barely half (51.2%) of children were in these placements as of March 2024, down from 58% in 2019, with their number falling from 45,310 to 42,730 over the past five years, despite the overall growth in the care population during this time.

Over the same period, the share in kinship foster placements grew from 13.4% to 16%, growing from 10,450 to 13,660 from 2019-24.

Growing numbers in children’s homes

In line with the sharp rise in the number of registered children’s homes in England over the past few years, more children are being placed in these settings.

As of March 2024, 8,640 young people were in children’s homes – the vast majority in open settings – up from 7,990 in 2023 and 7,100 in 2020, and accounting for 10% of the care population.

This year’s figures are the first since the government required organisations providing formerly unregulated independent and semi-independent placements to register with Ofsted as supported accommodation providers to be able to continue supporting looked-after children aged 16-17.

Supported accommodation data incomplete

This followed mounting concerns about the quality of unregulated care and its growing use, with the proportion of looked-after children in these placements rising from 8% (6,070) to 10% (8,650) in the two years to March 2023.

The DfE recorded 6,250 young people – 7% of the care population – as being in supported accommodation as of March 2024. However, this figure only covered the subset of providers that registered with Ofsted by the deadline of 27 October 2023, meaning the figures are incomplete.

Placements delivered by providers that did not register in time were classified as “other placements”, the number of which grew from 1% (1,150) to 5% (3,790) of the care population in 2023-24 as a result.

Growing proportion of out-of-area placements

The proportion of children placed out of area has grown steadily in recent years, from 41% in 2020 to 45% (37,520) in 2024. Over the same period, the share placed more than 20 miles from home has grown from 20% to 22%, with half of this group being children placed for adoption.

There has been little change in the level of placement stability in recent years, with 10% of children having three or more placements in 2023-24, compared with 11% in each of 2022-23 and 2019-20.

Levels of offending were consistent year on year, with 2% of looked-after children aged over 10 being convicted of an offence or subject to youth cautions or youth conditional cautions during 2023-24, the same rate as in 2022-23.

The same was true for levels of substance misuse, with 3% of children identified as having a problem with this in 2023-24, the same proportion as 2019-20.

Increasing concern about wellbeing

There was a small increase in concern about children’s wellbeing, based on responses to the strengths and difficulties questionnaire from the majority of looked-after children aged 5-16.

Forty one per cent of them had scores that were a cause for concern, up from 40% in 2022-23.

Among care leavers, the proportion of 19- to 21-year-olds who were not in education, employment and training rose from 38% to 39% in 2023-24.

‘A system in desperate need of reform’

The figures come with government children’s reforms – initiated by the Conservatives and inherited by Labour – focused on enhancing family support in order to reduce the number of children going into care.

However, charities have criticised perceived delays in implementing the reforms on the grounds that this would prolong a “crisis” in children’s social care.

This message was echoed by the County Councils Network, which warned that local authorities were “having to operate in a false economy of increasingly paying astronomical sums for placements and less on preventative services”.

Its children’s services spokesperson, Roger Gough, said the figures revealed “a system in desperate need for reform” and that change needed to come “urgently”.

The number of mainstream foster care households in England has fallen by 10% over the past three years, despite a rising care population, official figures have shown.

As of 31 March 2024, there were 33,745 approved non-kinship foster households, down by 1,260 (3.6%) on the year before and by 3,580 (9.6%) since 2021, revealed the Ofsted data.

Though the number of family and friends carer households grew for a second consecutive year in 2023-24, from 8,400 to 8,865, they are approved to care for specific children only.

Also, the growth in their number has been far exceeded by the decline in the number of mainstream households, meaning total fostering capacity has fallen from 45,370 to 42,615 from 2021-24, a drop of 6.1% (2,755).

Falling numbers of fostering places

The fall in the number of mainstream fostering households translated into a drop in the number of approved fostering places in 2023-24, from 72,770 to 70,465. This figure has fallen year on year since 2020, when it stood at 78,830.

Meanwhile, the number of filled approved mainstream places, which was stable from 2021-23, fell in 2023-24, from 44,580 to 42,870.

This is despite the number of children in care in England having grown by 3,070, to 83,840, from 2021-23, a period during which the children’s home sector has grown significantly.

Sector charity the Fostering Network said the declining number of carers was the result of a lack of remuneration, inadequate support from their council or fostering agency and insufficient respect for their role.

In response, the Department for Education (DfE) pointed to increased investment since 2023 in foster care recruitment through the rollout of regional hubs to support applicants through the process, which will be extended to the whole country in 2025-26.

Councils disproportionately hit by fall in carer numbers

As in 2022-23, the fall in the number of mainstream fostering households in 2023-24 was driven by reductions in the numbers approved by local authorities, which fell by 975 (4.9%), from 19,835 to 18,860.

There was a smaller fall in the number approved by independent fostering agencies (IFAs), which dropped by 280 (1.8%), to 14,890. IFAs now account for 44% of mainstream fostering households – up from 41% in 2020 – and 48% of filled mainstream places, up from 43% in 2020.

However, while the number of IFA-approved households grew in 2019-20 and 2020-21, this figure has reduced in each of the last three years.

Recruitment and retention

There was a slight increase in the number of applications to foster in 2023-24, with 8,485 households doing so, up from 8,010 the previous year.

However, the number of newly approved mainstream households was flat year on year (4,055, compared with 4,080 in 2022-23) and below annual levels seen between 2019-20 and 2021-22.

The number of deregistrations was 4,820 in 2023-24, with 4,280 households leaving fostering altogether during the year, down from 4,570 in 2022-23.

Policy response to foster care shortages

Under its Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy, the previous Conservative government took action to bolster foster care recruitment and retention, including by:

• Increasing national minimum fostering allowances by 12.43% in 2023 and 6.88% in 2024.
• Investing £36m, from 2023-25, in 10 regional fostering recruitment hubs, covering 64% of local authorities. These are designed to provide a single point of contact for people interested in fostering and support them through the process from initial enquiry to application.

The majority of hubs were launched in summer 2024, after the timeframe of Ofsted’s figures, meaning their impact is yet to be seen in the data. Labour has continued with the regional hubs policy, allocating £15m in 2025-26 to roll them out to the rest of the country.

Recruitment hubs ‘will generate hundreds of new placements’

A Department for Education spokesperson said this would “generate hundreds of new foster placements and offer children a stable environment to grow up in”.

“Foster carers play a hugely important role in the wider children’s social care system and will be at the heart of our thinking as we re-focus the system to provide earlier support and greater stability for children,” the spokesperson added.

The Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) said it welcomed the extra investment but stressed that it was “imperative that local and central government continue to work together to ensure we have enough foster carers and that they have the resources, training, and support needed to thrive in their roles”.

Leaving IFAs out of recruitment hubs ‘a strategic error’

The Nationwide Association of Fostering Providers, which represents IFAs, meanwhile, raised concerns about the exclusion of agencies from recruitment hubs.

“Government has decided to roll out the recruitment and retention hubs across England,” said NAFP chief executive Harvey Gallagher.

“This is premature, given the short time most have been operational. But, in the light of falling fostering capacity, it’s understandable that government hope these hubs will provide a possible solution.

“The hubs have excluded IFAs – this is a strategic error. Local authorities and IFAs are two parts of the same system, as this dataset demonstrates. Government policy should reflect this.

“We need to rid ourselves of historical divides and pull together to provide the high quality integrated fostering provision which our children and young people deserve.”

Lack of remuneration and support causing carers to quit – charity

The Fostering Network said carers were leaving for three main reasons – inadequate remuneration, lack of support from their fostering service and insufficient respect for their role – and warned that “annual losses will continue unless urgent action on a much greater scale is taken”.

“Action needs to be taken to make fostering more sustainable – we urgently need a UK-wide fostering strategy that addresses the retention of foster carers as much as recruitment,” added chief executive Sarah Thomas.

“We are also calling for a national recruitment campaign that is underpinned by a more personal and child centered approach when a foster carer picks up the phone to enquire about fostering.”

Carers ‘are ignored and blamed’

The National Union of Professional Foster Carers, which represents about 8% of carers, said falling numbers were down to carers’ voices being “ignored” and them being “blamed whenever anything goes wrong”.

General secretary Robin Findlay said regional fostering recruitment hubs would not work when “current carers were leaving and advising prospective carers not to join”.

“Personal recommendation is the best way to recruit new carers but until the system is fixed and current carers treated fairly this will not happen,” he said.

Findlay said the union had put forward ideas to the DfE about changing the way allegations of harm or concerns about standards of care in relation to foster carers were handled.

He claimed that, currently, “fabrications take precedence over facts and evidence and the foster carers are often not invited to contribute to the fact finding until the matter has been self-investigated and decisions have already been made”.

Under the union’s proposed solution, providers and carers would both supply evidence to a legally-qualified external adjudicator, who would determine the outcome.

Allegation statistics

The number of abuse allegations made against foster carers in 2023-24 – 3,050 – was similar to levels seen in the previous two years, though above the numbers recorded in 2019-20 (2,495) and 2020-21 (2,600), showed the Ofsted figures.

Most of the allegations were made by foster children (1,880), with just over half concerning physical abuse (1,610) and almost a quarter (735) emotional abuse.

In about half of cases (1,595), the concern was resolved with no further action taken, while in 875 instances (28.7%), the concern remained and the issue was referred to the fostering panel. In the remainder (575), a period of continued monitoring was agreed.

Further delay to the reform of children’s social care will prolong the “crisis” the sector is in and increase costs, charities have warned in response to the Budget.

The Children’s Charities Coalition issued the message after the government indicated that “fundamental reform” of the sector would be implemented from April 2026 at the earliest, in its Budget document, published yesterday.

In the meantime, ministers have allocated over £250m for 2025-26 to “test innovative measures to support children and reduce costs for local authorities”, including allowances for kinship carers and the rollout of regional hubs to support foster care recruitment.

Testing ideas for reform

This is in addition to the £200m that was allocated by the previous Conservative government from 2023-25 to test measures from last year’s Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy, including the regional commissioning of care placements, setting up specialist child protection teams and establishing family help services.

The latter involve the merger of existing child in need and targeted early help teams and are designed to provide struggling families with earlier, less stigmatising support to help them resolve problems and keep their children.

They were the centrepiece of the 2022 final report of now Labour MP Josh MacAlister’s Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, which proposed investing £2bn in family help over four years, part of a £2.6bn package for the sector as a whole.

Care review lead Josh MacAlister

Investing in earlier help to reduce care population

MacAlister’s thesis was that investment in family help, alongside other reforms, would reverse “a trajectory of rising costs, with more children being looked after and continually poor outcomes for too many children and families”.

As a result, 30,000 fewer children would be in care by 2032-33 than would have been the case without reform, he said.

However, this was dependent on the reforms being implemented from 2023-24. Instead, the previous government responded by testing the measures proposed by MacAlister from 2023-25, leading him to warn that the sector was a “burning platform” and needed more urgent transformation.

‘Social care is in crisis today’

Meanwhile, a report for the Children’s Charities Coalition, which comprises Action for Children, Barnardo’s, the National Children’s Bureau, NSPCC and The Children’s Society, found that the government’s approach would cost the social care system an extra £200m a year over the long run.

The testing phase will now continue for a further year, with the government saying it would set out “plans for fundamental reform of the children’s social care system in phase 2 of the spending review”. This will report next spring, setting public spending plans for 2026 onwards.

“The government has also confirmed its commitment to further reforms to children’s social care in future spending reviews, but children’s social care is in crisis today,” the Children’s Charities Coalition said. “Further delays will see [costs] escalate.”

‘Promoting early intervention and fixing care market’

The government said its reform plan would include “promoting early intervention to help children stay with their families where possible and fixing the broken care market”. Some of its component parts will be included in the forthcoming Children’s Wellbeing Bill, which ministers have said will include measures to tighten regulation of care placements.

The Department for Education is yet to set out details of how the more than £250m for 2025-26 will be spent, beyond allocating £44m to testing financial allowances for kinship carers in up to 10 areas and extending regional fostering recruitment hubs to all council areas.

The latter provide a single point of contact for people interested in fostering and support them through the process from initial enquiry to application, and are designed to boost recruitment.

Further testing of family help and regional commissioning 

The remainder of the more than £250m is likely to include further funding for the families first for children programme, which comprises the family help model and specialist child protection teams and is being tested in 10 areas.

It may also resource the further testing of regional care co-operatives (RCCs), which are trialling the regional commissioning and delivery of care placements in the South East and Greater Manchester.

RCCs are designed to give councils – collectively – greater clout to shape services across their regions and ensure sufficient high-quality placements for children in care, in the context of widespread concern about current provision.

Families need support ‘when challenges are emerging’

Family Rights Group (FRG) chief executive Cathy Ashley welcomed the increased investment in kinship and foster care.

She added: “The spending review and the upcoming Children’s Wellbeing Bill must now prioritise the wider reforms the child welfare system urgently needs.”

“Children and parents need support when challenges are emerging. Family and friends should be given the opportunity to find solutions with a right to a family group conference safely averting children going into care.

“Kinship care needs to be defined in law alongside the practical, emotional and financial support kinship families need. And no child in care or care leaver should be left isolated and alone, with the offer of Lifelong Links [an FRG programme] to build those loving relationships we all need.”

DfE ‘must work at pace on kinship allowances’

The charity Kinship said: “We urge the Department for Education to work at pace to confirm plans for the kinship allowance trial so that kinship carers across England can understand how it might impact them.

“Although the trial will ensure more kinship families get the financial support they need to help children thrive, it must not paralyse progress towards a wider rollout of financial allowances for kinship carers across the country.”

Alongside the reform funding, the Budget also pledged an extra £1.3bn in grant funding for local authorities for 2025-26, at least £600m would be allocated to social care.

Concerns pay and tax rises will swallow up social care funding boost

In total, the government said local authority “spending power” – the maximum resource that councils have available to them – would rise by an estimated 3.2% next year. However, the £600m for social care falls far short of the £3.4bn in additional pressures that the Local Government Association (LGA) has calculated councils will face in adults’ and children’s services in 2025-26, compared with 2024-25.

Also, adult social care leaders have warned that extra funding risks being swallowed up by the costs to providers of rises in the national living wage and employer national insurance contributions.

For the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS), president Andy Smith said the funding for councils, while welcome, was a “short-term” measure.

“In order to ensure the stability of many vital and valued services, long-term, sustainable funding for local government and children’s services is the only solution,” he added.

Smith urged ministers to set out “sufficient multi-year settlements for local authorities so they can effectively plan for the future”.

The government is committed to introducing multi-year funding settlements, alongside reforms to how resources for councils are allocated, from 2026-27 onwards.

The government has provided £44m for kinship and foster care in its Autumn Budget, part of a package of over £250m to support children’s social care reform.

The funding, for 2025-26, will enable up to 10 areas to test providing kinship carers with allowances to cover some of the costs of care, encouraging more family members or friends to come forward.

It will also lead to the extension of regional fostering recruitment hubs to all council areas, to help them recruit more carers.

Proposal ‘to generate hundreds of placements’

The Department for Education (DfE) said this would “generate hundreds of new foster placements, reduce local authorities’ reliance on the expensive residential care market and offer children a stable environment to grow up in”.

In the Budget, delivered on 30 October 2024, the Treasury said the £44m was part of an investment of over £250m in testing new ways of working in children’s social care next year.

Both policies show clear continuity with the approach taken by the Conservatives.

Testing allowances for kinship carers

In its kinship strategy, published in December 2023, the Tories pledged to pilot providing special guardians of former looked-after children with allowances equivalent to those received by foster carers in eight areas from 2024-28, backed by £16m in 2024-25.

Currently, only family and friends foster carers, among kinship carers, are entitled to an allowance, with special guardians or carers with a child arrangements order generally paid less, or nothing, by local authorities to look after children formerly in care.

The policy was not introduced before July’s general election and, since being elected, Labour has made no statement on it until now.

In response to the Budget announcement, the chief executive of the charity Kinship, Lucy Peake, said: “We are pleased that the government has made a commitment to trialling a new kinship allowance so that more children can be raised in well-supported kinship care with family and friends who love them, delivering better outcomes for children and for the public purse than the care system.”

Allowances ‘help promote stability and durability’ of kinship care arrangements

The Family Rights Group also welcomed the news, while social care evidence body Foundations pointed to evidence about the effectiveness of financial subsidies to kinship carers in promoting permanence.

A review of the evidence around kinship care, commissioned by Foundations, found a small but statistically significant impact on permanence from providing financial subsidies to kinship carers who take on guardianship for children, based on five papers across three US studies.

Its chief executive, Jo Casebourne, said: “Foundations welcomes the government’s support for the trialling of kinship care allowances in pilot local authorities. Our research shows that financial allowances for kinship carers increase the stability and durability of kinship arrangements.

“They make it more likely that families stay together safely, which could help children here avoid residential care and promote better outcomes for them.”

Promoting foster care recruitment

Regional fostering recruitment hubs were introduced as part of the Conservatives’ 2023 Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy, to provide a single point of contact for people interested in fostering and support them through the process from initial enquiry to application.

The Tories provided £36m from 2023-25 to fund these and other initiatives in order to recruit 9,000 more foster carers and redress a 6% drop in the number of mainstream fostering households from 2021-23.

As of September this year, the hubs covered 64% of the country, and the DfE said they would now be extended to all local authority areas.

Over £250m for children’s social care reform

The government has not stipulated how the remainder of the more than £250m for children’s social care reform, announced in the Budget, will be spent.

However, it is likely to include the continuation of some of the initiatives currently being tested as part of the previous government’s Stable Homes agenda. These include:

• The families first for children pathfinder, which is testing, in 10 local areas, the development of family help services, merging child in need and targeted early help provision, and specialist child protection teams.
• The regional care co-operatives pathfinder, which is trialling, in two regions, central regional bodies commissioning and providing care placements for looked-after children on behalf of their constituent local authorities.
• The family network pilot, which is testing providing extended families with funding to help children stay within the family network rather than go into care.

The government will announce further reforms to children’s social care when it delivers its spending review next spring. The review will set detailed plans for public spending from 2026 to 2030.

Children are staying longer in the care system due to inequalities in payments to kinship carers, a report has found.

While increasing numbers of children are in family and friends foster care in England, there has not been a similar increase in numbers leaving care to find permanence with their kinship carers, according to analysis of government data by the charity Kinship.

Based on separate research with kinship carers, the charity said a key cause of this was the loss of financial support for carers that came from moving from a foster placement to a special guardianship order (SGO) or child arrangements order (CAO) providing them with parental responsibility for the child.

In its report, Kinship said this demonstrated the need for carers with SGOs or CAOs to receive allowances at least on a par with those received by foster parents.

Children spending longer in kinship foster care

The number of children in kinship foster care rose by 24% in England from 2019-23, from 10,450 to 12,920, with their share of the care population rising from 19% to 23% over this time, according to Department for Education data.

However, there was a far smaller rise in the number of children leaving kinship foster care for an SGO over this time, with this figure rising by 10%, from 2,270 to 2,500 over this time.

And while the number of children leaving care on a CAO remained stable from 2018-19 (1,130) to 2022-23 (1,110), the percentage leaving from kinship foster care fell from 37% to 26%.

In addition, DfE data obtained by Kinship through a Freedom of Information request revealed that the average length of a child’s final placement in kinship foster care rose by 4.3 months from 2018-19 to 2022-23, to just over one year and ten months (676 days).

While this was shorter than the average duration of all final placements for children leaving care in 2022-23 (880 days), the latter figure had grown only by 2.4 months (73 days) over this time.

Loss of financial support

Drawing on result from its 2023 survey of carers, Kinship said that, while they desired permanence for the children in care, this was being stymied by the prospect of losing financial support as a result.

While kinship foster carers are entitled to an allowance of at least the national minimum set by the DfE, the charity found that 76% of kinship carers looking after at least one child under an SGO special received an allowance from their local authority, with the same being true of just 28% of carers caring for a child under a CAO.

Of those who received an allowance, special guardians were given £148 per week and carers with a CAO £133 per week at a time when the minimum fostering allowance outside London ranged from £175 to £199 per week.

About half (49%) of children in kinship foster care arrangements were expected to move to a different arrangement – nearly all (97%) to special guardianship – found the charity’s 2023 survey. However, 38% of these children expected to stay in the care system.

Regarding the latter group, the majority of comments left by kinship foster carers justifying this decision noted the likely loss of support from moving away from their existing arrangement.

Kinship described this as a “perverse incentive in the current system for the child to remain looked after in local authority”, even where carers perceive it to be in the best interests of the child to have the stability and secure parental responsibility provided by an SGO or CAO.

Kinship carers ‘feel pushed into SGOs’ by children’s services

Among those kinship foster carers who expected to move to an SGO, some reported that they felt pushed to do so by children’s services.

“Rather than this being a free and informed decision, many kinship foster carers felt they had no choice in the matter and resented the constant pressure they felt from social workers to agree to
a new arrangement where support was likely to cease or reduce,” said the report.

Some of those who had already become special guardians reported being pushed into it against their wishes, including by the suggestion that the child might otherwise be placed with unrelated foster carers or adoptive parents.

Piloting equalised allowances

In its kinship care strategy, published in December 2023, the previous Conservative government announced it would pilot providing special guardians of former looked-after children with allowances equivalent to those received by foster carers, in eight areas from 2024-28, backed by £16m in 2024-25.

No further announcement was made before the July 2024 election, and the incoming Labour administration is yet to comment on whether it is taking forward the kinship strategy in general and the so-called financial allowances pathfinder in particular.

In the recommendations from its report, which also covered Wales, Kinship called for governments in both countries to provide a non-means tested financial allowance to kinship
carers at least equal to the national minimum fostering allowance.

In relation to England, it said the new UK government should “accelerate the financial allowances pathfinder” and ensure that it “does not paralyse progress towards a wider rollout of allowances”.

Kinship also called for carers – and those considering the role – to be offered free and independent advice, including legal guidance, on the different care arrangements and their implications for financial and other forms of support.

Kinship families ‘a priority’ – minister

In response to the report, minister for children and families Janet Daby, a former fostering social worker, said: “For too long, kinship carers have not been recognised for the vital role that they play or the challenges they can often face – whether financial or emotional.

“We will drive change right across the children’s social care system, prioritising reform to support kinship families.”

The Association of Directors of Children’s Services highlighted the importance of councils’ funding levels in tackling the issues raised by the report.

Policy on kinship ‘needs sufficient funding’, say directors

“The varying way in which kinship arrangements have been developed in local authorities so far will be linked to levels of funding, amongst other things,” said Nigel Minns, chair of the ADCS’s health, care and additional needs policy committee.

“Above all else, it is important that the needs and best interests of each individual child always remains at the heart of decision making. The kinship care strategy offers a blueprint to change the way we work with and support a significant number of children for the better.

“We await new government guidance on kinship care for local authorities, however, this will need to be backed by sufficient government funding to ensure all children and families get the same access to the financial and practical support they need to thrive.”

The number of mainstream children’s homes in England has grown by 44% over the past four years, amid a contraction in the fostering sector.

Children’s home numbers grew by 12% in the year to 31 March 2024, continuing significant increases seen in preceding years, showed Ofsted’s annual statistics on the social care sector, released last week.

The number of places in mainstream homes – a category which excludes secure units and homes also registered as residential special schools – has grown more slowly but still significantly, with a 28% rise, from 10,033 to 12,870, from 2020-24.

Reduction in foster carer numbers

The growth in the residential sector has accompanied a decline in the number of mainstream fostering households, a group which excludes family and friends carers.

Their number fell by 7% from 2019-23, from 37,520 to 35,005, with the number of approved fostering places dropping by 12%, from 78,995 to 72,770 over the same period (source: Ofsted).

The shift in provision is evident in statistics on where looked-after children are placed.

The number of placements in secure units, children’s homes and semi-independent living grew by 4,530 (to 14,580) from 2019-23, compared with an overall growth in the care population of 5,700 (to 83,840).

Over the same period, the numbers in foster care grew much more slowly, by 1,260, to 57,020 (source: Department for Education).

Children’s homes ‘in wrong places’

As in previous years, Ofsted’s data showed there were significant disparities in the distribution of homes and places between regions. The proportion of places ranged from 6% in the South West and 8% in London to 22% in the North West, significantly above that region’s share of looked-after children (18%).

Ofsted has long raised concerns about a mismatch between the location of homes and local levels of need and demand.

Speaking to the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) conference last week, Ofsted’s national director for social care, Yvette Stanley, said this reflected the lack of control over where homes are established.

“The homes are still in the wrong places,” she said. “We can’t stop the homes where there’s saturation nor is anyone stimulating growth where they are needed.”

Skills concerns despite improved performance

Ofsted’s data showed that performance among mainstream children’s homes had improved, with the proportion rated good or outstanding as of March 2024 standing at 83%, up from 80% a year earlier.

Despite the improving performance, Stanley raised concerns about skills levels in the residential sector.

“We have some real challenges out there,” she told the ADCS conference. “The needs of the children out there are growing, and we also know that our providers…have difficulty recruiting staff with the training and skills to work with those children.”

She added: “We must acknowledge that there are places where children really aren’t having their needs met – not many, but it’s really awful when I see them.”

Qualification levels falling

In its annual report last year, Ofsted said 54% of children’s homes staff of children’s home staff held a level 3 qualification, down from 61% four years ago. Regulations require homes to ensure staff are level 3 qualified within two years of starting work.

Providers and councils reported that staff in roles that required few or no qualifications were moving to better-paid jobs in other industries, while more qualified workers were moving into higher-paid agency roles, the regulator said.

Stanley urged directors to work with Ofsted to “nudge” providers to invest more in having staff with the right skills, amid widespread council concerns about the rising costs of care placements, particularly in residential care.

Placement costs driving children’s budget pressures

Authorities are budgeting to increase children’s social care spending by £1.4bn in real-terms in 2024-25, with spending on looked-after children accounting for £933m of this, according to government figures.

This follows a planned £1.2bn real-terms rise in children’s social care spending in 2023-24, of which £700m was accounted for by looked-after children’s expenditure.

Annual council spending on private children’s home providers – who run the vast majority of children’s homes – grew by 105% from 2016-22, during which time the number of registered places grew by just 11% (source: Revolution Consulting).

Concerns over profits

These pressures have been linked to profit levels, particularly among private-equity owned organisations. In these cases, companies are bought out by investment firms using funds backed by high levels of debt, which must then be serviced through the providers’ profits.

Before they left power, the Conservatives set up a market advisory group tasked with looking at how to tackle “profiteering” in the children’s social care sector.

It remains to be seen what stance the incoming Labour government takes on this issue, though in its election manifesto it promised to strengthen regulation of the children’s social care sector.

However, Stanley told the ADCS conference that, even if councils saved money through restrictions in profit levels, they may have to spend more on helping children’s homes invest in their staff.

“We might make savings if we eradicate profit but we may need to invest more into therapeutic support for these children,” she added.

Management vacancies

Separate Ofsted data released last week revealed that 12% of all children’s homes – including secure units and dual-registered residential special schools – did not have a manager in post as of 31 March 2024.

This is unchanged on last year, when Ofsted reported, in its annual report, that in 40% of homes with a registered manager, they had been in post for less than a year.

The data showed there was a “significant gap in oversight of what is happening for children”, the regulator said at the time.

The previous government’s children’s social care strategy included plans to develop a leadership development programme for children’s  homes and explore professional registration of the sector’s staff.

The new government is yet to confirm how far it will take forward the Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy.