Building a new kinship care system

Current status

Whilst national reform activity around kinship care progresses, 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 has 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 acknowledges that future legislative reform will be needed in kinship care, particularly following the conclusion of the Law Commission’s forthcoming review (see below). Further policy development work will need to take place before primary legislation delivers a new kinship care system informed by the views and expertise of kinship carers.

The previous Government agreed within its Stable Homes, Built on Love implementation strategy 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 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 will seek to embed the most effective policies so that more children in kinship care can benefit. It explains that the Strategy is “the first step” in the a longer-term journey to reform kinship care.

New and existing advisory structures to support the Department’s continued work were outlined in the National Kinship Care Strategy. A new National Kinship Care Advisory Board of sector experts is set to be established to support and scrutinise the Department’s reform programme for kinship care, advising the Minister for Children and Families, and sitting alongside the continuing Kinship Carer Reference Group. The latter group continues to meet, although no further information has been published about the Kinship Care Advisory Board.

One of the Strategy’s commitments 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 will “begin when resources at the Commission become available, following the completion of current projects” and the terms of reference will be published on the Commission’s website “in due course”. 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”.

Our verdict

We welcomed the National Kinship Care Strategy which finally gave kinship care some of the focused policy attention it deserved. The delivery of a dedicated kinship care strategy marked a significant win for our #ValueOurLove campaign which had called upon the 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 stops short of articulating a detailed, longer-term roadmap for kinship care. Its problem diagnosis and vision for the future is fairly strong overall, but – as with wider children’s social care implementation plans – what is expected beyond the current Spending Review period still remains unknown. This Strategy should be seen as only the very start of providing kinship families with what they need and deserve.

Kinship families need the new Government to provide urgent and targeted support for kinship families today, and to build a future system which supports the kinship families of tomorrow. The sequencing of these two aspects is crucial: the welcome prioritisation of kinship care and specific actions to rebalance the system in favour of family networks (e.g. the use of relevant Dashboard Indicators as part of the new National Framework – see ‘Data and research‘) should not push the system towards increasing the number and/or proportion of all children unable to live with their parents into kinship care before accompanying reforms to financial and other support for all kinship carers have been introduced. To do so would be dangerous and not in children’s best interests.

Additional 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.

What should  happen next

We urge the Government to follow the three step plan articulated in our #ValueOurLove campaign manifesto in first focusing on maintaining the momentum and delivering urgent support before turning its attention to building a new kinship care system. This aligns well with Labour’s mission to break down the barriers to opportunity and its belief in mission-driven government as an approach for delivering system reform for today’s complex social problems.

It’s crucial that additional commitments to support kinship carers are delivered first and the Department only seeks to include Dashboard Indicators (see ‘Data and research’) and practice which incentivises the placing of more children into kinship care once we are confident these different arrangements are well-supported by policy and practice as part of a new system. 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.

It is crucial a future system is built through new primary legislation around the recognition that kinship care is fundamentally 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, strengths 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 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. The Law Commission’s project should explore the potential for bespoke kinship care pathways. The government must take all the upcoming opportunities available through the Children’s Wellbeing Bill, the multi-year spending review and the Law Commission review to ensure that all kinship families get the urgent financial, practical and emotional support they need, and to lay the legislative groundwork for a kinship care system which recognises the unique needs, strengths and experiences of all kinship families.

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 minoritized ethnic backgrounds in informal kinship care arrangements. We are yet to understand if the National Kinship Care Strategy was accompanied by both a thorough equalities impact assessment (EIA) and child rights impact assessment (CRIA) as we recommended. It is potentially helpful that policy responsibility for equalities in the new UK Government is now held within the Department for Education.

The views and expertise of kinship families must continue to 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, but they 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.

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.