Kinship care provision overly focused on carers with SGOs, says government adviser

Kinship care services are overly focused on carers with special guardianship orders, and insufficiently concerned with children, parents and care arrangements other than SGOs, according to the government's adviser on the issue.

Jahnine Davis, the Department for Education's first national kinship care ambassador, told Community Care Live 2025 this week that she had also found that kinship was primarily seen as a source of permanence for children, rather than an early help option or one that could support reunification.

Davis, an expert on the safeguarding of black children who spent time in kinship care herself, was reflecting on findings from her first year in the post in a session yesterday at the two-day event for social care practitioners.

Over the past 12 months, she has visited several areas to find out about their "kinship local offers" - the support and services available to kinship families in their localities - and talk to children, carers and parents about their experiences.

Kinship encompasses a wide variety of arrangements (see box) and the government's statutory guidance states that the services set out under local offers should be "based on the needs of the child rather than merely their legal status", with council staff able to support families in a "fair and consistent manner".

Focus on SGOs over other arrangements

However, Davis told CC Live delegates: "Most of the time when I speak to local authorities about their local offer, the response is about what they offer to those with an SGO. But there are those with a [child arrangement order], there is private fostering, there are informal arrangements. How can we move to a place where the local offer goes beyond the support offered under SGOs?”

While she stressed the huge challenges faced by carers, including those with an SGO, such as feeling "abandoned" by the local authority once an arrangement was in place, she said the kinship system generally was carer-focused, with insufficient consideration given to children themselves and to their parents.

Parents often reported feeing "isolated" and "erased" once a kinship arrangement was in place, while children often felt conflicted about their desire to maintain relationships with their parents and wider family, she added.

Children at risk of being 'sidelined'

In a blog post to mark the end of her first year in post, Davis said she was concerned that current approaches risked "sidelining children's voices and needs, despite best intentions", and that she would be launching a research project later this year focused on capturing children's views.

In her session at Community Care Live, she also highlighted the fact that kinship services and teams were generally part of local authorities' permanency provision, alongside fostering and adoption.

While she emphasised that it was a permanence solution for some children, for example, where there were serious safeguarding issues, she said that the current approach neglected kinship's value as an early intervention option or a "bridge" to the child's reunification with their family.

Potential of children's social care reforms

The DfE's current children's social care reforms offer the potential for kinship to be used in these ways through the use of family group decision making (FGDM) meetings. These give extended families the opportunity to come up with plans to safeguard and promote the welfare of a child when there are concerns, including through kinship arrangements.

Under the Families First Partnership (FFP) programme, now being rolled out across England, councils are encouraged to offer FGDM meetings at all stages of families' involvement with early help and children's social care, including as a route to reunification. Councils will be under a duty to offer FGDM meetings at the pre-proceedings stage, under the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which is currently going through Parliament.

The bill would also require councils to publish a kinship local offer and take steps to ensure families receive this information, and also oblige them to take appropriate measures to support the educational outcomes of children in kinship care, under the responsibility of virtual school heads.

Separately, the government has commissioned the Law Commission to carry out a review of kinship legal orders and develop recommendations to streamline the system, and will pilot the payment of an allowance to carers of children who would otherwise have been in care in up to 10 areas. Currently, those approved to foster are the only kinship carers entitled to financial support for thier role.

Survey finds ongoing hardship for some kinship carers

This is in the context of widespread concerns about the financial hardship faced by kinship families, most recently evidenced in charity Kinship's annual survey of carers, whose results were published last week. This found 44% were using savings to cope with the high cost of living, compared to 30% of the population, and 24% were finding things difficult financially, though this was down from 32% in 2023.

Davis told CC Live delegates that kinship was "a real priority area" for the department, as evidenced by its policy agenda and her own appointment. She also pointed to the creation of a kinship board within the DfE, which she chairs, and which includes carers, parents, children, young people, and professionals.