The Department for Education’s announcement on 27 February of seven new Kinship Zones across England marks a significant milestone in the approach to supporting kinship families. Backed by £126 million, the government will pilot a financial allowance for eligible kinship carers, equivalent to the National Minimum Allowance for foster carers, reaching around 5,000 children across seven local authority areas, paired with increased support tailored to local needs.
The announcement marks an important step forward in recognising the role of kinship carers and addressing the evidence gap on what works to support them.
That’s why Foundations is pleased to be undertaking work as part of this national initiative. We’ll be leading the independent evaluation of the financial allowances pilot in Kinship Zones, commissioning Alma Economics to examine its impact over the next three and a half years. The evaluation will explore whether financial support reduces strain and improves placement stability, and what works in different local contexts, helping to ensure that future policy decisions are grounded in high quality evidence.
Addressing the evidence gap
This evaluation is part of attempts to tackle the persistent lack of robust evidence on effective support for kinship carers that we have highlighted in our previous work. Despite kinship carers’ crucial role, the system too often lacks the evidence base necessary to identify, design or scale effective support.
We began to address this gap in Kinship Care Practice Guide published in October 2024, commissioned by the DfE and produced by Foundations. The guide reviewed international evidence on financial allowances and identified promising findings from the United States, where allowances for kinship carers are associated with greater placement stability and more positive outcomes for children. Yet the guide also underscored the need for UK specific evaluation to understand how allowances might translate to local systems and families’ needs.
A new phase of evidence generation
The newly announced Kinship Zones are a huge opportunity for a large‑scale test of financial support for kinship families in this country. Each Kinship Zone will receive dedicated funding and flexibility to tailor delivery of kinship allowances locally. Our evaluation is designed to answer some of the key questions about allowances: does financial support help kinship carers meet children’s needs? Does it improve stability for children in kinship care? And crucially, how should support be implemented to ensure it is accessible, fair and effective? As Josh MacAlister, Minister for Children and Families, said on the day of the announcement, we’ll be testing ‘what works at scale’ to help shape the future of financial support for kinship families.
This is hugely positive, but the Kinship Care Practice Guide underlines that kinship families need a comprehensive system of evidence-based support of different kinds, not just financial help. That’s why in January 2026, Foundations began pilot evaluations of kinship navigator programmes and therapeutic support for kinship families, and in February, we kicked off new projects to explore directly the views and experiences of minoritised ethnic children in kinship care.
Experiences of minoritised ethnic children
We are also working to better understand how to support minoritised ethnic children and young people in kinship care, which is a significant gap in the current evidence. We have commissioned work by which will provide a more comprehensive understanding of what minoritised ethnic children in kinship care themselves say about support that really works for them.
We know these children are more likely to be in informal arrangements than their peers from White backgrounds, and families in informal kinship arrangements are currently not eligible to take part in the Kinship Zones pilot. At the same time, minoritised ethnic kinship families can face compound adversities caused by structural racism and inadequate support. Building an evidence base on what works for these kinship families is urgently needed.
Alongside last week’s DfE announcement, Jahnine Davis, the National Kinship Care Ambassador, published her report on how to develop an effective local kinship offer. In it, she explores how a lack of understanding of different cultural practices can be a barrier to reaching some families in (mainly) informal kinship arrangements. Her report reflects on how some local authorities are testing using different wording and approaches to ensure kinship carers from minoritised ethnic backgrounds can access the support available to them.
The launch of the Kinship Zones pilot is a big moment that reflects growing recognition of the role played by kinship carers in helping more children stay safely in their family networks. We aim to help ensure that policy choices about future support for kinship carers draw on rigorous evidence and are informed by local circumstances, and, above all, that future decisions deliver effective support and meaningful change for all kinship families.