Despite ongoing efforts to recruit more foster carers, at least 8,600 are still needed to meet demand across the UK, according to the Fostering Network, organisers of Foster Care Fortnight, which kicked off on 12 May.
To tackle this shortfall, three projects in England based in West Yorkshire, the North West and Oxfordshire working with the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, are trialling new ways to improve recruitment and retention of carers.
Made up of council and voluntary sector agencies, consortia in each area have been given between £125,000 to £175,000 to spend in the two years up to March 2015. These groups are exploring a range of ideas including new marketing techniques, ways to broaden the pool of carers, and improvements to the initial enquiry process, payments, support and training.
The Fostering Network is the government's partner on the pilot. For chief executive Robert Tapsfield, one of the most innovative aspects is collaboration between councils and independent fostering agencies (IFAs). By working as partners, rather than as commissioner and provider, they can "share good practice, pool resources and better ensure their local foster care population is meeting local need," he says.
Collaboration brings economies of scale, with councils and IFAs pooling expertise and resources to provide cost-effective region-wide services such as training and telephone support. Data sharing is another benefit, and is already helping those involved create their most detailed picture yet of their local foster care population and gaps in provision.
Andrew Christie is executive director of children's services for the three London boroughs of Hammersmith & Fulham, Westminster, and Kensington and Chelsea, and chair of the Association of Directors of Children's Services' health, care and additional needs policy committee.
He concedes a lack of commissioning expertise in children's services has got in the way of this kind of joint work in the past. "In children's services it's not as well developed as it is in adult social care," he says. "Children's services' expertise in managing relationships with external agencies is still developing."
Support and training
The pilot's focus on improving support and training for carers is especially welcome in the eyes of Janet Rich, trustee of the Care Leavers' Foundation.
"Foster carers work in their own homes sometimes with very angry, distressed and emotional young people and that is not easy," she says. "We are still not good enough at training carers so they can better understand what's going on in the minds of these young people. We are also not good enough at helping carers to understand their own emotions."
Better emotional support and training will also ensure placements are more stable, says Rich. "For a lot of foster carers, breakdowns come not because of the child's behaviour, but because neither party knows how to deal with that situation," she adds.
Latest figures for the year ending March 2013 show 11 per cent of looked-after children had three or more placements, a proportion that has not varied since 2009.
A wider range of carers will help councils and IFAs find better matches and further enhance stability, says Tapsfield.
There is also a powerful financial argument for all councils to invest more in improving fostering recruitment and retention, he says. "The knock-on costs of a placement breakdown will mount up. If a placement is stable that is good for young people and good for the purse strings."
From next year the government will work with The Fostering Network to look at the key lessons learned from this project with the aim of developing a national approach to fostering recruitment and retention. The hope is it will lead to a drop in placement instability and reduce shortages of carers.
West Yorkshire: Targeting new communities and professionals
Ensuring fostering recruitment meets the needs of a changing local population, particularly increased migration from Eastern Europe, has been a key focus of the West Yorkshire consortium's work.
Involved in the consortium are Leeds and Calderdale councils as well as independent fostering agencies Core Assets and Fostering Yorkshire.
"The starting point is simple - look at the cohort of kids coming into care and ensure we have carers locally who can meet their needs," says Paul Bollom, head of children's services commissioning and market management at Leeds Council. "With an increase in children from Eastern European communities we wanted to ensure we had carers that were best-placed in terms of culture and language to support them."
Work already under way to target Eastern European communities includes organising meetings with community and business groups, such as the city's Polish Centre.
The search is also on for more professional families with experience of teaching or social work, as they are seen as potentially good carers for children with complex needs.
The University of York is supporting the consortium, carrying out research with focus groups of professional families and carers to better understand how to reach them.
"We are asking about issues such as the importance of carrying on working and finding out how we can persuade more career-minded people to be foster carers," says Bollom.
Good support and training have already emerged as top priorities for such families.
This prompted the consortium to look at how peer support can be improved and whether carers would prefer local groups, who may be able to meet more frequently, or groups that may be spread across a wider area but better fit their specialism such as caring for children with disabilities.
Another aim is to create a common form of data collection to help better plan foster care in the local area to meet changing population trends and highlight specific shortages of carers. "For example, at the moment in Leeds I won't be able to say how many of our carers are degree-educated. We don't ask that, whereas another provider might," says Bollom. "We are looking to get a more uniform set of data."
The consortium partners are also looking to better tailor questionnaires for carers to include more specific information about Eastern European ethnicity.
One challenge has been to ensure commercially sensitive information, particularly around pricing, is protected, while maintaining collaborative working.
"We laid that out very early on and made sure there was a clear understanding that it was right for any agency to have concerns about sharing certain information," says Andrew Walker, Fostering Yorkshire's lead on the project. "But so far we haven't had a need to not disclose information, as we haven't discussed fees directly."
As a small fostering agency with 23 households, Walker says one of the main benefits of the consortium for Fostering Yorkshire is the chance to work with a larger agency and councils outside of the confines of traditional commissioning and competition relationships.
"The overall aim is to see how services could work together in a more helpful way to improve the fostering sector across the area," he adds. "That main thrust is really welcomed by us as a smaller agency."
Oxfordshire and London: Cinema advertising
For the first time in Oxfordshire and Tower Hamlets, adverts are being shown in arthouse cinemas to encourage middle-class families to adopt sibling groups of looked-after children.
This highly targeted piece of promotion is one of the central planks of work by a consortium of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, Oxfordshire County Council and independent fostering agency Parents and Children Together (Pact), to improve foster care recruitment and support.
Their research identified a particular need in both Oxfordshire and Tower Hamlets to recruit carers for sibling groups as well as children with disabilities. If this year's sibling campaign proves successful, another targeted campaign, focusing on children with disabilities, will start next year.
On paper, Oxfordshire has a good track record of placing siblings together, with just three out of 34 sibling groups having to be separated in the last year. But Teresa Rogers, adoption, permanence and fostering service manager at Oxfordshire County Council, says a lack of suitable local carers means they are often placed outside of the county.
Hilary Bull, head of the fostering service at Tower Hamlets, says a lack of families living in housing large enough to take on a sibling group is a factor. "We have got some new builds emerging and gated communities and wanted to try something new to target them," she says.
Satwinder Sandhu, director of adoption and fostering at Pact, explains that middle-class professionals are also "more likely to have professional experience of caring for a group of children so will not be daunted by taking on more than one child at once". "We are looking at teachers and social workers for example. The assumption is that through this type of cinema advertising we can effectively target that group."
Carers from both areas who took part in focus groups have been important to the campaign's design, says Rogers. "We had originally planned to focus on images of carers," he explains. "However, the carers told us we should be focusing on images of children, so that change was made."
The focus groups also highlighted the need to have a good support package in place for foster carers. As a result, carers who are recruited through the consortium's campaign will also be offered out-of-hours support and peer mentoring.
Among benefits to emerge from the collaboration across councils and Pact is better data sharing. Rogers says that by pooling their data on carers they have been able to identify gaps in their knowledge, such as the occupations of carers.
They have also pooled resources and marketing expertise, with Oxfordshire learning from Tower Hamlets' experience of leaflet drops to promote fostering.
"Leafleting is seen as a bit old school, but sometimes the call to action can be conveyed in a much simpler way with a leaflet," says Vicky Seyforth, family finding co-ordinator at Tower Hamlets. "It can cover a more random demographic, so we are looking to see if that can work as well as the targeted marketing approach."
The council areas and Pact have also pooled their social media and online promotion experience to create a dedicated website for the sibling campaign.
North West: Carers encouraged to recruit
With the biggest shortage of foster carers of any region in England, the need for better recruitment and retention in the north west is particularly pressing.
The north west consortium, comprised of seven local councils and the independent foster care agencies Barnardo's and Core Assets, is now looking at ways to address this shortfall.
Involving carers more directly in recruitment promotion is one of the ideas being explored, explains Lesley Goode, the independent consultant brought in by the consortium to assist with planning and strategy.
Surveys undertaken by the consortium's members found face-to-face contact with experienced carers was the most persuasive form of promotion. The plan is to create an incentive-based system in which carers are trained to run promotional events and paid expenses and a commission for potential carers recruited.
"We want them to go out and talk to church and community groups on their own, as they are the people that potential carers want to hear from," says Goode.
The consortium's partners are all taking the lead in different aspects of work, with Barnardo's and Warrington and Blackpool councils overseeing recruitment activity, including peer promotion.
Trafford and Stockport councils, together with Barnardo's, are leading on training improvements. This work includes launching an 18-week nurturing and attachment course, delivered by a psychotherapist and social worker to around 50 carers this year.
"The course instils confidence, competence and a greater resilience in the carer, with peer support built into it," says Brenda Farrell, head of fostering and adoption at Barnardo's.
Another project being piloted by the consortium, and led by Core Assets, is for an out-of-hours telephone support service for carers. This launched in April, will run for three months and mirrors a service already offered by Core Assets. If successful, this support service and training could become permanent features for carers in the region, paid for jointly by councils involved, who are keen to explore economies of scale.
"We hope delivering training and out-of-hours support across a large area will prove to be a cost-effective way of providing services for carers," says Goode.
Improving the initial enquiry system is another issue under examination by the consortium, whose other members are Tameside, Wirral and Blackburn with Darwen councils.
The work of the consortium is monitored throughout so good practice is shared swiftly, with information going to local children's professionals across the region every six weeks.
