Care Review response: What the government needs to do now for kinship families
Janet Kay
Thursday, February 2, 2023
Today, the government has published its long-awaited children’s social care implementation plan, responding to the recommendations made by the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care last year.
It rightly celebrates kinship care, highlighting how it helps children maintain connections with the people they love, delivers good outcomes, and makes economic sense too. Finally we’re seeing some meaningful, tangible commitments from government to provide the kind of support which has long been missing for kinship families across the country, and which charities like Kinship have been campaigning for decades.
But there is a lot more still to be done before kinship carers get the help they need to successfully raise the children in their care without the stress of inadequate financial, emotional or practical support.
As both an adopter and a kinship carer, as well as a former social worker and lecturer, I’ve seen how we support children and families from a number of different perspectives. Each of these varied experiences has given me a new lens through which I’ve tried to understand what’s working and what’s not – and most crucially, why that’s the case.
I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to share some of my views and suggestions for how to improve things both with the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care as part of the Experts by Experience Group, and more recently as a member of the Department for Education’s social care national implementation board which has helped to advise on the government’s children’s social care plans.
This work hasn’t been easy. I’ve had days where I’ve been elated by the real possibility of major change for our kinship families. But I’ve had other days where I’ve been deeply sceptical or frustrated with the lack of ambition from those with the power to do things differently.
It’s been a struggle at times, but it’s always been a privilege and something I’ve never taken for granted – especially when there are thousands of other kinship carers out there with their own unique stories to tell and visions for what needs to change.
Whilst the implementation plan doesn’t include everything I hoped it would, one thing I’m pleased to see is a commitment to deliver a dedicated kinship care strategy by the end of the year. This should give kinship carers and their children the focused attention they’ve been desperately seeking for years, and help drive government action and long-term investment like we’ve seen elsewhere for adoption.
This does mean another document to wait for, and with it more energy spent and hope invested in influencing another set of commitments. But it’s the right thing to do to value kinship care in its own right, once and for all.
To that end, here are three things I think the Department for Education really needs to consider in order to make their current and future strategy commitments work for kinship families.
Firstly, they need to recognise the varied nature of kinship care. It’s complex and looks very different in different families. This new children’s social care plan rightly sees wider family members as having a role to play in supporting children when challenges first appear, but kinship care is more than this; it provides permanence for children when it’s clear a child can’t live with their parents. 95 per cent of kinship carers in Kinship’s most recent survey said they considered their arrangement to be long-term or permanent. The routes into kinship care are variable – some sudden and others with a long history of increasing intervention – and the way any system is constructed needs to take account of this.
Secondly, sequencing is important. It’s true that more children could and should be living in kinship care, but it would be dangerous to encourage this before we’ve patched up the gaping holes in support for kinship families. We can’t blindly nudge a system in a certain direction when it currently doesn’t do enough for kinship families. There needs to be a step change in support for kinship carers first, or we risk more families facing financial destitution and potential breakdown.
Finally, there’s the important question of funding. Local authorities simply can’t and won’t deliver the changes we need at the pace we need without the stability and reassurance that proper funding from Government brings. Kinship care doesn’t exist in a vacuum; we need the rest of children’s services to have the financial backing it needs too.
We’ve got a long way to go. Simply finding out how many kinship families there are would be a good place to start. But our ultimate ambition should be that the experiences and outcomes of children growing up in kinship care compare favourably with children in the general population. They and their families should be comprehensively supported – financially, practically and emotionally.
This is urgent. Kinship families have struggled without recognition for too long and it is imperative that the government now keeps up the momentum and makes that a reality.
Janet Kay is a kinship carer for her grandson and also has three adult adopted children.
As a former social worker and lecturer from South Yorkshire, Janet has long campaigned for improved support for children and their families.
She has shared her lived and professional expertise as a member of the Department for Education’s children’s social care implementation board and Expert by Experience Group for the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care.
Janet is also a trustee at national charity Kinship, and volunteers as an Independent Visitor and as a peer mentor for other adopters.
