Alternatives to recently closed Adoption and Special Guardianship Leadership Board

Family Rights Group joined the Board in 2018 when the remit of the then Adoption Leadership Board was expanded to include children who left the care system on a special guardianship order. While shining a welcome light on the challenges faced by special guardians and the children they were raising, the broader kinship care community has remained largely overlooked and undervalued. As Cathy Ashley, Family Rights Group chief executive, said, special guardianship “frustratingly always felt like a late add-on to a board that was constituted around adoption”. The Board’s closure provides an opportunity to refocus attention on how kinship care in all its forms can be championed across the system. 

Josh MacAlister’s Independent Review of Children’s Social Care recommends a multitude of ways to improve support for kinship carers: a simple definition of kinship care in law to ensure kinship care in all its forms is recognised; financial support for kinship carers who disproportionately face severe financial hardship; paid employment leave, akin to adoption leave, to give carers time to adapt after unexpectedly taking on a child. The recently announced extension of legal aid to some special guardians last year hopefully has laid the groundwork for further expansion to support all kinship carers before and during care proceedings. But we run the risk that good recommendations will be overlooked, or implemented badly, and progress will stall.  

If we are to create a system that recognises and supports kinship carers in the long-term, we must recognise the value of those with lived experience and harness their expertise in service design and delivery. As Morris and Featherstone note in their 2020 report, Stepping Up Stepping Down, many families see service design as remote and not in their interests. Indeed, it is noted that families’ only way to influence the services on which they rely is to complain - setting the stage for hostile and unproductive relationships between families and social workers.  

Involving families in decisions about the child social care system provides benefits across the board. Professionals are better equipped to do their job when services are well designed and responsive to families’ needs. Families are more likely to trust their social workers if they feel involved and respected. Outcomes for children improve when families and social workers work together effectively. 

International comparisons show how effective a focus on lived-experience can be when it receives long-term buy-in from government and public agencies. In 2003, the Washington State government established a Kinship Care Oversight Committee with responsibility “to monitor, guide, and report on kinship care recommendations and implementation activities”. While including professionals and civil servants, the Committee was mandated to have at least 30 per cent kinship carer representation. Reporting to the Governor and state legislator every year, the Committee has continued to function for two decades, providing a definition of kinship care that received buy in from all stakeholders, oversight of the government’s implementation of a plan on support for kinship carers, and influence over the design of services for kinship families.   

Closer to home, lived-experience experts are invaluable to our work. Family Rights Group’s kinship care panel members are central to everything we do, and along with our parents’ panel they advise other organisations and agencies on policy and service design too. Kinship carers have changed the hearts and minds of parliamentarians – including those on the Parliamentary Taskforce on Kinship Care and its successor, the All Party Parliamentary Group on Kinship Care. There are many other examples of local campaigning kinship care groups but Kinship Carers Liverpool in particular show how an active, tenacious group of kinship carers and children and young people can make decision-makers sit up and listen. 

Moving on from the ASGLB, we should seek to be innovative and ambitious. A focus on lived experience provides this. Any future oversight body for children’s social care reform must include those with lived of experience of kinship care. We now need a conversation about the best way at local and national level that kinship carers – and families more broadly – will play a more central role in oversight of the system.  

In the new year, we’re hopeful the government’s implementation plan of the Independent Review will begin a step change in support for special guardians and kinship families. The creation of a new team focusing on kinship care in the DfE is a welcome first step to ensuring focus remains on this too-often overlooked aspect of the child social care system. But if we are to avoid the inadequate implementation of previous rounds of reform to children’s social care, families’ voices are needed to contribute and raise the alarm if efforts fall short.  

Joe Smallman is communications officer for Family Rights Group and was raised in kinship care himself