Building a new kinship care system

What’s happening now?

Whilst there is positive recognition of and improving support for kinship families through the government’s legislative and wider children’s social care reform programme (including the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill and trial of a kinship allowance), more substantial changes to the operation of the system will likely be conditional on securing further investment within the forthcoming multi-year Spending Review.

To that end, it is promising that the Government clarified in the Autumn Budget 2024 that it will “set out plans for fundamental reform of the children’s social care system” as part of the next phase of its Spending Review. The government’s Keeping children safe, helping families thrive policy paper, published in November 2024, also acknowledges that future legislative reform will be needed in kinship care, particularly following the conclusion of the Law Commission’s forthcoming review (see below).

The National Kinship Care Strategy included an agreement from the Law Commission to conduct a review into the legal statuses and orders for kinship carers, and make recommendations to Government on how the legislative framework could be simplified or improved. This is still only set to “begin when resources at the Commission become available, following the completion of current projects” and with a terms of reference published “in due course”; this remains unchanged since the publication of the Strategy in December 2023.

Details released by the Commission so far confirm the project will consider the assessment and approval process for kinship carers and the potential for reform of current legal orders in the kinship care context, including the possibility of a new bespoke order for this situation; it will not consider the reform of legal orders beyond their application in kinship care nor other changes to legal aid, financial allowances or other issues beyond the Commission’s remit best “addressed by changes to practice, procedure or funding”.

What’s happened previously?

The previous government said within Stable Homes, Built on Love that “kinship care has received little national policy attention” and that “even where children are in kinship arrangements, too little support is given to extended family members who play a caring role for their young relatives”. As such, they pledged to deliver a dedicated national kinship care strategy by the end of 2023 to “establish the foundations for a future, transformed kinship care system in England”.

The subsequent National Kinship Care Strategy was published in December 2023, committing to £20 million investment until March 2025 as part of ‘Phase One’ reforms to “pivot the system to ensure children and families are at the very centre”, after which ‘Phase Two’ reforms were to seek to embed the most effective policies so that more children in kinship care can benefit. It explained that the Strategy was seen as “the first step” in the a longer-term journey to reform kinship care.

The National Kinship Care Strategy also committed to establishing a National Kinship Care Advisory Board of sector experts to support and scrutinise the Department’s reform programme for kinship care and to advise the Minister for Children and Families. This has not yet been established, although the Kinship Carer Reference Group (KCRG) has continued to meet.

Our verdict

Although the continued focus on kinship care within government is welcome, it remains concerning that the government has failed to grasped the importance of policy sequencing, pushing ahead with reforms which seek to increase the number of children living in kinship care arrangements before improving the financial, practical and emotional support available to kinship families. This is particularly crucial given our evidence which reveals that many children are unnecessarily remaining in kinship foster care due to an absence of appropriate support in more permanent kinship arrangements outside of the care system.

Its understanding of how improved support may lead to diversion away from local authority care doesn’t consider the mechanics of how the children’s social care system and local authority practice operate, and how this will impact on its broadly welcome steps to introduce greater use of family group decision making (see ‘Engaging and supporting family networks‘) and a trial of a kinship allowance (see ‘Financial allowances’). The Family Network Pilots (FNP) (see ‘Engaging and supporting family networks‘) will likely continue to provide the most valuable learnings for how future policy reform could enable local authorities to deliver earlier, intensive support for kinship carers without necessitating entry into the kinship foster care system and how future legislation could end the perverse incentive for children to enter or remain in local authority care.

We welcomed the previous government’s National Kinship Care Strategy; this marked a significant win for our #ValueOurLove campaign which had called upon the then government to deliver a specific strategy for kinship care in response to the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care. However, whilst making funded commitments to kinship families over the coming two years and setting future ambition and direction through the Children’s Social Care National Framework, the Strategy stopped short of articulating a detailed, longer-term roadmap for kinship care.

More considerable investment across children’s social care is notably absent from existing plans. Local authorities cannot be expected to do increasingly more with increasingly less; radical recalibration of services, practices and culture which better prioritise and support kinship care cannot be delivered successfully without greater financial and workforce stability supported by wider investment too in children’s social care. Indeed, The Department for Education itself identifies that local authority financial challenges is a critical risk to the delivery of essential support services and reforms across children’s social care. Increasing and deepening levels of child poverty risk undermining long-term efforts to pivot the system towards greater use and support for kinship care, given what we know about the impact of poverty and deprivation on likelihood of child welfare intervention.

The Law Commission’s commitment to review legal orders for kinship carers is very welcome; as an advisory non-departmental public body sponsored by the Ministry of Justice, recommendations from the Law Commission are taken extremely seriously by Government and there are recognised parliamentary mechanisms to speed up the process of implementing their reports. This Review provides a specific opportunity to consider bespoke legal kinship care pathways which could help to end the patchwork of financial, practical and emotional support based on the type of kinship arrangement and the child’s journey into kinship care, and recognise that those children in kinship care have similar needs, experiences and strengths to those children who enter unrelated foster or residential care.

What should happen next?

Kinship families need the government to provide urgent and targeted support for kinship families today and to build a future system which supports the kinship families of tomorrow. This ‘twin-track’ approach will by necessity involve a period of “double running”, as articulated by the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, “where government is funding both the current system and a new system”, and involves getting the sequencing of reform right in order to tackle both short and long term challenges.

It’s crucial that additional commitments to support kinship carers are delivered first and the Department for Education considers the implications of further policy and practice reforms which incentivise more children entering kinship care before we are confident these different arrangements are well-supported. It’s welcome this is recognised already within Stable Homes, Built on Love which argued that kinship care “should not be seen as a free (or nearly free) option for local authorities to reduce costs. Savings should be diverted to supporting kinship carers and children”. However, this message must continue to be reaffirmed in action by the government and local authorities.

Future primary legislation must recognise two fundamental aspects of kinship care: whilst the needs and experiences of children who enter kinship care are often very similar to those who enter other forms of alternative care having experienced significant trauma, separation and loss, the experience of being in kinship care and its challenges and strengths is markedly different to other forms of care for children who cannot live with their parents. Simply extending entitlements or support currently available to foster or adoptive families – without consideration of the unique needs and circumstances of kinship care – will not deliver what kinship families need nor the outcomes intended.

Future policy development work should build on existing pathfinders and pilots (see ‘Engaging and supporting family networks‘) to explore how local authorities can best actively support movement – 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. The Law Commission’s project should explore the potential for bespoke kinship care pathways.

Future plans to reform kinship care must also consider in what ways commitments will or will not disproportionately impact on kinship carers and children from specific ethnic backgrounds. This is important given the evidence on racial disparities in kinship care, and particularly the overrepresentation of children from Black and minoritised ethnic backgrounds in informal kinship care arrangements.

The views and expertise of kinship families must meaningfully shape the Department for Education’s kinship care reform work. We have been proud to support kinship carers to share their views with the Department to inform the National Kinship Care Strategy and participate in the Kinship Carer Reference Group, but the government should work closely with organisations such as Kinship to ensure a range of mechanisms and opportunities enable a large and diverse range of kinship carers to input into the development and subsequent delivery of ongoing and further reform. The Kinship Care Ambassador should play a significant role here (see ‘Local authority practice‘).

We echo the calls of the Local Government Association, Association of Directors of Children’s Services and other groups for the government to ensure children’s services has the funding it needs to fulfil not only its statutory duties but provide all children and families with the support they need. This is essential in order to ease the current workforce and financial pressures which make the recalibration of services, practice and culture all the more difficult.