Kinship Connected - join the research trial

Kinship Connected is our intensive support programme for kinship carers. It’s designed to improve your wellbeing, build your resilience, and help your kinship family feel more stable.

A Kinship Navigator will work with you for up to 6 months. They’ll meet you at home and in your community. They’ll help you find local services and support and guide you through complex local systems so you don’t have to do it alone.

A Kinship Navigator is a trained member of Kinship staff. They’re not part of your local authority, they’re independent. But they often work alongside local authority teams in places like Family Hubs.

Your Kinship Navigator will:

• walk alongside you and help you navigate complex systems with confidence
• connect you to local services, community resources, and peer support groups
• take time to understand your family’s needs using a trauma-informed and empathetic approach
• help you feel less isolated and more confident in your kinship caring role

Your Kinship Navigator will support you for up to 6 months. They’ll agree a plan with you at the start, based on what you and your family need. You will work on it together.

Kinship Connected is open to all kinship carers regardless of your legal order or how long you’ve been a kinship carer.

The only exception is Kinship Foster Carers or Kinship Connected Carers who already receive support from the local authority.

Kinship Navigators come from a wide range of professional backgrounds. This includes social work, benefits and finance, education, legal services, and therapeutic support among others.

All Kinship Navigators are trained to understand kinship care. They understand the challenges you face and approach their work with empathy and a trauma-informed practice.

Some of our Kinship Navigators are kinship carers themselves, or have been in the past. We actively encourage lived experience in these roles.

Around 1 in 3 of our Kinship Navigators have lived experience of kinship care. We think that matters and we’re proud of it.

Your Kinship Navigator will work with you 1-to-1. The support they give you will be based on your situation and your goals, so it will look different for every kinship carer.

On average, you can expect at least 3 to 4 in-person meetings and at least 4 to 6 phone or video call sessions over the 6 months. But this depends on what you need. It could be more, or it could be less.

Your Kinship Navigator can help you with a wide range of things, including:

• emotional support – including trauma-informed support for you and help with therapeutic parenting
• money and benefits – such as help applying for Disability Living Allowance (DLA), Universal Credit, housing, blue badge, or grants
• education – such as supporting you to get an education, health and care (EHC) plan for a child with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND)
• legal matters – such as helping you understand your options or supporting you at court
• immigration and passports – helping you fill in applications
• attending meetings with you – such as school meetings, child protection meetings, or looked-after children reviews
• food bank vouchers, Max cards, and other practical help
• referrals to parenting programmes and Kinship’s training service
• connecting you to local peer support groups and other kinship carers
• signposting you to other local and national services that can help

When you take part in the programme, you’ll also receive a free copy of the Kinship Care Guide for England. This is a practical guide to help you understand your rights and what support is available to you.

At 3 months, your Kinship Navigator will check in with you to review your goals and adjust the support if your needs have changed. At 6 months, you’ll have a final review together to celebrate what you’ve achieved and make sure you know where to go next.

You don’t have to take up every part of the programme but we do ask you to complete the 6 month programme. All elements are voluntary including peer support groups.

It will be important to be able to demonstrate that the programme works.

Ideally yes. This is the first research trial of it’s kind for kinship carers. We want to make the case that all kinship carers in England should be able to access Kinship Connected.

We understand that situations do change, so if you do join the programme, you can talk to your Kinship Navigator about any changes needed in your support.

You can withdrawal from the programme and trial at any point.

A social worker works for your local authority. They have a statutory role, which means they have legal duties and powers. This can include making decisions about children’s welfare, carrying out assessments, and applying for legal orders. 

A Kinship Navigator is completely independent from your local authority. They work for Kinship, a national charity. They have no legal powers and play no part in decisions about the child in your care. 

However like all organisations that work with children and families, Kinship has a duty to act if we believe a child is at risk of harm. If your Kinship Navigator has a safeguarding concern, they may need to share information with the relevant people to keep a child safe. Your Kinship Navigator will always be open with you about this. They will follow Kinship’s safeguarding policy.

A pilot is a small-scale test of a programme before it’s rolled out more widely. We’re running a pilot to check that Kinship Connected works well in practice and reaches the kinship carers who need it most.

A randomised controlled trial (RCT) is a way of testing whether a programme really works. You compare 2 similar groups – 1 gets the programme, 1 doesn’t – and look at whether there’s a clear difference.

To make sure the comparison is fair, researchers use randomisation. Think of it like flipping a coin – it decides which group each kinship carer goes into. This removes bias and gives the strongest possible evidence about whether the programme made a real difference.

RCTs are used in children’s services because they help government and funders understand what genuinely improves outcomes for families.

A pilot RCT is a smaller test to check whether running a full RCT is possible. It focuses on whether the processes work. It helps us answer questions like:

• can we reach and recruit enough kinship families?
• do our referral pathways work as we expect?
• can Kinship Navigators follow the model consistently?
• can we collect data in a way that is ethical and realistic?
• will local authorities engage?

Kinship is running the pilot, and we’ve been matched with independent evaluators called CEI and Ipsos.

They understand kinship care in the UK. Their job is to understand how well the pilot works and what we need to improve before a full RCT can happen. They’re here to learn with us, not to judge us.

The pilot is funded by Foundations who are in turn funded by the Department for Education. They have no influence over how the research is carried out or what the findings show.

The evaluation is run independently by CEI and Ipsos, which means the results will be published transparently, whatever they show.

We started working on the reserach trial in December 2025. The pilot runs over 18 months until August 2027.

Delivery for kinship carers starts in June 2026 and will finish at the end of July 2027

Yes. The trial is approved by an ethics committee and an advisory panel that includes kinship carers. Their views are central to how we’ve designed the pilot and how we’ll measure whether it works.

Kinship Connected was developed in 2013 based on what kinship carers told us we needed.

We know this is one of the hardest parts of asking kinship carers to take part in a trial and we want to be honest about it. 

This pilot uses a waitlist design. That means some kinship carers receive Kinship Connected straight away, and others join a waitlist for 6 months before they receive the programme.  

This isn’t because 1 group is more deserving than another. It’s simply how researchers make sure the trial is fair and balanced, so we can show whether the programme genuinely works. 

We’re also looking at keeping the time between referral and starting the programme as short as possible. 

Every kinship carer who takes part will receive Kinship Connected.

The timing is just different because of how the trial works. And over 12 months of delivery, all kinship carers in the trial will get the support. 

We want to make sure language is never a barrier to taking part. If English is not your first language, please let us know if or when you decide to take part.

We can arrange an interpreter through your local authority and we have materials available in other languages.

There are 2 ways to access Kinship Connected during the pilot.

1. through your local authority: they can refer you to Kinship Connected. They’ll ask for your consent before making a referral. They’ll also explain that referrals are randomised as part of the trial
2. through self-referral: you can also refer yourself directly to the programme

Both routes use an online form that asks for some key information about you and your situation.

You will need to complete these to take part.

If you apply, a computer will randomly put you into one of two groups:

• Group 1 – you start the programme straight away.
• Group 2 – you join a waitlist and start around 6 months later (this is called the Control group)

As part of your referral onto the trial, Kinship will ask you to complete a form. The research trial team will use some of this information to help us understand who is accessing Kinship Connected. This will include:  

• information about you and your household 
• your experience as a kinship carer
• your wellbeing 
• the support you receive as a kinship carer 

For the trial, we will collect information in 4 ways. This includes: 

• forms completed by kinship carers 
• 1-to-1 discussions with kinship carers 
• administrative data from local authorities 
• programme and administrative data from Kinship 

We’ll ask you to complete a form as part of your referral onto the trial. Six months later, you’ll be asked you fill it in again. 

You will receive a £20 voucher for completing the first form. Kinship carers who wait 6 months to start Kinship Connected will receive another £20 voucher for completing the follow‑up form.  

We’ll start to open up to referrals from the week beginning Monday 15 June 2026. 

It will be a 2-step process even if you refer yourself, or your local authority refers you.