That National Fostering Crisis!

That National Fostering Crisis!

Welcome to the first in my series of blogs that I will be writing about fostering and foster care in the UK. The blogs will link in with the video blogs we are doing (see our EPIC Family CIC facebook page) and will also link to why we are doing what we are doing at EPIC.

The Data

It is no secret that the UK is in the midst of a fostering crisis. The number of approved fostering family’s is at a 10 year low, with numbers continuing to drop. OFSTED figures show that numbers of approved foster parents fell from 43,405 to 42,615 in the year to March 2024. In the last 3 years, more foster parents have left than joined, and there is a net loss of 2920 (The Guardian 24/11/24).

Reasons For The Crisis

The Fostering Network (13/05/24) estimates that there is a shortage of 6500 foster parents in the UK. They report that the key reasons for the loss of foster parents is the lack of support, feeling undervalued, not respected by their fostering service, or the placing authority, and inadequate financial support.

The Guardian (07-01-25) said that “the decline in foster carers is due to the impact of the pandemic, the cost of living crisis, biological children remaining at home longer, spare rooms being used as offices” etc.

Fostertalk undertook a cost of living survey in 2022 and found a large proportion of foster parents were considering leaving as they cannot financially cope”.

Barnardo’s undertook a poll (4000 adults) which revealed that 73% knew that there was a foster parent shortage, but only 7% would consider fostering. When exploring why, they found 82% thought they were too old (over 55 yrs), 34% 25-44 year olds wanted their own children, 19% didn’t have suitable accommodation and 15% couldn’t afford it.

The Impact On The Children

A chid comes into care every 15 minutes in the UK (Barnardos 2024) and 19% of them will live with a kinship carer. This leaves 81% who need a home with a mainstream foster parent. A shortage of foster homes has a significant impact on the children who come into care. Nearly 1 in 5 children are placed more than 20 miles from their home, which leads to a loss of connections with family, friends, community, along with long journeys to school etc.

There is an increasing level of need, and trauma experience for the children coming into foster care, and therefore an increasing need for therapeutic or specialist foster homes/families to meet their needs.

With fewer foster parent options, it is becoming increasingly difficult for siblings to remain living together, children not been matched with suitably experienced foster parents who can meet their needs, and more children than ever living in unregulated placements. For some children/young people, residential care is the right choice, but due to ongoing financial constraints in local authorities, the funding is often not available, and so these children with very complex needs are placed into foster homes which are not equipped to meet their needs, the family breaks down, and the child needs to move (often with minimal time to prepare) and this causes further trauma.

 All of this inevitably leads to more foster home (placement) breakdowns, more instability and trauma for the child.

What We Plan To Do Differently

The Department of Education have said “We are investing £15M to boost the number of foster carers next year, to generate 100’s of new placements and offer children stable homes to grow up in” (The Guardian 07-01-25)

Obviously, there is no magic wand and no magic solution to this crisis. We know from our experience of working with foster parents, children and local authorities, that this crisis has a wide reaching impact on everyone involved, but most importantly on the children in care.

At EPIC, we do believe that there are some simple solutions that fostering services can do to help, which we will be embedding through all of our work:

Show some respect and be human – this is something that Dan and I talk about a lot – the importance of being human and showing respect to the people we work with, whether that is foster parents, other professionals, and each other. We are clear that this will underpin all the work we do. We will recognise and celebrate the small things, proactively seek feedback and views, and actually respond to them, shaping our service to meet the needs to of the people we are there to support.

Stop the foster parent vs social worker narrative – We know that foster parents often find some of the decisions made by social workers very frustrating. This often comes from a lack of clear communication. There is a growing frustration on social media from foster parents about social workers. While we fully hear and acknowledge those frustrations, we believe that building positive professional relationships via clear communication is the way forwards. We know foster parents won’t always agree with decisions made about the children they care for, but we do believe if they understand the rationale for the decision, and are included where appropriate, it makes it easier to understand and accept. Each of our EPIC Supervising Social Worker’s will be working closely with the Children’s Social Worker’s to ensure that there is positive and clear communication.

Make matching meaningful

Those of you who have been around for a while, will remember when there used to be proper matching, and a choice of homes for children so you could match with the most appropriate. As the squeeze on foster homes has grown over the last few years, this happens less and less. We are keen to return to that model of proper matching. At EPIC, we will consider each referral against each vacancy we have. We will then identify potential foster parents and discuss as appropriate. If the foster parent would like to proceed, we will arrange a meeting with the placing Social Worker, foster carer and our EPIC Supervising Social Worker to ensure that all the relevant information is in the referral, and that matching is positive. At this meeting we will also discuss any additional support that is needed and seek confirmation in writing of the funding for this.

Real support when you need it

At EPIC Fostering we are committed to providing our fostering family’s with the real support they need, when they need it. There will be no delays while requests for funding are made, or while we wait for the Local Authority to agree to the support. Every foster family will have not only their own therapeutic EPIC Supervising Social Worker to offer day to day support as needed, they will also have access to our full therapeutic support team for any counselling or therapeutic support they may need. This will all sit along a support worker who will be there to support the child in care.

We will also have a bespoke service called EPIC Listeners. These will be experienced foster parents who have undertaken additional training in order to offer our foster parents 1:1 peer support and guidance.

Retention as well as recruitment

It goes without saying that we will need to recruit foster parents (once approved by OFSTED), however, at EPIC Fostering, we will have a strong focus on retention.

We will value the foster parents we have, and want them to feel part of the organisation with us. We will provide trips, celebrations, and activities.

We won’t be using big financial incentives to attract new foster parents like some do (how is it right new foster parents  can be paid more than experienced ones?)

We will offer an enhanced level of training for our experienced foster parents (who wants to do the same basic training every year?)

 Final few words:

We (Sara and Dan) know that this is not an easy time to be fostering in the UK and we know we don’t have a magic wand to fix it all, but what we do have is a desire to do things differently, especially in the way we treat our foster parents, which in turn will improve the outcomes for the children we care for.