England’s first national foster carer recruitment campaign launched at 10 Downing Street on Tuesday 13 October, backed by £88 million in Department for Education funding and a target of 10,000 new foster care places by the end of this Parliament. It arrives against a stark operational backdrop: approved foster carers have fallen by 12% since 2019 while the number of children needing care has risen.
The money is being put to work in specific ways. Of the £88 million, £12.4 million goes to a fostering innovation fund trialling new models of care, such as short-term respite fostering and weekend fostering, approaches designed to open the role to a wider range of people. On Tuesday the government also named the 11 programmes receiving funding through that fund. They include schemes to recruit weekend foster carers, support carers through allegations, develop parent-and-child fostering, provide therapeutic training, increase diversity among carers, and help children move from residential care into foster families where that meets their needs.
The campaign targets adults in their 30s and 40s who have the values and capacity to foster but may never have seriously considered it. Recent DfE polling suggests the bottleneck is partly one of perception rather than capacity: 66% of people, two thirds, believe they could be a good foster carer if practical barriers were removed. The campaign will highlight that all kinds of different people can foster, and it is backed by foster carers and care-experienced influencers.
The Downing Street launch brought together the people who run the system day to day: foster carers, frontline workers and people with lived experience of care. Attendees included public figures with experience of the care system, among them former NFL star Efe Odaba, care-experienced broadcaster and author Ashley John-Baptiste, and TOWIE star Lydia Bright.
Children’s Minister Josh MacAlister framed the campaign as part of a broader reset of children’s social care. Fostering changes lives, he said, both for children who gain stability and love and for the carers themselves, who describe it as one of the most rewarding things they have done. “Right now, thousands of children need that chance, and that’s exactly what our national campaign is about: cracking fostering open to ordinary people across England who have the values, the commitment, and the love to foster,” he said.
Meanwhile, delivery on the ground is being reshaped through structural reforms. A new rulebook for foster carers is intended to humanise the decision-making process, digital tools are being introduced to speed up recruitment, and funding is going to more flexible approaches. More than 70% of local authorities are now part of a Fostering Hub, which the government presents as evidence of real progress. The stated aim is to make it easier not only to become a foster carer but to ensure existing carers are better supported and can understand the processes behind fostering at every stage.
Sector organisations involved in delivery welcomed the campaign. Dame Carol Homden, CEO of Coram, said her organisation is pleased to support the government’s push, adding that Coram’s own research indicates a substantial pool of people open to fostering if they are supported through the process and helped to thrive as a foster family. Rachel Cole, CEO of Black Foster Carers Alliance, said too many Black children in care grow up without anyone around them who reflects who they are, and that her organisation exists to recruit, support and retain the carers those children need. She credited UnLtd’s support with helping that work grow nationally.
Mark Norbury, Chief Executive at UnLtd, the Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs, said a stronger fostering system will require both more placements and innovative, inclusive approaches. Through its new fostering accelerator, supported by the Henry Smith Foundation, UnLtd is backing social entrepreneurs to grow ventures aimed at a more inclusive and sustainable future for fostering across the UK.
The campaign follows the Fostering Action Plan launched by the Children’s Minister in February and the Enduring Relationships Programme in June, building a sequence of measures the government says is intended to ensure every child has the support they need in family care, now and in the future. Whether the recruitment drive can reverse a five-year decline in carer numbers by the end of this Parliament is now the question the sector will be watching.