News

Kinship Learning and Collaboration

We recently brought together organisations to host an event looking at where kinship care currently is in Scotland and where it needs to be to support young people and their wider families to thrive.  

The kinship care landscape in Scotland

“We need to do more for kinship carers and children” 

Since 2016, Inspiring Scotland has worked alongside 11 partner charities to deliver intandem mentoring, a powerful community-based mentoring programme for children and young people with care experience. Through these trusted mentoring relationships with children in kinship care and their kinship carers, we became increasingly aware of a gap in support for families and sought to understand this in more depth with The Robertson Trust.

Insights from our charity partners suggested increasing demand for support from kinship families. Charities also reported that despite doing their best some kinship carers they visit are often close to crisis, but that families and staff sometimes struggled to identify available support. Conversations with Children & Families Teams within some local authorities also indicated increasing numbers of kinship families. 

This led to the Kinship Learning and Collaboration event, which aimed to bring together those working alongside kinship families to improve connectivity and understanding around what supports and services exist for families. 

Key learnings from the event 

“The willingness to collaborate and learn from each other stood out for me.” 

We need to work together and collaborate. All families are different and have different needs. Organisations and agencies need to work together to ensure there is a strong network of shared supports which are accessible and co-designed with families – no one organisation or support worker can do this alone. Inspiring Scotland, and indeed everyone at the event, wants to see children and their families offered the right support at the right time in line with the commitment of The Promise. 

“Carers need collaborating teams behind them, not just an individual caseworker” 

intandem has been on a journey to understand how best to support the needs of young people in kinship care and their carers. Families often ask our coordinators for practical and emotional support which can go beyond mentoring, and intandem’s relationship-based approach has led us to try and find ways to meet these varied support requests either directly or through others.  

The event highlighted several challenges and suggestions for change: 

• Legislation for kinship care has evolved in a piecemeal fashion and doesn’t always support the varied needs of kinship carers. A simplified landscape would free up staff and families time, energy and resources. 
• Collaboration is needed to join up the approaches of the statutory and voluntary sectors to create and deliver more standardised, quality care, and increase the visibility of support.   
• More authentic participation is needed and this needs to be followed up with action and delivery.  
• Although some support services for kinship families do exist and are often high quality, they are small in scale, localised and with limited consistency across Scotland. Not all areas have dedicated local authority kinship teams and peer support groups are highly valued but not everyone has access to one. The current capacity of third sector staff and volunteers to meet the rising demand is an ongoing challenge we can’t get away from. 
• More investment is needed alongside a joined up, national approach to support longer term, sustainable, services which form part of a strongly connected network of support for families.  

“Such a disparate picture throughout Scotland in terms of service provision” 

What works: Next steps? 

“Some great work being done but still a way to go.” 

It’s important to recognise that there are some high-quality supportive services available and that these work well when they are adequately resourced and readily accessible.

We heard some examples of what is working well in some communities across Scotland:

• family support work provided alongside mentoring for children and young people  
• a family hub approach including therapeutic support, mentoring for young people and statutory services 
• carers self-advocating and creating local peer support groups 
• dedicated kinship teams and panels in local authorities 
• broader criteria to help remove barriers to accessing support 

We want to keep up the momentum for collaboration and drive positive change for kinship carers who take on such an important role for society.

We are committed to supporting children and young people in kinship care with mentoring. Our relationships mean we cannot overlook the immediate needs of the families around the children and young people mentored.

We therefore continue to seek to galvanise people from across the sector to help ensure kinship families are supported and empowered.  

We want to keep up the momentum, learn about and share more resources, and strengthen links between those supporting children and young people in kinship care.  

If you are working in this area or have insights on kinship care, please get in touch.  

Celia Tennant

CEO at Inspiring Scotland