Every day around 68,000 children are living with over 52,000 foster families across the UK. With around 13 per cent of foster carers retiring or resigning every year, The Fostering Network estimates that 6,000 more foster families are needed in the next 12 months alone to ensure all children needing foster care can live with the right family for them. There is a particular need for foster carers to look after teenagers and sibling groups.
Fostering services work all year round to find and recruit the foster carers they need locally to look after these children. Without enough foster families willing and able to offer homes to these groups, some children will find themselves living a long way from family, school, and friends, being split up from brothers and sisters, or being placed with a foster carer who does not have the ideal skills and experience to meet their specific needs.
Number of foster families needed across the UK
|
UK |
6,000 more foster families needed |
|
England |
5,000 |
|
Northern Ireland |
400 |
|
Scotland |
350 |
|
Wales |
300 |
Regional recruitment targets for England
|
North East |
350 |
|
North West |
700 |
|
Yorkshire and Humber |
530 |
|
East Midlands |
360 |
|
West Midlands |
630 |
|
East of England |
440 |
|
London |
760 |
|
South East |
820 |
|
South West |
420 |
|
Total |
5000 |
Methodology
In order to calculate the recruitment targets, The Fostering Network uses the best available statistics and sector intelligence and makes a number of assumptions based on our market knowledge.
Our recruitment targets include only mainstream foster carers (not kinship foster carers), as kinship carers are typically only approved to care for a specific child or children and are not recruited in the same way as mainstream foster carers.
There are three elements in the calculation:
-
Replacing foster carers who leave during the year
We take the percentage of mainstream fostering households leaving each year (turnover) from the Ofsted dataset for England and the Care Inspectorate dataset for Scotland. For Wales, we take the percentage of local authority mainstream fostering households leaving each year from Foster Wales statistics, and assume this holds for independent sector fostering households. For Northern Ireland, we take an average of the other nations.
-
Number of children in foster care
We take the change in the number of children in mainstream foster care from government statistics in each nation of the UK. These are published by the Department for Education (England), StatsWales, the Scottish Government, and the Department of Health (Northern Ireland).
-
Increasing the size of the pool of available foster carers
Fostering services continue to report that in some parts of the country there are simply no available foster carers or specific shortages of households willing/able to care for teenagers, sibling groups, disabled children, unaccompanied asylum-seeking children and so on. We therefore include a further element to enable growth of the pool of available foster carers to improve matching.
The sum of these three elements gives a percentage change which we apply to the number of existing mainstream fostering households in each nation of the UK. These figures are taken from Ofsted (England), Foster Wales and the Welsh Government, the Care Inspectorate (Scotland), and the Department of Health (Northern Ireland).
A slight adjustment is made to these figures to reflect the number of fostering households de-registering to provide post-foster care only.