Inkfish Homes is committed to addressing the national foster care crisis through an innovative pilot programme.

This initiative aims to enhance support, improve recruitment, and develop sustainable models to strengthen foster care services.

The foster care system faces critical challenges, including:

Declining carer numbers: The Fostering Network has reported a concerning trend of decreasing fostering households.

Growing demand: There is an urgent need for more foster carers to provide stable homes for children.

Foster carer wellbeing: Research indicates that many foster carers experience burnout and consider resigning.

Impact on children: These challenges can lead to placement instability, children being placed far from home, and siblings being separated. These issues necessitate innovative and sustainable solutions, and our pilot project is designed to address them head-on.

We are launching a £10 million pilot programme in 2025 with ten local authority partners. We are focusing on recruitment innovation by developing targeted strategies to attract and retain diverse carers.

We will use a rigorous framework to track key metrics and ensure evidence-based outcomes, demonstrating the effectiveness of our pilot programme.

Our pilot directly supports key objectives outlined in the 2024 government white paper, including:

• Supporting the aim that ‘wherever possible, children should remain with their families and be safely prevented from entering the care system.’
• Addressing the need to ‘support children to live with kinship carers or in fostering families, rather than in residential care.’
• Supporting the government’s commitment to ‘scale and spread evidence-based programmes which have improved children’s outcomes.