Aoife O’Higgins, Director of Evidence announces our new funding call to strengthen the evidence base on what works to support kinship families.
Last week Foundations launched a call for funding that invites Expressions of Interest from organisations which support kinship families and want to participate in high quality evaluation of their services. This work will build on the current evidence base about what works in kinship care and ensure all kinship families have the support they need.
The call follows the publication on 14 October of the first national Practice Guide on Kinship Care, developed by Foundations and commissioned by the Department for Education. Drawing on the strongest available international evidence, the Practice Guide recommends the approaches that are most likely to keep kinship families together. However, the UK evidence base on how to support kinship carers is weak. To change this, our call aims to build on and strengthen the evidence about what works here.
Doing this work matters because we know that kinship carers in England typically have unmet needs – they are more likely than non-kinship foster carers to live with disabilities, experience financial difficulties, or be single caregivers, for example. In addition, we know that there are substantial racial inequalities in kinship care and that families from minoritised backgrounds are less likely to get the support that they need. But research tells us that when all kinship families are adequately supported, kinship care can lead to better long-term outcomes for children and families in areas such as health, income, and family stability.
For this call, we are particularly interested in funding programmes aligned with one or more following recommendations of the Kinship Care Practice Guide, including:
- Navigator and enhanced navigator programmes: these help kinship carers understand and access the complex landscape of services, resources, and support systems available to them.
- Therapeutic support for kinship carers and children in kinship care: Our review identified cognitive behavioural therapy-based approaches as effective for kinship carers. However, we also understand from our engagement with stakeholders that other types of therapeutic support are on offer to kinship carers. We are interested in enhancing the evidence base for these programmes.
In addition, we are also interested in understanding the experiences of children in kinship care and to determine whether there are services specifically designed to meet their needs.
Our work highlights that kinship carers from minoritised ethnic backgrounds experience structural inequalities and racism when seeking support; this limits their engagement. As a result, these families face a disproportionately higher risk of missing out on essential support. Programmes we fund will need to clearly demonstrate how they engage and support families from minoritised backgrounds. To this end, we are particularly interested to hear from organisations that have developed and tailored programmes for racially minoritised kinship families. We are committed to working flexibly and creatively to support smaller organisations, including ‘by and for’ providers who may not have engaged with us before.
Supporting kinship carers and the children they care for, together
Today’s call comes as kinship care rises to the top of the policy and political agenda. We know that Department for Education Ministers are committed to better support for kinship families because this is key to the drive to ensure opportunities for all children. National statutory guidance, issued by the DfE at the same time as the Practice Guide, aims to improve outcomes for children brought up in kinship care, by strengthening the support available for their carers. We also welcome the appointment of the new national Kinship Ambassador, Jahnine Davis, who is championing the voices and perspectives of children and racially minoritised families and working with local authorities to improve practice.
Our funding call will support the national effort to give kinship care greater profile and priority, by identifying the existing gaps in the evidence on services for kinship families, and testing what kinds of support works best for them. Ultimately, it will tell us how we can make the biggest difference to the lives of children in kinship care.
If you provide outstanding support to kinship families, we want to hear from you. Join us to find out what works to support kinship families and improve the life chances of children in kinship care.
