Local authority practice

What’s happening now?

Local authorities are continuing to consider their practice and support around kinship care, responding to the publication of new kinship care statutory guidance and the Kinship Care Practice Guide in October 2024, and the continued emphasis placed on kinship care within the governent’s children’s social care reform programme. Through our Professionals’ Network and local offer insights group, we are working with several local authorities to support them in co-producing their kinship local offers alongside local kinship families.

Other welcome changes include restructuring services and teams to consider kinship care in its different forms, delivering improvements to the financial, practical and emotional support offered to kinship families, and pioneering new ways of working alongside Families First reforms, including through government-led pathfinders and pilots.

It is reassuring that evidence from our 2025 annual survey of kinship carers suggests ratings of local authority support, information and trust from kinship carers are all improving, albeit from a low base.

What’s happened before?

The goverment was clear that refreshed kinship care statutory guidance, published in October 2024, “does not place any new statutory requirements on local authorities”, but “repositions previous guidance into a clear framework supported by updated factual information and legal guidance”. This included outlining a new ‘kinship local offer’ requirement to replace the existing family and friends care policy requirement (see ‘Information, training and support for kinship carers’ for more information).

Jahnine Davis was also appointed by the Department for Education as the National Kinship Care Ambassador in October 2024. The role “advocates for kinship children and carers across government and works directly with local authorities to improve services”.

The National Kinship Care Strategy confirmed that Ofsted would review published guidance to ensure references to kinship care are clear and that local authorities’ strengths and weaknesses in kinship care practice are captured in their inspection reports. Since then, only very minor changes have been made to Ofsted’s inspection guidance to include reference to “kinship” or “kinship care” where this wasn’t present before.

The National Kinship Care Strategy also noted ongoing work to introduce a new Early Career Framework (ECF) for social workers which would set out the skills and knowledge needed to support kinship families well, Since then, plans for a five-year ECF have been dropped and the government instead launched a consultation in March 2025 on a two-year social work induction programme (SWIP) and new post-qualifying standards (PQS), with a response due in winter 2025.

Our verdict

New statutory guidance is welcome; previous guidance was outdated and failed to capture the current policy context and focus on kinship care. In particular, we were pleased to see a reaffirmed requirement for local authorities to provide visible, accessible and up-to-date information to kinship carers (see ‘Information, training and support for kinship carers’ for more).

We welcomed the appointment of Jahnine Davis as National Kinship Care Ambassador who brings a wealth of valuable lived and professional experience, and we are glad to have welcomed Jahnine to meet with Kinship peer support groups and young people raised in kinship care since her appointment.

Foundations’ Kinship Care Practice Guide marked an important step forward in identifying and recognising best practice in supporting kinship families at a time when kinship care awareness and recognition amongst professionals is growing. Its recommendations echo many of those we continue to advocate for local authorities to consider, including specialist support to help kinship carers navigate to and access support (reflected in our own support services for kinship carers), and the use of financial allowances to increase placement permanency and reduce disruption.

Further Ofsted activity to both support and challenge local authority practice in kinship care has been minimal. As such, its framework for inspecting local authority children’s services is increasingly misaligned with the focus placed on kinship care within the National Children’s Social Care Framework, the Department for Education’s vision for the children’s social care system, and the government’s ongoing programme of reform. Additional consideration must be given to how Ofsted can best scrutinise and investigate local authorities’ practice around kinship care and support for family networks more effectively given its role as a lever for driving strategic change and practice improvement within children’s services.

What should happen next?

Local authorities should work alongside their kinship families and local peer support groups to build a strong kinship local offer and inform their own practice with kinship families; the National Kinship Care Ambassador should be a key enabler of this. The role should have a strong focus on ensuring all local authorities deliver the essentials well, with priorities aligned to key objectives with the National Kinship Care Strategy and the National Children’s Social Care Framework.

We want to see Ofsted significantly enhance the attention paid to kinship care practice and support within its inspections and undertake a thematic review of its inspection reports to support this work. We also encourage Ofsted to consider establishing a separate judgement for kinship care and support for family networks within its inspection framework for local authority children’s services, similar to the recent (re)introduction of this for care leavers. This would better align the inspection framework with the new National Framework,

Further practice guidance around kinship care should be built on existing research and evidence in supporting kinship carers, including ‘Key elements of a special guardianship support service’ and ‘Developing good practice in financially supporting special guardians’. It should also address some of the challenges highlighted by specialist social workers who practice in kinship care given its unique mix of skills and knowledge which draw from elements of both child protection and mainstream fostering practice. Where these do not exist already, local authorities should consider establishing specialist kinship teams with the breadth of skills necessary to deliver high-quality social work support; this should be encouraged by the government and the National Kinship Care Ambassador.

The government must also ensure local authorities have the core, long-term funding they need to deliver reform and pioneer new ways of working with kinship families; current workforce and financial pressures make the recalibration of services, practice and culture all the more difficult.