Kinship care

'It's perverse that foster carers sometimes get more support than birth families.'

Sometimes a relative in a child's wider family may want to foster them - usually grandparents.  This is called kinship care.  The advantages are obvious: children are able to stay in touch with their parents, where appropriate, and to live with people they know.  They will often be able to stay at the same school and may feel less stigma and loneliness.

How many children are in kinship care?

It's hard to say how many children are being looked after in this way, because not all reach the notice of social services.  In 2008, 16% of all foster placements were with kin - 6,900 children. But add in guesstimates of informal arrangements, and there are probably 2-300,000 children in kinship care, or a huge 1.7 - 2.5% of the whole UK child population.  There are probably around 100,000 grandparents caring for children under 13.

Why are children cared for by relatives? 

Many of these children will have been through traumatic times before moving in with their grandparents - 24% will have lived with abuse, neglect and violence; 23% will have been deserted by their parents, often after drug and alcohol abuse. 16% go to grandparents after family breakdown; 10% after a parent's illness, often mental illness and 10% after the death of a parent - often through substance abuse.

Children who have seen so much, so young, are challenging to care for.  Grandparents in these situations need support, but may actually get less than a foster carer would.  Anecdotally, social services sometimes avoid family placements.  Where the parent is chaotic or addicted to drugs, it's sometimes hard to disentangle the truth about what has happened from 'family mythology'.  

Jean Stogden of Grandparents Plus says:

'Perhaps because of time constraints and loss of skills, many [social workers] prefer to use unrelated foster care... if a social worker advocates keeping a child within the extended family and it goes wrong, it may well be seen as the social worker's individual decision. By contrast, responsibility for making a foster care placement work automatically becomes a corporate responsibility.'

Paying for kinship care 

Another difficulty for some kinship carers is that this type of fostering is unpaid.  That sometimes makes it difficult for grandparents to afford to care for a grandchild. They may have to stretch a State pension, or balance work with childcare long after they thought the childcaring phase of their life was over.

There's some remedy for this situation in the 2008 Children and Young Person's Act.  Previously, payments for kinship care could only be made in exceptional circumstances.  Now local authorities have greater choice about whether they choose to pay relatives.  But so far, local authorities haven't received more money to cover these extra payments.  

The act also requires local authorities to take greater trouble to see if kinship care is a possibility and to stabilise it if it's already happening. Family members who have been caring for a child for a year can apply for a residency order - so a child who is settled can't be suddenly 'reclaimed' by a parent who is still living chaotically and not able to give proper support.

Perhaps because in-family fostering has been happening casually for centuries, it's often been ignored by policy makers.  Now groups like Grandparents Plus are asking for a much clearer framework of help: access to advice, support and money to help a child stay within their family network.   Roughly half of children go into kinship care with behavioural and emotional difficulties - but around 80% improve after placement - the same as with foster care. According to one study, their sense of self worth may be slightly better in kinship care than with unrelated carers (68% kinship cared, vs 63% foster cared).  

With so many children experiencing this kind of upbringing, it's important to know more about this overlooked group and give more help to family carers. 

Thanks to Joan Hunt - many of these statistics are from her research at the Oxford Centre for family law and policy. If you want to know more about grandparents acting as kinship carers, visit Grandparents Plus.