How to contact us for advice
We provide advice to parents, grandparents, relatives, friends and kinship carers who are involved with children’s services in England or need their help. 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). For Textphone dial 18001 followed by the advice line number. 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.
Our get help and advice section describes the processes that you and your family are likely to go through, so that you know what to expect. Our webchat service can help you find the information and advice on our website which will help you understand the law and your rights.
Kinship care is when relatives or friends step in to raise children who cannot stay at home with their parents. Such situations come about for reasons including parental death or illness, domestic abuse, parental substance misuse, and imprisonment.
Here is how we got to that figure:
While there are limitations to this new census data (see more below), the insights it does provide can tell us more about the kinship care population in the UK in 2021.
*Note: this analysis only includes kinship care arrangements with relatives in households of 5 or less.
Commenting on the figures, Cathy Ashley, Chief Executive of Family Rights Group said:
“The evidence shows that for many children who can’t live with their parents, the love and stability of their kinship carers gives them the best chance to thrive in life. However, too often, both children and kinship carers face adversities and cannot access the support they need.
“It’s clear from the census that most children in kinship care are living with grandparents, many of them older in age. They are also more likely to be living in more deprived parts of the country. Children in the north of England are more likely to be in kinship care than in the south.
“The children’s social care review was stark in its warning that without putting family-led solutions first and properly supporting kinship care, many more children will be raised in a care system which is already struggling to cope and too often leaves young people isolated.
“This new data is a reminder that thousands of children rely on the love and support of kinship carers stepping in, but this cannot be taken for granted. Many are struggling. Kinship carers often have to give up work to take on the children driving them into poverty, and the children aren’t getting the professional therapeutic support they need to deal with their tragedy or trauma. Yet without these kinship carers, the care system would buckle.
“It doesn’t have to be like this. As the children’s social care review made clear, reforms and investment would not only assist current kinship care households but would lead to some children being able to be raised with loving family and friends rather than being in the care system. Kinship carers are doing right by the children, now it’s time for Government to do right by kinship care by raising its ambitions in the upcoming Kinship Care Strategy.”
The Government has committed to publishing the first national kinship care strategy by the end of the year. Family Rights Group has set them six tests to meet. Devised with members of our kinship carers panel, they are designed to ensure that the Government commits to both important reforms and adequate funding to support kinship care going forward.
You can read about the six tests here.
While the 2021 census provides useful insights on the state of the nation on census day, there are limitations, especially when dealing with a relatively small population group. The issues we set out here highlight why the Government must ensure better data collection and analysis is a key part of the national kinship care strategy.
The first of those is in relation to households of six people or more. The ONS have advised us that accurately identifying children in kinship care in those households is difficult due to limitations in the way the relationship between household members was recorded. This means that the ONS’ headline numbers will be underestimating the number of children in kinship care. We know from census data on the general population living in households of six or more, that they are more likely to be from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic communities and more likely to be in major conurbations. Therefore, we expect kinship care arrangements in those communities and geographies to be particularly underrepresented.
The ONS have calculated a rough estimate of the overall number of children in kinship care in England and Wales living in a household of six people or more. This estimate is based on applying the proportion of children in smaller households to the child population in larger households.
Our analysis of the number of children living with friend carers should also only be taken as an estimate. We have taken the census data on children living with unrelated carers and removed the number of children in unrelated foster care as of March 21 drawing on DfE data. The ONS advise that their methodology on children in unrelated care will include households where unrelated teenagers either side of 18 years live together. This could overestimate the number of children in such arrangements.
About Family Rights Group
We are the leading national charity working to ensure the child welfare system supports children to live safely and thrive within their family and strengthens the family and community networks of those children who cannot live at home.
Our free specialist advice service supports parents and kinship carers in England, helping them to understand their rights and options.
We pioneer innovative child welfare practices including family group conferences and Lifelong Links.
For almost 50-years, our legal, policy and campaigning work has influenced developments in the child welfare system including securing the two-child tax credit exemption for kinship carers and a recent extension to legal aid for special guardians. We provide the secretariat to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Kinship Care and the Kinship Care Alliance.
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