Media releases

  • The Scottish Government has announced today that foster and kinship carers across Scotland will receive an updated allowance to help them care for the children and young people they look after. 

    The Fostering Network has campaigned with our foster carer members for this change for many years, so we welcome this long overdue announcement today.  

  • The Fostering Network, the UK’s leading fostering charity, is pleased to announce that it has been awarded the contract to deliver The Fosterline Service, commissioned by the Department for Education.

  • The UK’s leading fostering charity, The Fostering Network, has welcomed the Welsh Government’s commitment to create a national register of foster carers, having campaigned for this for many years.

    Yesterday the Government published its response to the Children, Young People and Education Committee’s report: ‘If not now, when? Radical reform for care-experienced children and young people’. It agreed to work with Social Care Wales to scope and fund the delivery of a national register for foster carers.

  • Today Professor Ray Jones published his final report as Chair of the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care in Northern Ireland, following 16 months of extensive consultation. The report lays out a pathway to bring about transformational change, making recommendations for sweeping reform of children’s services

  • A pilot framework explaining how services should handle suspected missing children and young people cases has launched today. For the past two years, The Fostering Network has been a part of a national task and finish group, led by the National Police Chief’s Council, working to develop a new approach to reporting children who are thought to have gone missing from care.  

  • Today the UK’s leading fostering charity, The Fostering Network, have released new research which addresses vital knowledge gaps into the retention and recruitment of foster carers in England – one of the biggest challenges currently facing the foster care sector.

    At an event this afternoon attended by Claire Coutinho MP, the Minister for Children, Families and Wellbeing, the charity will present their findings. This research comes at a crucial point as the Government begins to implement their strategy for children’s social care. 

  • The Fostering Network, the UK’s leading fostering charity, announces Sarah Thomas as their new chief executive officer, following an exhaustive recruitment process.  

    As a director within the charity’s senior leadership team, Sarah has held responsibility for leading work in Wales and England as well as taking forward the introduction and development of The Fostering Network’s Learning and Development function. 

  • The UK’s leading fostering charity, The Fostering Network, is urging people to come forward to foster so that more children can be cared for in their local community. Across the UK, 7,200 more fostering families are needed – this figure comes during Foster Care FortnightTM (15-28 May), the charity’s annual awareness raising campaign.  

  • We are delighted that today the John Lewis Partnership have announced they are a Fostering Friendly employer – the largest organisation to receive the accreditation so far. 

  • Over the weekend the Observer published findings into their investigation of a ‘crisis in the system’. They reported that some children in foster care in Britain are being moved to foster families and care homes more than 300 miles away from the neighbourhoods they grew up in, removing them from critical support networks and everything they are familiar with.