Building Community in Kinship Care in Fife

What were you trying to understand?

Following a scoping exercise across Scotland looking at what was being done to support kinship carers, the project started with five workers in Fife, who were looking to identify the kinship carers in Fife, identify what support needs they had, and provide them.

What did you do?

At first the team provided one-to-one support and group sessions for kinship carers, while developing training courses that would meet their needs.

In 2019, Fife Council decided to grow the team, as part of their strategy to support kinship carers, making sure that wherever possible children would be able to stay with their families.

The larger team meant that more training could be developed, and the training for kinship carers is now fully comprehensive and tailored to meet their specific needs and is very well attended.

Another change meant kinship care assessments would be centralised to the kinship team. This reduced the workload on other teams meant that assessments would be able to be done more quickly, by the staff with the most experience in this area.

The larger team and the new assessment process also enabled the kinship care team to start building in more support straight away. New kinship carers are initially supported weekly, then can dip in and out as they need it.

For ongoing support there are peer support groups across Fife with kinship workers facilitating and available to provide support whenever it’s needed.

What did you learn?

The team obtained funding from the Corra Foundation to review their kinship strategy, with the goal to:

...support and build upon a culture of practice that has a focus on family support and networks, enabling children to remain with their family and within the community. This work seeks to understand how the kinship care system feels and what it is that everyone involved needs for us to deliver on ‘the promise’.

As part of this strategy review, they took part in a design school course to capture what was working well, and what needed to change. Following the design school course, the team were able to get funding for a research project to be undertaken in Fife on the needs of kinship carers.

Following that research, a group was formed to create a kinship strategy, which is now on its second refresh of Fife’s kinship care strategy, in that group is Intandem, Barnardos, Education, NHS, CAHMS, a kinship carer, a kinship child, and housing.

There is also a separate kinship care ambassador group with 10 carers, and the two groups feed into each other, identifying issues and opportunities and bringing their input and perspective to what needs to happen.

Emma King, Fife Kinship Care team manager, said: “One thing we’ve learned is the kinship team can't do it alone, social work can't do it alone, it's about a community supporting a family, it isn't just about one worker or one team.”

Several changes have been made as a part of the kinship care strategy group, such as identifying that delayed payments were impacting many kinship carers, so they made changes to how this works, and payments are now made straight away when they are eligible for it, preventing financial hardship and families struggling while waiting for slow payment processes.

One of the big benefits from the kinship care strategy group was unplanned, with kinship carers who were taking part finding huge value in the peer support they found there, and led to the formation of the kinship care ambassadors group.

What helped and what got in the way?

The high workloads of social workers is a challenge for everyone, and it was recognised the assessment of the kinship carer by the child’s worker was creating barriers to support for the carers, which is why making changes like moving the assessments to the kinship care team have been effective. Rather than creating more steps, they sought to streamline the process and find ways to improve things while also reducing workload where they can.

Another thing that helped has been the energy and passion of the kinship carers themselves. The kinship care ambassador group has been truly inspirational to the kinship care team that works with them. The ambassadors group holds regular meetings and events, and staff from the kinship care team who attend find themselves energised and inspired by the strength of the community and their passion to support each other and improve how kinship care is experienced.

One of the regular events they do is an annual summer party, attendance is capped at 550 people and it is always fully booked, they arrange a fair, a marquee, a petting zoo, and it is attended by kinship carers and their extended families of all ages.

What difference did it make?

The kinship care strategy in Fife is paying off, with the number of children going into foster care decreasing, and the number of children going into kinship care and staying with their family is increasing.

But numbers aren’t the most important measure of the impact, and don’t capture what this means for the children able to stay with their families more easily and with better and quickly available support. The sense of community and peer support for kinship carers is also impossible to measure in statistics.

The kinship team has helped in the most needed times when we feel like we have no more to give.

Kinship is a community: we realise we are fighting the same battles doing the same job but we often forget ourselves. The peer support offered has helped us find new friendships and not so feeling alone as we are all in it together just trying to love and care for our kinship child.

Why does this matter?

Each step taken has laid the groundwork for the next, leading to more opportunities, from forming the kinship care group, to attending the design school, to the research project, then the kinship strategy group, to the kinship care peer group.

Each new step has strengthened the kinship care team and improved the support that kinship carers receive, and give to each other, across Fife and beyond.

What could other local areas learn?

The kinship care team in Fife didn’t do this work in isolation, working with a broad coalition of partners and attending national events has led to the formation of a kinship care forum.  Starting from a few kinship team managers talking after an event, they decided to keep in touch informally to support each other.

There are now representatives from eleven local authorities taking part in the forum, and they have started organising kinship care conferences, to share best practice and learn from each other.  Local authority kinship care teams who are interested in joining this growing network please contact Emma King, Fife Kinship Team: emma.king@fife.gov.uk.