Regional hubs to take over assessment, approval and support of carers from individual local authorities in Department for Education plan to reverse decline in number of fostering households and rise in number of residential placements.
Social work roles will be regionalised under Department for Education (DfE) plans to create 10,000 more fostering places in England by 2029 and reverse years of decline in the number of carers.
Regional fostering hubs, which currently handle carer recruitment, will also take on responsibility for assessment, approval and post-approval support from individual councils, to help prevent applicants from dropping out during the process and boost retention, said the DfE.
The proposal is a key plank of the DfE’s fostering action plan, which is backed by £88m over the next two years and is designed to ensure more children are looked after in foster homes.
The department said many of the growing number of children placed in residential care – at significant cost to councils – should be in foster care where, it claimed, long-term outcomes were better.
Fostering ‘has not kept pace with how families live’
However, it argued that the fostering system had “not kept pace with how families live today”, with the cost of living, housing constraints, restrictive rules and persistent myths about who can and cannot foster shutting many potential carers out of the system.
The number of foster places would continue to decline year on year without intervention, it said, with its target to boost numbers by 10,000 measured against a baseline for 2029 that is lower than current levels.
The department said its ambition would be achieved by opening fostering up to underrepresented groups, cutting “bureaucracy”, to speed up approvals and empower carers, enabling experienced fostering households to take on more children and boosting support.
It said it wanted the extra places to be mainly filled by councils, which have accounted for the vast majority of the fall in the number of carers in recent years, with the remainder filled by not-for-profit independent fostering agencies, despite these making up a minority of the IFA sector.
Decline in carer numbers concentrated in local authorities
In unveiling the plan, children’s minister Josh MacAlister said the DfE was “bringing fostering into the 21st century, removing outdated rules and unnecessary barriers to become foster carers as part of our overhaul of the care system”.
According to Ofsted and DfE figures, from 2021-25:
- The number of approved mainstream (i.e. non-kinship) fostering households fell by 10.4%, from 37,325 to 33,435, with the number of approved carers dropping by 11.8%, from 63,890 to 56,345.
- The number of approved mainstream places dropped by 9.2%, from 76,920 to 69,825, while the number of children in mainstream foster care fell by 6.8%, from 44,550 to 41,460, equivalent to 50.7% of the care population (81,770).
- 79% (3,080 out of 3,890) of the fall in the number of the approved households and 74% of the reduction in approved place numbers (5,285 out of 7,095) were accounted for by local authorities.
- The number of children in residential care rose by 27.4%, from 7,440 to 9,480, equating to 11.6% of the care population.
Outcomes from foster and residential care
The rising share of placements in children’s homes has come despite findings that children in foster care “generally experience better long-term health, social and economic outcomes than those who spent childhood in residential care”, said the DfE.
It cited a 2022 DfE-commissioned report that found that, of children who took their GCSEs in 2010-11, those who had only been in foster care were more likely to enter further and higher education and employment, and less likely to claim benefits, than those who had only been in residential care or had had a mixture of placements.
However, this study did not control for the relative needs of children in different types of placement, and the data showed that those in foster care were likely to have higher rates of GCSE attainment and lower rates of special educational needs, both of which were associated with better outcomes in adulthood.
Nevertheless, the DfE said many children in residential care should be in foster care. It referenced a Nationwide Association of Fostering Providers-commissioned 2024 study that found that 20% of children in residential care were assessed as having needs that would be below average for a child in foster care, and nearly half (45%) fell within the same range as children in foster care.
Previous target to recruit 9,000 carers
The fall in the number of carers and places from 2023-25 came despite the investment of £36m in regional fostering recruitment and retention programmes over this time to help meet a target, set by the previous government, to recruit 9,000 carers.
That funding led to the establishment of 10 regional fostering recruitment hubs, providing an information and support service to help prospective carers from their initial enquiry to making an application; marketing campaigns to drive interest in the hubs; and an expansion of the ‘Mockingbird model’, under which “constellations” of carers provide peer support for one another, co-ordinated by an experienced carer.
Most of the regional hubs, which cover 96 of the 153 local authorities launched in summer 2024. Despite the number of approved foster carers falling in 2024-25, nine of the 10 regions with hubs had seen an increase in approval numbers compared to previous expectations, said the DfE.
Extending regional fostering hubs
However, overall, there was a sharp drop-off in the number of fostering enquiries in 2024-25 (149,795) that translated into applications from prospective households (8,290) and then approvals (4,060).
It said dropout rates were in part driven by the length of the process, with 59% of fostering assessments take over six months to complete, and 29% taking over eight months.
The DfE said that while lessons on recruitment could be learned from the hubs, they were “too limited and cautious” in acting only as entry points for prospective carers before applications were passed to individual local authorities, which lead to “fragmented processes and incomplete data”.
Under the action plan, the department will invest £12.8m over the next two years in expanding the hubs geographically and extending their role to cover assessment, approval and ongoing support for carers.
Over time, the hubs would be folded into regional care co-operatives, which the DfE intends to take responsibility for finding placements for children in care across England in future. Separately to the £88m for the action plan, the DfE is spending £10.8m on expanding RCCs, which are currently operating in two regions, into six more areas over the next two years.
Social work roles to be regionalised
The DfE said by providing this “end-to-end” service, regional hubs would ensure “resource, skills and expertise from across individual local authorities can be brought together” to spread best practice and deliver efficiencies.
This will include embedding social workers within hubs as part of a “regional assessment function”, while the hubs will also be responsible for post-approval support, suggesting this social work function will also be regionalised.
Elsewhere in the action plan, the DfE said that planned revisions to standards and guidance would enable authorities to appoint a single social worker to support foster families, rather than have separate children’s and supervising social workers, where appropriate.
It said that, particularly in long-term placements, “a single social worker could offer stronger relationships, and more consistent support, provided the family also has access to wider specialist help”.
However, it is not clear whether such a single social worker role would sit in local authorities or at a regional level.
Scrapping fostering panels for approval and first review
The DfE said regionalising assessments would lead to quicker decisions, however, it is also consulting on scrapping the use of fostering panels in relation to approvals, in order to speed up the process.
Under the Fostering Services (England) Regulations 2011, panels, which must include a chair or vice chair, an experienced social worker and three or four other members, must consider all fostering applications and recommend whether the applicant should be approved or not.
The department said that, according to Ofsted, panels approved 98.6% of applications in 2024-25, posing questions as to whether they provided “meaningful additional scrutiny”, while they could be “discouraging” or “burdensome” for some prospective carers.
It added that assessments involved “multiple layers of practitioner oversight”, including assessing social workers, senior managers and agency decision makers (ADMs), with whom lay the final decision on whether to approve.
The DfE has also proposed scrapping panels for foster carers’ first reviews, which take place after a year, in the light of the “continual oversight” they are subject to following approval, notably from supervising social workers.
Improving carer support and retention
Alongside recruitment challenges, the DfE said that the system was losing “too many experienced foster carers”, including because of a lack of support.
It said the Mockingbird model had a good evidence base for supporting retention but only reached a small proportion of carers. To tackle this, the plan provides for £25m over the next two years to create at least 100 new Mockingbird constellations.
The DfE also plans to develop an “enhanced training and support offer” from 2027-28, drawing on learning from Mockingbird and other programmes, and including: stronger evidence-based therapeutic training; peer support and reflective practice; clear training on allegations processes, and access to a strong network where care can be shared for short periods.
No plan to increase fostering allowances
Despite longstanding concerns about financial support for carers being inadequate, the plan does not include proposals to increase the national minimum fostering allowance beyond inflation each year.
Instead, the DfE pledged to investigate variations in the financial support received by carers around the country, whether through allowances, council tax reliefs or other benefits, in order to achieve greater transparency and consistency.
Rewriting ‘outdated’ fostering rules
The department said it would consult on rewriting the national minimum standards for fostering and update foster care and care planning guidance to create a new “rulebook” that prioritised children’s relationships, continuity of care and stability.
Many existing rules “were designed decades ago”, and did not reflect the evidence that children most needed trusted, lasting and loving relationships, it added.
The department said the changes would also “make fostering workable alongside everyday life, so that unnecessary rules no longer get in the way of ordinary family experiences”, while also dispelling myths about who could and could not foster.
These included the idea that people who were single, in rented accommodation or disabled, or those who smoked, were not able to carry out the role.
Reforming the handling of allegations
Ahead of the wider rulebook changes, the DfE is consulting on reforming the handling of allegations of abuse against foster carers, which has long been an area of concern among fostering groups.
In 2024-25, of 2,860 allegations made, 30% were referred to fostering panels for review, with 52% of these resolved with no further action and 17% monitored for an agreed period.
The department stressed that, while abuse of children did happen in foster homes and needed to be tackled, investigations were taking too long and children were too often removed as an automatic response, disrupting their care. At the same time, good foster carers found the process “bruising” and often left fostering as a result.
To tackle this, the DfE is proposing to:
- Draw a clearer distinction between allegations and standards of care concerns, with the latter not meriting a formal investigation and the former being defined as cases of alleged harm to the child or criminality or that indicated that the carer posed a risk to, or was not suitable to work with, children.
- Require councils to consider whether there are other ways of mitigating risks to the child besides removing them from the placement during an investigation.
- Ensure children are reminded of their right to an advocate during the process.
- Ensure carers have access to independent support as early as possible and are able to choose their own form of independent support.
- Ensure supervising social workers continue to support carers, including with wellbeing checks, during an investigation.
- Have investigations carried out by a practitioner other than the supervising social worker, to enable the SSW to continue supporting the carer.
- Ensure carers who are paid a fee continue to receive this during the investigation until a final decision is made.
It also reiterated its expectations that 80% of investigations are resolved within one month.
What else is in the plan?
Other measures in the plan include:
- A national recruitment and awareness campaign to encourage more people, from a wider range of backgrounds, to consider fostering.
- An innovation programme, backed by at least £12.4m over the next two years, to test new models of care designed to improve uptake of fostering and outcomes for children, including placement stability.
- A £25m scheme to enable foster carers with at least two years’ experience to expand their homes in order to provide more placements and make it easier to accommodate sibling groups.
Have your say
The DfE is running a consultation on its proposed changes to the role of fostering panels and to the handling of allegations, which you can respond to by answering this online survey or emailing fostering.CONSULTATION@education.gov.uk
Alongside this, the department has launched a call for evidence on its wider fostering reforms, which you can respond to through this survey or, also, by emailing fostering.CONSULTATION@education.gov.uk.
The deadline for both is 17 March 2026.
Source: Community Care, Mithran Samuel
