Kinship
Kinship is a charity which supports kinship carers: a grandparent, brother, sister, aunt, uncle or family friend who steps in to look after a child whose parents are unable to care for them, for whatever reason.
Its work includes supporting kinship families, connecting them together, and campaigning.
Charity Name: Kinship (the legal name is Grandparents Plus)
Size:
- Revenue in most recent annual accounts (to March 2022): £2.1m.
- Operates in England and Wales. Currently works with 83 local authorities across England and Wales. (There are 355 in total.)
- Provided expert advice to 2,391 people (2022/23)
- It has 53 staff (during FY2021-22).
Age: Founded in 2002
Proportion of charity’s expenditure covered by the evaluated programme: 100%
Charity number: 1093975
The charity Kinship supports kinship carers and the children they look after. Clearly Kinship (charity) does not actually provide the kinship care: rather, that is provided by the family or friends who are the carers.
The Kinship (charity) aims to improve the lives of both kinship carers and the children, in relation to poverty, health, education and the stability / longevity of their kinship care arrangements.
Why the Good Giving List recommends Kinship
The Good Giving List recommends Kinship (charity) on the basis of an assessment by the What Works Centre on Children’s Social Care (which has since merged with the Early Intervention Foundation). That was a synthesis of the available rigorous studies of kinship care. There were 102 such studies (a huge number), 89 of which were conducted in the USA (which has a materially different system from the UK. It is unclear whether any of the studies are from the UK). That assessment found:
- Strong evidence that kinship care improved placement stability
- Children in kinship care were less likely than children in foster care to:
- have social and emotional problems
- experience re-abuse
- have a psychiatric disorder or require other mental health services.
- Children in kinship care were more likely than children in foster care to report positive emotional health.
More about kinship care
There is no legal obligation on families to inform the authorities about kinship care arrangements. Therefore most children and families are not known to the authorities and so do not receive specific government support.
The data on kinship carers is poor. The 2011 census found around 180,000 children living with a relative in the UK. But the census only included care where the carer is a relative, not where they are a family friend.
Kinship (charity) believes that 10-20% more children are cared for by a family friend.
The legal system around kinship care in England and Wales is complicated and rather strange. We’ll explain a little, which is useful for understanding what Kinship (charity) does.
Some kinship carers become ‘kinship foster carers’, also known as ‘family and friends foster carers’. To become a kinship foster carer, you must be assessed and approved before the child comes to live with you. The child is considered ‘looked after’ by the local authority, which shares parental responsibility with the child’s parents. You do not have parental responsibility and the child remains in the care system. That means engaging with social services (run by local authorities) which some people dislike because they find it intrusive.
Most kinship carers are not ‘kinship foster carers’. Sometimes this is because they do not realise that what they are doing is called ‘kinship care’ or that becoming a foster carer is an option, and sometimes they are afraid to involve social care.
Kinship foster carers are about 5% of all foster carers. When a kinship carer is registered as a kinship foster carer, they have the same rights as any foster carer – including to financial allowances from government – and the children have the same rights as other children in care.
But most kinship carers who are not foster carers do not have those rights, and do not get any financial support from government. Most kinship carers (who are not foster carers) have very few statutory rights: most do not receive the various types of support to which foster carers are entitled, such as training, ongoing support, and tailored support for children with special needs, e.g. behavioural or emotional issues.
In other words, despite the evidence that children in kinship care do better than those in foster care, most of these families receive no financial or practical support from government.
A key strand of the work of Kinship (charity) is campaigning for kinship families to receive the same support as foster and adoptive families.
Who are kinship carers?
In England and Wales, most kinship carers are family and over half are grandparents.
The next largest group is other relatives, such as siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins.
Compared with parents, kinship carers are more likely to report health problems, have more caring responsibilities and lower income. Almost half have to give up work to care for their kinship child / children. Kinship care has a strong link with poverty – not least because of the lack of financial allowances from government, mentioned above.
According to analysis by academics at the University of Bristol of the 2011 census, 76% of children in kinship care are in deprived households (compared to 47% of children living with parents).
The work of Kinship (charity) work
Kinship (charity) works in two main ways:
1. Supporting kinship carers
Unlike, say, adoptive parents, many kinship carers do not really choose to be kinship carers: rather, some unexpected event prevents the child’s parents from looking after them (death, illness, a prison sentence), and a family member or family friend steps in. They need support.
Kinship (charity) provides various kinds of advice and support. Some of these are available to any kinship carer; others are commissioned by local authorities and only available to kinship carers in their geographic area. (Note that local authorities have very little obligation to support kinship carers, whereas they are obliged to support foster carers: see below. So the local authorities who do fund this support are going above-and-beyond).
The support includes:
- Peer support groups, connecting people with other kinship carers
- Workshops on providing kinship carers. They cover issues such as understanding the trauma that the child might have been through. Some workshops focus on specialist topics, e.g. managing contact, and financial entitlements
- Information and advice online
- Individual advice sessions with experienced project workers employed by Kinship (charity)
- A programme of one-to-one support sessions, delivered locally by experienced project workers in partnership with local authorities, over six months
- An active community of over 12,000 kinship carers, keeping carers informed and reducing loneliness and isolation
2. Trying to change the system for kinship carers
This includes:
- Raising awareness of kinship care, amongst the public and policy-makers. For instance:
- Kinship (charity) campaigned to ensure that kinship care was recognised as an essential to the care system in the ‘independent review of children’s social care’ commissioned by the government published in 2022
- Kinship (charity) is trying to alert more kinship carers to the fact that they are kinship carers and the support that is available. It is doing this through schools, GPs, and healthcare workers: educating them to spot kinship carers so they can signpost them to support
- Generating evidence about the scale and benefits of kinship care, in order to influence local authority commissioning and national policy
- Advocacy, which includes supporting and facilitating kinship carers to be heard in relevant national debates. For instance, at the time of writing (April 2023), the UK government has promised to publish a national (England) kinship care strategy by the end of 2023, and Kinship (charity) is supporting kinship carers to respond
More about the funding for Kinship (charity)
- Kinship’s Peer-to-Peer Support Service – which is available to any kinship carer in England – is funded by government (specifically the Department for Education). The £1m annual contract currently runs until December 2023.
- Some services are commissioned by local authorities (meaning, purchased for relevant people in their areas). That is around £1m revenue per year.
- Other work is funded philanthropically and by the National Lottery. Some of that is unrestricted, for general organisation-building and innovation; some is to provide a service in a particular geographical area which the local authority there has not commissioned; some is for research and evaluation.
Other evidence
An evaluation (non-randomised) of one programme run by Kinship (charity) – Kinship Connected, which includes one-to-one support and community-based peer support groups – found various valuable effects, including:
- Most kinship carers who used the services “experienced a de-escalation in their concerns about their children’s behaviour, health and wellbeing, educational transitions, children’s friendships and children’s diet”.
- Nearly two-fifths of kinship carers reported an increase in confidence in their parenting role.
- A marked increase in the number of kinship carers who reported no longer feeling isolated [after six months].
- Improved mental wellbeing to above the point at which they would be considered to be at high risk from mental ill-health and depression.
Kinship (charity) is exploring doing a randomised controlled trial (RCT) investigating mental health outcomes for children in kinship care. This follows a report funded by the What Works Centre on Children’s Social Care which concluded that such a study is feasible.
All photos credited to the charity