£8.4m to roll out family finding schemes part of drive to make promotion of enduring relationships for children the “core purpose of practice” in children’s social care.
The Department for Education (DfE) will fund a national rollout of schemes to support children in care and care leavers build and maintain relationships with important people in their lives.
It will provide £8.4m from October 2026 to March 2028 to roll out family finding schemes, as part of a drive to make the promotion of enduring relationships the “core purpose of practice” in children’s social care.
This will also include introducing a measure in relation to enduring relationships against which local authorities will be judged, and making the issue a focus of Ofsted’s inspections of councils and social care providers.
The enduring relationships strategy also encompasses a review of the role of residential care, whose use ministers want to see reduced, and existing policies to reverse the decline in the number of foster carers.
Purpose of social care ‘must be promoting relationships’
“Children can experience multiple moves, separation from family and community, and too often leave care without the networks of support that most young people rely on,” said children’s minister Josh MacAlister in a ministerial statement announcing the strategy.
“The purpose of the children’s social care system must be to build, protect and sustain children’s enduring relationships, so they can feel safe, supported and able to thrive.
About family finding schemes
Family finding schemes are designed to help children in care and care leavers reconnect, and rebuild relationships with, important people to them, providing them with a network of trusted adults who can support them through their lives.
The previous government allocated £21m to family finding projects from December 2023 March 25, funding 27 schemes, across the same number of local authorities.
Of these, 23 were for Lifelong Links, the model developed and delivered by Family Rights Group (FRG), under which a practitioner works with a young person to identify important people in their lives and then co-ordinates a family group conference to develop a plan to promote lifelong relationships for them.
After taking power in 2024, the Labour government extended funding for family finding schemes until September 2026. According to the DfE, there are now 24 projects being funded, reaching around 2,000 children and young people.
The evidence base for family finding
The department said research has found that family finding participants gained, on average, 2.2 additional connections with important people important in their lives, with 35% reconnecting with immediate family and the same proportion reconnecting with professionals, such as teachers and social workers.
Separately, FRG has reported that Lifelong Links participants went from having seven connections, on average, before taking part in the scheme to having 26 afterwards.
The charity also said that it led to significant improvements in young people’s mental health and wellbeing, as measured by the strengths and difficulties questionnaire.
There was also a 10% reduction in the risk that a care leaver would be owed a homelessness prevention or relief duty in areas using Lifelong Links compared with otherwise similar areas not using the scheme, found a 2023 government-commissioned study by the Centre for Homelessness Impact.
£8.4m to roll out family finding
Under its plans to roll out family finding, the DfE will commission a provider of the approach to embed it within the up to 129 local authorities who do not currently have such a scheme.
This will be backed by £1.7m from October 2026 to March 2027 and a further £6.7m in 2027-28.
The selected provider will be expected to:
- Have extensive knowledge of a family finding model, supported by independent evidence demonstrating its effectiveness, and experience of delivering a family finding programme in a local authority.
- Scale up family finding to all English local authorities.
- Deliver change quickly within and build sustainable local authority capacity.
- Monitor and quality assure the family finding programme.
- Gather and share learning to support ongoing improvement.
New metric on how councils promote relationships for children
Another plank of the enduring relationships strategy is the introduction of a measure to track how well councils are promoting relationships for children and young people.
The DfE said the measure would support practitioners to work with children and young people to identify relationships that were appropriate, had the potential to endure and would provide trust, support and resilience.
It said it would work with a group of local authorities to develop the measure, with a view to rolling out later this year.
The DfE said it would also work with Ofsted to ensure that its replacement for the current inspecting local authority children’s services (ILACS) framework, which it will launch next year, gave “appropriate attention to enduring relationships for those in and leaving care”.
Ofsted will also consult on changes to the social care common inspection framework (SCCIF), for providers, later this year, which would also promote work to support enduring relationships, the DfE added.
