Engaging and supporting family networks

Current action

In February 2023, the previous Government announced within Stable Homes, Built on Love £45 million investment into two new programmes of work to test how to better identify and support early kinship arrangements. This followed the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care’s recommendation that a legal right to family group decision-making is introduced along with new Family Network Plans to better support kinship arrangements to prevent a child going into care,

The majority of the funding is delivering the Families First for Children Pathfinder (FFC) until March 2025: this aims to understand how to best roll out reforms to Family Help, child protection and kinship care in tandem, improving understanding on implementing “end-to-end service reform” and how each element impacts one another and the experience of children and families.

In addition to the Pathfinder, a separate £7.8 million Family Network Pilot (FNP) series is being delivered which tests out only the introduction of Family Network Support Packages in isolation within seven local authorities. Full details of the local authorities participated in the different waves of the FFC and FNP programmes can be found on the Department for Education website.

Family Network Support Packages are renamed from the ‘Family Network Plans’ recommended by the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care following feedback that a new ‘Plan’ could introduce legal confusion and additional burdens. Their aims remain similar however, as a structure to support family-led alternatives used prior to a child entering care which enable extended family networks to provide additional and substantial care for children. The National Kinship Care Strategy, published in December 2023, confirmed that the Department for Education will publish evaluation findings from the Family Network Pilot in Spring 2025 to inform future decisions about the wider rollout of Family Network Support Packages.

The Children’s Social Care National Framework and revised Working Together to Safeguard Children guidance highlight the expectation that family networks are engaged and empowered from an early point in referral, and that the voices of family networks are prioritised through the use of family group decision making wherever possible.

The National Kinship Care Strategy also notes that new statutory guidance on kinship care (see ‘Improving local authority practice’) will encourage local authorities to make use of findings from Foundations’ randomised control trial of family group conferences (FGCs) and work towards every family being offered an FGC at pre-proceedings stage, and will explore using legislation to mandate this in the future. The Strategy also highlights a digital innovation pilot taking place in North Yorkshire which aims to help social workers more easily and quickly identify family networks who could help to support children.

Our verdict

It is understandable that existing plans seek to test out new ways of working in tandem with each other to learn more about how to implement whole-system reforms successfully. In its Stable Homes, Built on Love consultation response, the previous Government said it was “proposing to develop the pathfinders on an incremental basis, with certain elements that we’d need to see as a minimum now and an expectation that the pathfinder would expand its remit in future after we have tested and evaluated the concept”.

However, this is unlikely to provide sufficient clarity for other local authorities who want to pioneer new ways of working today. Longer-term expectations around funding, timescales and accompanying points of assessment to stop, scale or adjust pilot activity were missing from the consultation response and from the National Kinship Care Strategy.

The shift towards much earlier involvement of and funded support for kinship carers prior to a legal order being made and without the child having to become ‘looked after’ is welcome, particularly as support for informal kinship carers is often poor or non-existent. Our 2022 annual survey – The Cost of Loving – found that only 4% of informal kinship carers received financial support from their local authority, despite their children’s similar needs and experiences to those in other forms of kinship care. Too many kinship carers are perversely incentivised to become foster carers and their children ‘looked after’ as this is the only way which kinship families can often access guaranteed support.

It is also important that kinship carers who have taken steps towards permanence through securing a special guardianship order, for example, aren’t ‘locked out’ of potential support through a Family Network Support Package if their assessed needs determine this is the only way to offer the level of support required and where there is a risk the child would otherwise go into care.

What should happen next

According to the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, the kind of support offered via Family Network Plans (now known as Family Network Support Packages) could include significant and intensive efforts which respond flexibly to fund different families’ needs, including “providing funding to make adaptations to a relative’s home through to compensating someone for reduced working hours”. This level of intensive support must be realised within the delivery of the Pathfinder and pilots in order to properly evidence how early support can deliver better experiences and outcomes for families, and establish more effective spending practices for local authorities.

In delivery of the pilots, local authorities and the Department for Education should consider the role of the voluntary sector, especially where collaboration could provide further insight and evidence about how the support offered through programmes such as Kinship Connected – which delivers intensive 1:1 support and facilitated peer support groups – can further improve experience and outcomes for families alongside practice reforms.

The Pathfinder and pilots must seek to understand how to balance requirements for assessment and ongoing formal oversight from local authorities whilst respecting the unique nature of kinship care and its position straddling state-led child welfare intervention and private family life. This was a key message within our response to the Government’s Stable Homes, Built on Love consultation. Kinship carers should be involved in co-designing how to do this well, and in ways which reduce unnecessary, stigmatising and invasive practice.

As noted elsewhere, although testing of new approaches to supporting kinship care is welcome, the radical recalibration of services, practices and culture cannot be delivered successfully without greater financial and workforce stability. The new Government should ensure all local authorities, including those not participating in the Pathfinder or pilots, have the funding they need to deliver their statutory duties and so that all children and families are supported as they need to be.