What the government’s National Kinship Care Strategy means to me as a kinship carer

People like me have been taking in their nephews and nieces, grandchildren, younger siblings and neighbours’ kids, when their parents were not able to care for them, since the dawn of time. Most people are fundamentally good, and when good people know a child who is in need of love, care and a home, they will put their own needs and desires to one side and work out how to provide for them.

It is remarkable then, that it has taken until now for a UK government to declare kinship care - in which more than twice the number of children are raised than in foster care - an area of the children’s social care landscape in need of its own dedicated strategy and investment.

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It has not come out of nowhere. For years, thousands of kinship carers have carved out what little time we could spare to campaign for recognition, a fairer children’s social care system and the support we know the children in our care need and deserve. I helped develop Kinship’s #ValueOurLove campaign alongside other kinship carers, and it has secured support from thousands of people in England and Wales, including celebrities raised in kinship care such as Davina McCall and Professor Green. For the past few years, my campaigning has seen me be part of the Kinship Carer Reference Group for the Department for Education. I’ve been able to share my experience and expertise, and hopefully advocate for kinship carers across the country. Government ministers (there have been a few) and officials have sought our views and opinions on how to improve support for kinship families.

It would be foolish not to recognise the distance that has been travelled here - from a total lack of public and political awareness to the first ever National Kinship Care Strategy for England. It would also, however, be foolish to assume that the publication of this strategy means the job is done in finally securing all the changes that kinship families need.

I have spent the past four years working closely with kinship carers in various roles at leading kinship care charity Kinship, and even longer than that running and participating in Kinship peer support groups, listening to fellow kinship carers talk about the challenges they are facing, and I can tell you without hesitation the biggest concern for them. Money. These are families, often with small incomes, who were completely unprepared for parenthood or a sudden extension of their family. These are grandparents cashing in their pensions or nest eggs to put food in front of two young boys. These are single, working women, thrown out of their jobs when they said yes to a social worker and took home their newborn niece. These are family friends who stepped up to support a local family, only to find the system abandoned them completely when they signed their special guardianship papers. It’s for good reason that so many kinship carers describe their experience of the system as the ‘dump and run’.    

The Independent Review of Children’s Social Care recommended financial allowances for kinship carers in 2022, and with this new strategy, the government has only gone as far as to pilot them across eight local authorities. I am utterly delighted for the families that will be eligible for this support. It will, I am sure, remove an enormous burden of financial stress and ensure that the children in their care are not only able to survive but thrive. But I find myself asking, as I have for the past 12 years, how long for the rest of us? How long until stepping up to care for the child of a family member or friend doesn’t automatically plunge you into poverty?

Affected by early life trauma, and with additional needs, my nephew came to me, aged two, with behavioural patterns that I had no idea how to manage, and my local authority provided me with no training or emotional support at the time of his arrival. Five years later, my local authority commissioned a Kinship project worker who was there to support me. She helped me access training about early life trauma which was transformational for our family. She also helped me navigate the system to apply to the Adoption Support Fund to unlock the therapeutic support my nephew needed, such as life story work, play therapy and sensory therapy. She introduced me, for the first time, to kinship carers just like me, with whom I was able to confess my struggles, and get encouragement and advice from other carers. For the first time ever, I was not alone.

The Adoption Support Fund will be rebranded as the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund, to try and increase applications for kinship families (around 85 per cent of applications are currently for adoptive families), but this does not address the core problem, which is that the Fund was not designed with them in mind and requires significant local authority support to submit a successful application. A rebrand doesn’t go as far as the reform that kinship families need to be able to properly access and benefit from this resource.

The government’s new strategy will also expand the remit of Virtual School Heads to include children like my nephew, who are growing up in kinship care. This is a welcome, public admission from change-makers that children like my nephew have experienced the same trauma and loss as looked-after children and require similar support in education. However, those children in kinship care who didn’t go into local authority care first will still not be able to access Pupil Premium Plus for educational support.

There are other partial wins. The government will publish new guidance outlining the steps employers can take to support kinship carers in their workforce, including signposting to Kinship’s Friendly Employer Scheme. This is a start. I have been campaigning, alongside many thousands of kinship carers, for the government to introduce a statutory right to paid kinship care leave on a par with that given to adoptive parents, as part of Kinship’s #ValueOurLove campaign. Earlier this year, Kinship’s Forced Out report revealed that more than eight in 10 kinship carers had been forced to give up work permanently or reduce their hours after taking on the care of a child and I’ve been so excited to see employers such as Tesco, John Lewis Partnership and Card Factory step up to do more to support their kinship carer employees. But this goodwill must be matched with political will and statutory kinship care leave, and I’m disappointed that the Department for Business and Trade has failed to work with the Department for Education to commit to this new entitlement.

On the positive side, I am really encouraged to see the government recognise it has a role in supporting and improving local authority practice directly, through the creation of a new Kinship Care Ambassador role, as well as additional training for Ofsted inspectors to better scrutinise and investigate local authorities’ support for kinship families.

We also know that a lack of robust data on kinship care is often the barrier to improving support, so the announced data linking project is a huge step forward to providing a crucial picture of the kinship care landscape.

Kinship carers, who we at Kinship have been standing shoulder-to-shoulder with, campaigning alongside for decades, can be incredibly proud. The National Kinship Care Strategy marks a long-awaited and necessary step change in the way the UK Government considers kinship care within the wider children’s social care system. But there is still much to do.

As a proud ‘mum’ to a now teenage nephew, I can tell you that children growing up in kinship care deserve a new, kinship care system that understands and provides for their unique needs, not one that tries to stuff them into existing processes or, worse yet, ignores their existence altogether. Everyone that cares about vulnerable children must continue to find ways, locally and nationally, to ensure the needs of kinship families are recognised and prioritised. I, for one, will not stop raising my voice until they are.

Kelly Taylor is a kinship carer and senior campaigns officer for kinship care charity, Kinship