Out of Order: The case for boosting financial support for kinship arrangements outside the care system
25 September 2024
Out of Order looks at available data on children in and leaving care to understand more about current trends in movement within and from kinship foster care to special guardianship and child arrangements orders, and explores insights from Kinship’s 2023 annual survey of kinship carers to reveal potential contributing factors.
It finds that the hierarchy of financial support for kinship carers has an antagonistic effect: it creates the conditions whereby many kinship foster carers are choosing not to move to other kinship arrangements outside the care system, despite the greater stability and permanence they feel this might bring and whilst often facing considerable pressure from local authorities to do so.
The perverse incentive for children in kinship care to remain looked after in local authority care must end. Out of Order argues that equalising financial allowances between kinship foster carers and kinship carers supported outside the care system would help to improve experiences and outcomes for children and their families, encourage decision making based on the needs of children, and deliver good value for local authority budgets and the public purse.
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4 in 10 children in kinship foster care were not expected to move to other kinship arrangements outside the care system
"“It [special guardianship] was forced upon me by social services because of permanency for the child but I wanted to remain a kinship foster carer as that means they have to continue to pay me an allowance at fostering rates. The special guardian rates are much much lower than the kinship foster care rates and as a kinship foster carer I would have been entitled to training but despite the judge saying I should have training they refused because I was a special guardian and blood-related."
Kinship carer and special guardian
