The Department for Education has launched a £12.4 million Fostering Innovation Fund intended to modernise foster care provision in England. In the department's account, the money is designed to increase the number of children and young people able to live in stable family homes by helping local systems test and expand new ways of delivering foster care. Rather than presenting the measure as a stand-alone recruitment drive, ministers are treating it as a service reform tool. Children's Minister Josh MacAlister has described the fund as a way to move fostering closer to modern family and working patterns while improving the experience of current carers and widening the pool of people who may be able to take part.
The policy is explicitly aimed at assumptions that have narrowed entry into fostering. The Department for Education says parts of the system have too often worked on the basis of traditional household arrangements, including fixed working patterns and a model in which one adult is expected to be available full time. The reform programme is intended to make room for younger carers, more varied households and more flexible forms of support. The department has also been careful to state that greater flexibility should not weaken safeguarding. In practice, that means any funded project will still sit within existing child protection duties, local authority oversight and approval processes. The operational question for councils is whether they can widen access without reducing placement stability or support around the child.
Funding will be distributed through Regional Care Co-operatives and fostering hubs operated by local authorities. Those bodies will be able to work with children's charities and other providers to develop and trial new models of care. That structure places local commissioning and regional collaboration at the centre of the programme. For local authorities, the measure is relevant to both delivery and commissioning. If councils can identify models that improve approval routes, retain carers for longer and match children more effectively, the fund could ease pressure on placement sufficiency. Its longer-term value will depend on whether successful pilots are built into ordinary commissioning rather than left as short-lived projects.
The government points to early local examples to show how targeted intervention can increase capacity. In Greater Manchester, a foster carer who had previously been limited to one placement because of space constraints received a £7,800 grant through the Greater Manchester Combined Authority's Room Makers scheme, allowing her home to be reconfigured so that siblings can be placed together. That kind of practical adjustment is significant in a system where sibling separation remains a persistent issue. The Department for Education also highlights respite and weekend-only fostering as models already being tested by some organisations. These arrangements can provide planned support for children in residential care or for those being looked after by extended family, while also giving full-time carers additional flexibility. From a policy perspective, they widen the range of family-based options without treating fostering as a single standard model.
The fund sits within the government's wider Fostering Action Plan, first announced in February, and ministers have linked it to an ambition to create 10,000 additional foster care places during this Parliament. The broader package includes work on more flexible fostering arrangements, stronger support for carers and changes to local authority decision-making about who can become a foster carer. That wider framing matters because the issue is not only about recruitment. For children's services departments, placement sufficiency, residential care spending and foster carer retention are closely connected. Projects backed through this fund are expected to improve outcomes for children and young people, including by preventing unnecessary entry into residential care and keeping more children in family-based settings where that is safe and appropriate.
Reaction from the sector has been supportive, with organisations including NOW Foster, TACT and Coram using the launch to argue for more flexible routes into fostering and closer collaboration across councils, charities and independent providers. Their comments broadly align with the department's position that children benefit when the system can offer stable long-term relationships while accommodating a wider range of adults who are willing to care. The fund was launched during Foster Care Fortnight, giving the announcement both a policy and recruitment context. The Department for Education has said successful applicants will be announced later in the summer once the application process closes. The immediate policy question is whether funded projects generate evidence that can be adopted across England's care system, rather than remaining isolated local experiments.