Engaging and supporting family networks

Current status

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:

1. 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.
2. 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. No further information about the FFC pathfinder nor FNP has been published since April 2024.

The Government has confirmed in its Keeping children safe, helping families thrive policy paper in November 2024 that future legislation will introduce a new duty to embed family group decision-making as an offer for all families before care proceedings are initiated. This follows new statutory guidance on kinship care (see ‘Improving local authority practice’) which encourages 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 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.

These actions follow 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 term Family Network Support Packages has since been adopted 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.

Our verdict

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 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. 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.

We have welcomed future legislation which will embed the opportunity for all families to receive an offer of family group decision-making before care proceedings. This will help ensure that wider family networks can be more effectively involved in decision making about the children they love and may act to subsequently increase the number of children looked after in some forms of kinship care. However, the government must consider further reform which does not necessitate entry into local authority care to deliver well-supported kinship care arrangements for children. Whilst it is right that kinship care options with family and friends are prioritised when a child must enter the care system, we must not simply see increasing the number and proportion of children looked after in kinship foster care as a measure of success. Our Out of Order paper highlights that too many kinship families feel unable to move from kinship foster care to more 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.

What should happen next

As detailed in 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.

As recommended in our Out of Order paper, future policy development should build on findings from the FFC pathfinder and FNP to explore how local authorities can 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.