Supporting Long-term Foster Care Placements in the Independent Sector

Authors Mary Beek, Gillian Schofield and Julie Young

Published by Department for Education, October 2016

Match Foster Care, a small independent foster care provider in the West Midlands, was one of the organisations funded by the government's Children's Social Care Innovation Programme, launched in 2013 to encourage innovative approaches to supporting vulnerable children. Match's project aimed to improve outcomes by having the local authority delegate certain statutory duties and related decision making to the provider. Young people would have one social worker, based in Match, who would support and supervise the foster carers as well as taking on the role of local authority child and family social worker. The social worker's duties would therefore include all statutory visits to young clients and organising and representing young people in personal education plan and looked-after children reviews.

A team of researchers from the Centre for Research on Children and Families at the University of East Anglia set out to evaluate the impact of the pilot project. The evaluation team wanted to find out how taking on statutory duties changed the way an independent foster agency delivers long-term foster care. They wanted to examine the effect of bringing together the role of agency and local authority social worker, the practical and financial implications of this change of approach and the impact on quality of care.

To do this, they identified another foster agency that hadn't taken on delegated statutory duties and did not provide "wraparound" services, and compared processes and outcomes through interviews, questionnaires, access to files and focus groups.

The researchers found that while young people in the innovation project had a consistent social worker throughout the period, this was not the case for all of those in the comparison agency. Some young people saw their Match social worker much more frequently than they had seen their local authority social worker.

The fact the innovation project funded access to wraparound services, including health, education and psychological support, meant young people in that group were able to benefit from such services in a timely fashion while those in the comparison group sometimes had to wait longer. While most participants in the Match project reported the wraparound services improved children's care journeys, a small number said the number of professionals involved could feel overwhelming. Match young people had support from between three and eight professionals while those in the comparison group were receiving support from between two and four professionals.

The costs for Match carrying out delegated statutory duties appeared similar to those estimated for local authorities to carry out the same duties. However, there was evidence Match was providing some additional services, including advocacy, and spending additional time on some tasks, thus offering value for money (see table).