Top five tips for supporting kinship carers
Thursday, November 28, 2019
Charity Grandparents Plus offers advice for anyone, including teachers, social workers and local authorities, on supporting kinship carers.
1. Learn about kinship care. Kinship carers are family and friends who step-in to raise children who aren’t able to live with their parents. It's a complex world, and support is too often determined by the child’s legal order. It’s worth spending time to understand the different orders out there and the specific needs of kinship carers. The Grandparents Plus website features a lot of information, including the experiences of younger kinship carers, as they face different challenges from older generations.
2. Whether you’re a local authority who could include information in all support plans for special guardians, a teacher who could have a chat at the school gates, or a youth worker who works with young people growing up in kinship care, a simple way to support kinship carers is to direct them to a free advice service offered by the charity. It supports all kinship carers regardless of legal order and their relationship to the children.
3. Read examples of where local authorities have not provided appropriate support for special guardians in the Local Government & Social Care Ombudsman report – 70 per cent of cases are upheld.
4. Involve kinship carers in the design and delivery of your services – Grandparents Plus has a Kinship Care Advisory Group that is made up of kinship carers from across the country. Get together a group of kinship carers at a school, youth centre, local authority or charity to see how your services could better support them.
5. Kinship carers and professionals supporting them can sign up to Grandparents Plus’s free kinship community network or Kinship Professionals network and attend free events or prospective and recently granted special guardians.
