In December 2023, the Education Select Committee held an Inquiry into children’s social care. However, the Inquiry was interrupted due to the General Election in July 2024 and dissolution of Parliament, which meant that all Select Committees were disbanded.
The Chair, Robin Walker MP, wrote to the Minister for Children, Families and Wellbeing, to share key points of importance from the Committee’s findings:
· “On average, children in the care system were placed more than 18 miles away from their homes in 2022. Local and national Government must work alongside providers to reduce the number of children being placed outside of their local area, so that they can remain close to pre-existing relationships and support systems.”
· “A national recruitment campaign should be considered, for both social workers and foster carers.”
· “A national register for foster carers, as exists for social workers, must be considered in order to improve recruitment and retention, best-practice and oversight.”
· Early intervention has fallen by £3.7 billion since 2010-11. This trend must be reversed in order to prevent rising numbers of children entering the care system in the future.
After the General Election, the new Education Select Committee decided to reopen the inquiry in November 2024.”[1]
The Fostering Network written evidence
The Fostering Network submitted evidence to both the original call for evidence at the start of 2024, and the new call for evidence at the start of 2025.
Our CEO Sarah Thomas also gave oral evidence to the Committee on the 16th April 2024, and covered several key issues such as the fostering recruitment and retention crisis, the need for improved early intervention measures, and the importance of a national register for foster carers.
December 2023 submission
The key points we raised were:
● The rising numbers of children in care and the declining numbers of fostering households is having an impact on care-experienced children and young people, who are not being placed in fostering households which are local, near their family, or meet their needs. We need enough highly-skilled foster families where children need them, to allow children to be cared for locally.
● Sadly, more foster carers are leaving than are joining the role. The retention of foster carers is just as important as the recruitment of new ones, to ensure that there are enough fostering households to provide a wide variety of homes which supports better matching, and creates stable, well-supported environments for children in care to thrive.
● We welcomed the previous Government’s Stable Homes Built on Love strategy’s focus on fostering – particularly the focus on increased financial investment into fostering recruitment and retention. However, the strategy needed to go further to address challenges with the sufficiency of foster carers, and to address the needs of care-experienced children and young people.
● Factors such as insufficient financial frameworks and social support are contributing to foster carers leaving the role – these require improvement to increase foster carer retention.
● TFN believes a key mechanism to increase the status and respect of foster carers is a national register which would also improve foster carer terms and conditions through increased portability of the workforce.
● Early intervention to support children on the edge of care is crucial – our Step Up Step Down programme provides essential learning to ensure that children on the edge of care can remain with their birth families.
● The Government must better support care-experienced young people into adulthood – one way of achieving this is through improving Staying Put provision – the extension of this provision to age 23 was welcome, but we called for it to be extended to age 25.
Read the 2023 submission
December 2024 submission
The key points we raised were:
● There continues to be declining numbers of fostering households, which continues to have an impact on care-experienced children and young people.
● Our 2024 State of the Nations Foster Carer Survey showed that there are three main reasons foster carers are leaving the role:
○ A lack of support
○ Inadequate financial support
○ Not feeling respected or valued in their role.
● Our report on foster carer fees (published September 2024) showed that foster carers are facing a postcode lottery when it comes to fees. Some local authorities provide as little as £18 a week, and others as much as £750 a week – a maximum difference of £38,000 per year.
● We believe that a national register for foster carers would improve matching and sufficiency, safeguard children, increase the portability of foster carers and improve foster carer’s status. Work on introducing a register is making progress in other nations of the UK and should be prioritised by the Government, as per the recommendation of the previous chair of the Education Select Committee.
● The Fostering Network is currently supporting 116 fostering services to grow and sustain Mockingbird, with most services working towards additional constellation launches. Our recent programme data and data from our State of the Nations survey 2024 continue to show positive outcomes in terms of increased retention of carers and stability for children, as well as a range of other outcomes. We welcome the announcements to roll out recruitment hubs in every local authority in England and urge the Government to commit to ensuring these new hubs are also funded to set up Mockingbird constellations in the Spending Review for 26-29.
● We welcomed the Government’s ‘Keeping children safe, helping families thrive’ policy paper, and the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which promise increased financial investment and set out legislation to support early intervention provision and actions to reduce profiteering in the sector. However, we believe the Government needs to go further to focus on fostering. They should bring forward previous progress on extending Staying Put to age 23, legislate to give foster carers delegated authority by default, and improve foster carers’ learning and development.
● We welcome the mandating of Family Group Decision Making (FGDM) across local authorities. Facilitating families to work together to make decisions in the best interests of children is crucial. As set out in our 2024 evidence, we believe the Government should consider how our Step Up Step Down programme can be utilised to provide essential tools for families to help children on the edge of care remain with their birth families.
Read our 2024 submission