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Are you a parent, kinship carer relative or friend of a child who is involved with, or who needs the help of, children’s services in England? We can help you understand processes and options when social workers or courts are making decisions about your child’s welfare.
Our advice service is free, independent and confidential.
To speak to an adviser, please call our free and confidential advice line 0808 801 0366 (Monday to Friday 9.30am to 3pm, excluding Bank Holidays). Or you can ask us a question via email using our advice enquiry form.
Our online advice forums are an anonymous space where parents and kinship carers (also known as family and friends carers) can get legal and practical advice, build a support network and learn from other people’s experiences.
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As a Kinship Carer, I often feel I’m banging my head against the issue of how much does it cost to care for a child? Anyone would probably say, the more money you have, the better. But all our households and lifestyles are different, so there is no perfect answer. But this is something that many people focus on when it comes to the prospect of becoming a kinship carer and thinking of the success of the future placement.
When many families are approached by children’s services to take on a child, one of the main issues they’re faced with is how is a two-Income family going to manage when one of them is required by the local authority to give up their job to care for this child? Especially when many of them have suffered early life trauma and need ongoing additional support.
In the blink of an eye one of the adults in your home loses their salary and their future pension rights. Now, if the allowances being offered to compensate for these losses existed, this may not be such a significant issue, but that is not the case.
However, as essential as the money may be, for me, the biggest issue facing kinship carers is not money, it is support. The number of times I’ve attended meetings with kinship carers and heard the phrase “Did you know…?” being uttered, followed by excellent facts and/or tips that many of us didn’t know about, is insane. Why is this? Because once a kinship placement is made, many of us feel more or less abandoned. Now, I do appreciate that this is not always the case, and I am sure that some kinship carers are properly supported, but most of us have expressed feelings of being dropped, without being told where to go next or even if there is a next to go to.
If someone asked me what I would want on day one of considering becoming a kinship carer, offering to look after a child so that they didn’t become part of the care system. Accepting far less in allowances than the real cost of care, and ensuring a better quality of life for that child, the one thing I would want is information. A clear guide as to what the steps are, what we are entitled to (even if they had to use vague wishy-washy words like ‘may’, ‘could’ or ‘should’) and where we can go to for support.
Surely, if the kinship carers don’t deserve to be treated better after everything we have done, the children we care for should. Come on, this needs to change. So my wish for 2023 is for the government to implement the recommendations of the Independent Review on Children’s Social Care and Family Rights Group’s Time to Define briefing which illustrate how improvements can be made. And if anyone wants to hear the voices of those with lived experience there are many of us, kinship carers on FRG’s kinship panel, who are more than willing to talk to them.
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