Data and research

Current status

In September 2023, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published its analysis of kinship households from the Census 2021 which estimated there were more than 130,000 children living in kinship care across England, although there are significant limitations to the use of the Census questions to determine this.

In October 2024, the Government published the first iteration of the Children’s Social Care Dashboard following its Children’s Social Care Data and Digital Strategy in December 2023. The Dashboard intends to provide “insights and learning through a clear, visual representation of key metrics and indicators. In time, this will provide information on what is happening in practice and how the outcomes and enablers set out in the National Framework are being achieved.” The single Indicator included for Outcome 2 of the National Framework is the percentage of children who cease being looked after due to moving into Special Guardianship Order (SGO) or Child Arrangements Order (CAO); no additions or amendments were made following the December 2023 update.

The National Kinship Care Strategy outlined a commitment to deliver a data-linking project to bring together the Ministry of Justice’s family courts data
with that available from the Department for Education to understand the national picture of permanent kinship care arrangements. In the longer term, this would include testing the feasibility of making data available to local authorities to allow them to have a greater understanding of who in their area has a special guardianship or child arrangements order, regardless of whether or not they were previously looked after. No further updates have been shared since on the status of this project.

Kinship continues to deliver sector-leading surveys of kinship carers each year which are the largest of their kind; our Make or Break report is based on responses from our most recent annual survey of more than 1,300 kinship carers conducted in 2024. We are also continuing to partner with researchers and academics to lead a series of pioneering kinship care studies, including explorations of the experiences of Black and Asian kinship carers in England alongside the Rees Centre at the University of Oxford (for which an executive summary was published in October 2024), increasing participation in kinship care research with the Centre for Child and Family Justice Research at Lancaster University, and understanding kinship carer networks to inform targeted support with the University of Exeter.

Foundations published in October a new Kinship Care Practice Guide, outlining the best available evidence to improve practice (see ‘Local authority practice‘). It acknowledges that “the evidence around how best to support kinship carers is limited but continuing to grow” and points to largely US-based examples which “show the results of investment in research for both evidence-based practice and for understanding what works”. Previously, What Works for Children’s Social Care (now Foundations) carried out a feasibility study for delivering a randomised control trial of our Kinship Connected programme, which has also had its own external evaluation.

The first methodological paper for the Family Routes study, commissioned by the Department for Education and which Kinship has supported, was published in September 2024.

Our verdict

There is no available data that gives us an accurate and robust understanding of kinship families across the country. This is in stark contrast to other areas of children’s social care, such as fostering and adoption, and maintains kinship families’ invisibility to policymakers. We know there is significant variation in the geography and profile of kinship carers and their children. For example, research shows that children from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds are significantly underrepresented in kinship foster care and kinship special guardianship.

Statutory data collection (in particular the SSDA903 returns made by local authorities to the Department for Education) tell us how many children are in kinship (i.e. family and friends) foster care and how many children leave care to special guardianship or child arrangements orders each year. We also have regularly published family court statistics from the Ministry of Justice. Other figures on kinship cohorts has been obtained recently via written questions in Parliament, including local authority-level figures of children in kinship foster care and School Census data which reveals the number of children previously looked after who are subject to a special guardianship or child arrangements order (where known).

Overall, the data picture for kinship care is patchy, incomplete and pieced together through various different datasets and methodologies which don’t deliver a robust understanding of the cohort(s). As such, the data linking project in progress between the Ministry of Justice and Department for Education is very welcome and something we have called for consistently to provide a comprehensive picture of at least formalised kinship care arrangements.

The Children’s Social Care Dashboard could support improved transparency and understanding about local authority variation in kinship care outcomes and practice. The selected indicator is important given our own analysis which reveals how movement to kinship arrangements outside the care system has stalled whilst the number of children looked after in kinship foster care has grown considerably. However, the Dashboard must not be used as a tool to judge performance and it is welcome this is acknowledged its supporting information. Future iterations must not incentivise prematurely pushing the system towards increasing the number and/or proportion of all children unable to live with their parents into kinship care before accompanying reforms to financial and other support for all kinship carers have been introduced. To do so would be dangerous and not in children’s best interests, and risks undermining welcome new efforts to improve support for families.

What should happen next

The Department for Education should work closely with Kinship (including our researchers network) and other expert sector organisations including Foundations and the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory to identify gaps in research, evidence, and statutory and wider data collection and publication, and confirm further plans to improve this. A collaborative and comprehensive approach is needed to ensure research and data resource is focused strategically on what is most needed to improve our understanding of kinship families.

The data linking project between the Department for Education and Ministry of Justice should extend not only to the SSDA903 returns from local authorities but too other sources of data held by the Department for Education, such as the National Pupil Database. This will help provide a rounded picture of how different kinship care cohorts are faring in education too.

The Department for Education should also consider utilising other means of data collection available to it, including adding a marker within the School Census to include all forms of kinship children (kinship carers currently have to self-declare only those previously looked after children cared for under special guardianship or child arrangements orders for the purpose of securing Pupil Premium Plus funding). Data sources from other governmental departments should also be considered to build an improved picture of kinship families and help improve policymaking and services targeted towards them. Other data linking projects should develop an improved picture of the number, characteristics and educational outcomes of children in all forms of kinship care, and analysis should be undertaken to understand the settings in which kinship children are learning and their progression to further and higher education. This analysis and future research should include consideration of potential ethnic disparities amongst kinship families.