Over the past week, many foster carers have felt stung and as a former foster carer of eight years, I can sympathise.
Not because of the government’s fostering action plan itself, which contains real ambition and much to welcome, but because of how fostering has been described in the public discussion around it.
In a Sky News clip, the children’s minister described fostering as “not work, not a job, not employment,” and appeared uncertain about how much foster carers are paid. I know how media interviews can be clipped for greatest effect, and I do not believe this was intended to demean foster carers. But I also know that many carers heard it as a dismissal of the reality of their lives, and for those who already feel under-recognised, it landed hard.
Undervalued and unheard
When fostering is described as “not work,” it may be intended as a defence of its family nature. But in practice it can feel like a denial of what foster carers do, and it can unintentionally reinforce the very culture that carers find most difficult: being undervalued, unheard, and expected to carry responsibility without power. Words matter because they shape how foster carers are treated day to day: whether they are listened to, whether their judgement is trusted, and whether they are seen as equal partners in the team around the child.
I fostered for eight years. And if anyone doubts whether fostering is “work”, I can only offer a glimpse of what it looked like for us. When my wife was in labour with our second child, she distracted herself by emailing social workers about the two children we were caring for as we approached final hearing. The next morning, five minutes after bringing our newborn home, I was out of the door to a CAMHS meeting we’d waited months for, because the children in our care needed this and we couldn’t risk this being delayed further.
It’s worth saying clearly: fostering is classified as self-employment within the government’s own framework. Foster carers do not have employee status. But that does not mean fostering is not work.
Foster care is both work and family life
Foster carers are not simply “at home”. They are parenting children who have often experienced trauma, loss, instability, and profound disruption. They attend meetings during the working day, advocate for children in professional settings, complete training, keep records, navigate complex systems, and frequently act as the stable adult in a child’s life when everything else feels uncertain.
And yet, at the same time, fostering is not only work. It is also family life. It is opening your home, and often the lives of your birth children, to provide love, belonging and safety for a child who needs it. The number of times I heard social workers say they couldn’t do what we did indicates that what foster carers do is more than a job. The bar and sacrifice involved are higher. There is no other public service role that so completely merges the personal and professional.
It’s hard to express what it is we do as foster carers. One Danish friend of mine described it as being professional parents. For other friends it is family and for others I know it is far more like a job. Each of us have our own ways of explaining our families.
But however we choose to describe what we, and whether we want it to be a vocation or are seeking employment rights, there are two principles in my mind that unties us.
One is that every foster carer need the financial, practical, emotional, and spiritual (if that is your thing) support to do it. Secondly, linked to the first yet distinct, is we all require the respect, autonomy and trust as an equal part of the team around the child we all exist to scaffold and care for.
The government’s strategy acknowledges this tension directly. It states:
“This has led some carers to seek to be recognised as workers. We are clear that in our view fostering should not be considered a form of employment. Foster care should be a family-based vocation, and we do not believe that standard employment regulations reflect its distinctive nature. Fostering homes should feel like family homes with people who love them, not a workplace with staff. We do not believe foster carers need to be considered workers to get the support and respect they need and deserve. But we must ensure that support and respect is provided with far more consistency across the country.”
Navigating the tricky conversations
There is much in this that I agree with. Fostering is distinctive. Children need family homes that feel like homes, not workplaces. Standard employment regulations may not reflect the unique nature of fostering. I remember well navigating the conversations with one child we cared for who was adamant that as we were paid it was our job to care for her and we didn’t really love her – she didn’t need for us to feel like we were doing our job, she needed us to assure her that she mattered to us. It’s a tricky balancing act.
But if the government is clear that fostering should be treated as a vocation rather than employment, then it becomes even more important that adequate support is provided consistently, both financially and practically.
Right now, many fostering services across the country are looking to government to help set clearer expectations around what financial support for carers should be. In the same way that the National Minimum Standards helped establish clearer expectations around quality and safeguarding, the sector needs stronger national leadership on the financial foundations of fostering too.
This is not about creating a rigid national pay scale. Local contexts will always differ. But it is about creating a clearer, fairer baseline, and supporting local authorities to make the step change required. Otherwise, we risk asking services to deliver a national ambition while leaving them to manage the hardest part alone: making fostering sustainable for the people we are trying to recruit and retain with all the financial risk.
Recruitment is essential, but retention is the foundation
The ambition to recruit 10,000 more foster carers is both necessary and overdue. Across the country, children’s social care is under immense pressure, and the impact is being felt most acutely by children themselves.
In my work with local authorities, I have seen situations where children as young as five or six have been placed in residential care, not because it is the right place for them, but because there are no foster carers available. That should give us all pause. Young children need to grow up in families. The fact that we cannot always provide that feels, quite simply, tragic.
So yes: we should welcome the renewed focus on fostering, and the intent to recruit more carers. We should also welcome proposals to make the assessment process more efficient, if done carefully and without compromising safety and quality. There is a genuine opportunity here.
But recruitment cannot succeed without retention. And retention cannot improve without addressing the everyday realities for existing foster carers.
Over a third of foster carers are aged 60 or over. This is not a criticism. It reflects extraordinary commitment over many years. But it does mean that fostering is facing a demographic cliff edge. Many carers will reduce capacity or retire in the coming years, and without a younger generation coming through, the system becomes more fragile.
For younger families in particular, finances are not the only issue. But they are an unavoidable one. Many foster carers reduce their hours or give up work entirely in order to prioritise caring, not because they want to, but because the system assumes daytime availability for meetings, school issues, health appointments and professional processes.
This matters because foster carers are the foundation of the system. The strategy will live or die on whether it works for existing carers as well as new ones. Goodwill and commitment can sustain people for a long time. But they cannot sustain a system indefinitely.
This action plan, and the funding attached to it, could mark a genuinely transformative moment for fostering. But that will only happen if we focus not just on recruitment and innovation, but on creating the conditions in which foster carers can thrive, however they understand their role.
We will work with foster carers to ensure their views are heard during the action plan consultation and to advocate for vital changes that will enable them to continue in their role, including improved remuneration.
Ultimately, this is about one thing: ensuring children grow up in families, supported by carers who feel trusted, valued and able to do this extraordinary, life-shaping work.
