Agenda item

To provide information to the Corporate Parenting Committee about the general management of the in-house fostering service and how it is achieving good outcomes for children, in accordance with standard 25.7 of the Fostering National Minimum Standards (2011).

Tom Donovan (Service Manager, Looked After Children and Permanency, Brent Council) introduced the report, which provided information about the general management of the in-house fostering service and how it achieved good outcomes for children, including relevant performance data and updates on the functioning and progress of Foster Panel. In introducing the report, he highlighted the following key points:

• The service was focused simultaneously on recruitment and retention of foster carers to ensure Brent had as many foster carers as possible.
• The service had a duty to raise awareness of fostering and did that through a mixture of digital campaigning and outreach. A digital campaign would be launching that week to boost digital awareness raising and see whether that translated into interest.
• Enquiries had increased through Meta to Fostering West London, but the quality of applications through that route were not what the service would want, so there was a need to put more investment into search engines. It was noted that someone was more likely to be ready to foster if they were already doing their own research.
• Foster West London had launched a new application called Care Friends, which was helping people to refer their friends to fostering.
• The Fostering Recruitment Manager, Tee Malik, was supporting the fostering team to set up stalls in different areas to have a physical presence to promote fostering, and had done some promotion in Queen’s Park, libraries, schools, and GP surgeries.
• Good feedback was being received on the Mockingbird Project.
• An upcoming celebration was scheduled to show support for carers, and officers would use that opportunity to get marketing materials through photos and testimonials.
• The service had visited other local authorities to learn from them.

The Chair thanked Tom Donovan for the introduction and invited comments and questions from those present, with the following issues raised:

Noting that the report detailed the role of housing in foster carer application’s being rejected due to the lack of a spare room, the Committee asked how the housing crisis was impacting fostering. Tom Donovan confirmed that, nationally, the housing crisis and cost-of-living crisis was impacting fostering recruitment, which Foster West London had fed back to the previous Children’s Minister. Children were moving out of their parents’ houses much later meaning there were fewer spare rooms for a placement and people were retiring much later. He advised that the service was limited in what it could do to influence the housing crisis, but officers were being creative where possible. For example, when doing outreach work, officers raised the possibility of fostering very young babies if there was no spare room, or to install a fire-safe partition between two rooms. Children could also share bedrooms where they were placed with certain family members such as cousins so there was still energy and focus encouraging kinship placements. Kelli Eboji (Head of LAC and Permanency, Brent Council) added that, previously, if an applicant were in social housing, they could apply for another bedroom to foster, but that was no longer an option. She had not heard from other local authorities whether they were doing anything in this area with their housing departments.

The Committee noted that Brent’s next recruitment campaign would focus on LGBT+ communities and asked if officers felt that would help to increase the number of LGBT+ foster carers. Tom Donovan highlighted that he was hopefully and ambitious that the campaign would attract carers, as the service did not currently have any LGBT+ carers. He added that the campaign would not have a significant cost but if there was no evidence of an increase in enquiries and applications then the service would move on to a new group.

As no further issues were raised, the Committee resolved to note the report.