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Consortium of councils share costs of producing series of films to promote foster care
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The films have proved so popular that number of councils involved has grown nearly three-fold
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In Coventry, which started the initiative, film has helped boost foster carer recruitment
ACTION
The West Midlands Regional Fostering Recruitment Forum short film Out There, released in October 2021, highlights the ways fostering can make a difference to the lives of everyone involved, from the children and young people who live with foster carers, to those who come forward to care for them.
It is the fourth film produced by the forum following on from Giants (2017), There was a Boy (2018), and Truth be Told (2019). The first film was a joint-funded collaboration between 13 local authorities, but more councils have got onboard since then with 34 teaming up and contributing to the cost of the latest release in order to use it.
Rachel Brown, Coventry City Council’s fostering recruitment and development officer, who has led the project on behalf of the forum, says the idea for the initiative developed out of a lone piece of work conducted by Coventry, which in 2015 worked with a film director on a budget of £6,000 to dramatise the story of a little boy coming into the foster care system, called Alfie’s Journey.
“We wanted to use a different approach – maybe a bit more of an emotive approach,” she says.
“It was done on a very tight budget with every favour that could ever be called in. When it was produced and we saw the end result we absolutely adored it as a medium and just felt that in the three minutes of film that we had it really did tell a story.”
The film reached 200,000 people within the first three days through use of paid-for social media promotion.
“It became an overnight success and we started to see enquiries coming through, but we knew it would never cost us that little again,” Brown says.
The following year (2016) the West Midlands Regional Fostering Recruitment Forum was established as a way to bring together council fostering recruitment services to share best practice. This included fostering recruitment specialists meeting in person in Birmingham every four to six weeks.
When Coventry took the chair of the forum in 2017, Brown says the idea came about to do another film and “open it up as a project” to forum members as the issues faced by local authorities in terms of recruitment were often the same in different local authorities.
Giants cost around £15,000 in total, an average of £1,150 for each of the co-funding local authorities, with precise contributions calculated based on the size of each authority’s looked-after children population.
Brown says the main issue faced was having to be mindful of things like accents and housing type so that it looked as though it could be based anywhere.
“That wasn’t such a challenge when it was just the West Midlands,” she says. “But it became more of a challenge as more people got involved over the next two projects. We tried to keep the accents as neutral as possible and we’ve had really good feedback on that.”
In 2020, the forum moved online due to the Covid pandemic – meaning it could have more of a national reach.
“[The forum] has grown substantially and we are at a crossroads to decide to what extent the collaboration can become potentially more formalised,” explains Brown.
“Because we have got more than 20 per cent of local authorities now involved in the project – and we have more than that on our national forum – I think we are a group that should be considered in regard to policymaking and changes affecting the sector. We have access to a very broad range of representation.
“Let’s take some of this learning from this very difficult time (with Covid) like being able to host national meetings on Teams or Zoom that people can attend from anywhere and think about how we can use that to cut through on some of these very challenging issues affecting local authorities across the UK. I think the world is our oyster – there is real enthusiasm and it is a proven way of working together.”
IMPACT
Since Coventry began using dramatised short films to recruit foster carers there has been a significant increase in the number of approved households in the city.
In 2016/17, the figure stood at 152 approved households, but has been growing steadily each year to stand at 196 approved households in 2020/21 – a rise of 29 per cent.
Meanwhile, there have been 25 direct enquiries to the service in Coventry as a result of the October release.
The forum is currently collating data from local authority participants in relation to the most recent release in order to understand the impact it has had in different areas.
Another outcome of the popularity of the films is that money has been banked from contributions made by local authorities coming on board after the initial cost sharing calculations have been made.
Brown says: “We have now got enough funding for another film next year without having to go back to any of the participating authorities for additional budget. This will focus on the needs of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, which is quite a priority for fostering services.”
