Engaging and supporting family networks

What’s happening now?

The government’s Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill currently progressing through Parliament includes a new legal duty to embed family group decision-making (FGDM) as an offer for all families before care proceedings are initiated. In supporting wider family networks to be more effectively involved in decision making about the children they love, this aims to ensure a consistent offer across local authorities in England with the stated aim of reducing the number of children entering local authority care.

In July, an evaluation report with early findings around the implementation and delivery of the Families First for Children Pathfinder (FFC) was published (see below for more information). We await further information about subsequent evaluation of both the FFC Pathfinder and separate Family Network Pilot (FNP), both of which ended in March 2025, and an understanding of how the findings will further influence policy and practice direction in children’s social care.

More broadly, the government is continuing to invest in family services to rebalance the system towards earlier intervention and support, including through the Spending Review. 

What’s happened previously?

The government’s Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive policy paper, published in November 2024, shared some insights into learnings to date from the FFC Pathfinder and noted that evidence from this would be used in future reform. 

In February 2023, the previous government announced in Stable Homes, Built on Love £45 million investment in two new programmes:

1. A Families First for Children Pathfinder (FFC) set to run until March 2025: this aimed to understand how to best roll out reforms to family help, child protection, multi-agency safeguarding and support for family networks 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.
2. A separate £7.8 million Family Network Pilot (FNP) series to test only the introduction of Family Network Support Packages (FNSP) in isolation within 7 local authorities to evidence “how FNSPs can unlock barriers and enable family networks to play a more active role in providing loving, safe and stable homes for children through financial and other practical means”.

This followed updated statutory guidance on kinship care (see ‘Local authority practice’) published in October 2024 which encouraged 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 the Children’s Social Care National Framework and revised Working Together to Safeguard Children guidance which highlighted 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.

These actions followed the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care’s recommendation that a legal right to family group decision-making should be introduced along with new Family Network Plans to better support kinship arrangements to prevent a child going into care. The term Family Network Support Packages was adopted instead following feedback that a new ‘Plan’ could introduce legal confusion and additional burdens.

Our verdict

The inclusion of a new duty to offer FGDM within the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is broadly welcome. This will help ensure that wider family networks can be more effectively involved in decision making about and supporting the children they love, and it may help the identification of potential kinship carers if required to deliver care in the future.

However, the government’s impact assessment for the Bill’s children’s social care provisions and its rhetoric around the relationship of this policy to kinship care is confused, particularly in how it anticipates the new duty may impact on the number of children living in kinship care and their outcomes, This is emblematic of the government’s broader conflation of reforms which look to better utilise family networks and those which support kinship care; whilst obviously related, these are not the same.

If the government’s intention with increasing FGDM use is that it will divert children from what are better-supported kinship care routes (i.e. kinship foster care or arrangements which follow from this) and into less well-supported routes (e.g. by encouraging kinship carers to care for a child informally or pursue a special guardianship or child arrangements order via private law proceedings), there’s a real risk that families will be set up to fail in the pursuit of lower costs and fewer children in care. These latter routes and arrangements have significant long-term implications for the support available to the child and their kinship carers.

More broadly, 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 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. This is why the Family Network Pilot (FNP) is crucial in rebalancing the system and working through financial, legal and other practice challenges which might inhibit such approaches. It is not unexpected that the early evaluation of the FFC Pathfinder, which includes use of FNSPs, found that “the roll-out of FNSPs (family network support packages) was said to be initially slow across Wave 1 and 2 areas alike, driven by uncertainty amongst frontline staff around how to use it and the restrictions on how to spend the funding.”

What should happen next?

It’s vital that guidance accompanying the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill’s FGDM duty makes it clear that FGDM should not be seen as a means to drive up children entering kinship care arrangements at the expense of families getting the right support.

To ensure the policy sequencing is right, the government must deliver further reform to end the perverse incentive which necessitates children’s entry into local authority care in order to deliver well-supported kinship care arrangements, if deemed in the child’s best interest following any family group decision-making process. Whilst it is right that kinship care options with family and friends are prioritised when a child must enter care, we must not simply see increasing the number and proportion of children looked after in kinship foster care as a measure of success. Our research highlights that too many kinship families feel unable to move from kinship foster care to more suitable permanent kinship arrangements, such as special guardianship, due to a lack of guaranteed support, with significant implications for those families and for local authority budgets.

It is vital that future policy development moves at pace to build on findings from the FFC pathfinder, FNP and implementation of the FGDM duty to consider, including through the use of bespoke kinship care pathways, how local authorities could then best actively support progression – when in the best interests of the child – to other more permanent kinship arrangements such as special guardianship without necessitating entry into local authority care and without negative implications for future support.

It is understandable that government plans continue to test out new ways of working in tandem with each other to learn more about how to implement whole-system reforms successfully. In Stable Homes, Built on Love 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”. The timeline for further evaluation and rollout of reforms associated with the Family Network Pilot and use of FNSPs should be clarified as soon as possible.

As detailed in the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, the type 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”. Given the difficulty noted in the evaluation of the FFC Pathfinder above to truly facilitate this level of intensive support, further rollout of FNSPs must include clear guidance on the expectations for how these can deliver better experiences and outcomes for families, and establish more effective spending practices for local authorities.

We hope to see future evaluation and rollout explore 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.