Many children in kinship care have experienced adverse childhood experiences and face poorer outcomes than their peers. Kinship carers often face health difficulties, poverty, and financial pressures, alongside the demands of caring. These challenges can lead to stress and conflict with birth parents, which can negatively affect children’s long-term outcomes. Despite these challenges, kinship carers do not always receive sufficient support from local authorities or services.
This intervention, delivered by Family Solutions, used mediation to help kinship carers and parents communicate, resolve disputes, and make shared decisions in the child’s best interests. It also incorporated positive parenting techniques to strengthen carers’ understanding of trauma and strategies for managing conflict. Family Solutions’ trained mediators, skilled in trauma-informed practice, positive parenting approaches, and effective communication, delivered the work. Additionally, mediation training was provided to over 70 professionals across participating local authorities, aiming to improve referrals into the service.
The intervention supported 17 kinship families across five South Hampshire local authorities. We commissioned Coram to conduct a feasibility study to assess the potential for a future evaluation and scale-up.
This feasibility study aimed to contribute to the evidence base on interventions and support for kinship carers, family members, and children in kinship care. It also intended to provide evidence about the best ways to further develop the kinship mediation intervention, and to assess whether it could be feasibly evaluated on a larger scale in the future.
Coram aimed to act as a collaborative, supportive, and critical learning partner to Family Solutions as the intervention developed over the 18-month delivery phase.
Coram looked at a series of formative research questions as part of this feasibility study. These were:
To answer these questions, Coram analysed qualitative data from interviews, observations, and feedback about the acceptability and suitability of outcome measures, along with feedback about the training for professionals and analysis of Family Solutions’ administrative data.
This feasibility study has successfully demonstrated that a kinship care mediation service is a viable and promising intervention to support kinship carers and birth parents who are experiencing conflict and communication challenges.
The intervention, delivered by Family Solutions across five local authority areas, showed early signs of improving communication, reducing conflict, and helping families reach more stable and child-focused arrangements. Some kinship carers and birth parents perceived mediation as a potential alternative to court, or as a means of preventing families from entering legal proceedings. Importantly, the study found strong support for the model from both participants and professionals, with mediators and the Family Solutions team praised for their flexible and compassionate approach. As a result of mediation, kinship families were often able to establish clearer and more predictable contact arrangements, agree on shared rules and routines, and streamline their communication.
Family Solutions also ran four online and one in-person training sessions for 130 professionals across three referring local authority areas. Training was received positively from attendees who reported improved understanding about mediation and greater confidence to appropriately refer kinship families to the service.
Despite some challenges around data collection and engaging birth parents, the study was able to collect rich and meaningful insights through qualitative methods. The findings indicated that the Family Solutions kinship care mediation intervention achieved the intended outcomes set out in the logic model. This was evidenced through interviews with kinship carers, parents, and referring professionals. Referring professionals supported these findings, observing improved cooperation, greater emotional relief for kinship families, and clearer roles and expectations. They also noted that even modest improvements helped lay important groundwork for future progress.
With further refinement of training, delivery, and evaluation tools, the kinship care mediation service has the potential to become an important part of the support landscape for kinship families.
Coram made a number of key recommendations about how the service can be strengthened and rolled out in the future:
Coram made a number of recommendations that are intended to inform the design of any future evaluation of the kinship care mediation service. These recommendations focus on strengthening evaluation methods, improving data collection processes, and enhancing the consistency of the intervention across sites. Overall, the report recommends undertaking further feasibility work ahead of moving to an experimental or quasi-experimental evaluation which should:
They also strongly recommend that any future study embeds a participatory approach with children and young people in kinship care. Children and young people involved in this intervention should be given the opportunity to meaningfully influence the next stages of evaluating the service.
First, further feasibility work is needed before moving to an experimental design. This should establish a set of short-term outcome measures, identify a control group, and test the feasibility of delayed delivery through a waitlist model. Alongside this, specific methods should be developed to capture the impact of MIAMs, since many families benefit even without progressing to mediation.
Recruitment approaches should also be refined. An expression of interest model would help select suitable local authorities, excluding those where embedding referrals may be challenging. At household level, families where parental contact is extremely limited, or where trauma is likely to prevent engagement, should not be recruited. Expanding recruitment to include households in pre-proceedings could also be beneficial, provided clear safeguards are in place to protect confidentiality and manage risks.
Future evaluations should build a stronger data system, with mediators and service managers trained in data capture. Outcome measurement should include adaptations to the Family Mediation Scale, piloting goal-based approaches, and exploring additional indicators such as court days. Follow-up assessments and flexible modes of completion should be built in.
Children and young people should be meaningfully involved both in evaluation design and as participants, ensuring their voices are represented. Mediators should be trained to administer feedback forms effectively, while a fidelity checklist would help ensure consistent delivery across sites.
Finally, collaboration with local partners, including kinship and birth parent support organisations, would strengthen recruitment and engagement. Refresher training for local authority teams midway through the evaluation would further boost referrals and ensure feedback is captured to inform ongoing improvement.
This intervention was delivered by Family Solutions.
Rated 1: Set up and delivery is low cost, equivalent to an estimated unit cost of less than £100.
Rated 2: Set up and delivery is medium-low cost, equivalent to an estimated unit cost of £100–£499.
Rated 3: Set up and delivery is medium cost, equivalent to an estimated unit cost of £500–£999.
Rated 4: Set up and delivery is medium-high cost, equivalent to an estimated unit cost of £1,000–£2,000.
Rating 5: Set up and delivery is high cost. Equivalent to an estimated unit cost of more than £2,000.
Set up and delivery cost is not applicable, not available, or has not been calculated.
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Supporting children’s mental health and wellbeing: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient.
Preventing child maltreatment: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient.
Enhancing school achievement & employment: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient.
Preventing crime, violence and antisocial behaviour: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient.
Preventing substance abuse: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient.
Preventing risky sexual behaviour & teen pregnancy: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient.
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Rated 2: Has preliminary evidence of improving a child outcome from a quantitative impact study, but there is not yet evidence of causal impact.
Rated 2+: Meets the level 2 rating and the best available evidence is based on a study which is more rigorous than a level 2 standard but does not meet the level 3 standard.
Rated 3: Has evidence of a short-term positive impact from at least one rigorous study.
Rated 3+: Meets the level 3 rating and has evidence from other studies with a comparison group at level 2 or higher.
Rated 4: Has evidence of a long-term positive impact through at least two rigorous studies.
Rated 4+: Meets the level 4 rating and has at least a third study contributing to the Level 4 rating, with at least one of the studies conducted independently of the intervention provider.
Rating has a *: The evidence base includes mixed findings i.e., studies suggesting positive impact alongside studies, which on balance, indicate no effect or negative impact.
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