A word from...... James Lawrence, Head of Communications & Engagement

In the final days of 2025 the government announced its intention to introduce a set of reforms in the new year to improve foster care.

Among these reforms is a commitment to tackling the growing shortage of foster carers across England. The government hopes its actions will help increase the number of foster places available and start to tackle one of the greatest challenges the fostering sector faces – retaining existing carers.

Alongside the reforms is funding previously announced in 2025, which focuses on three areas. It aims to expand who can become foster carers, remove unnecessary barriers and help more people with full-time jobs or families of their own to offer foster care. Secondly, it’ll better support carers to fit fostering around their family and working lives. Thirdly, it’ll develop models of fostering, based on insights from foster carers and frontline practitioners.

More details will be announced during 2026, with a consultation expected to launch early this year.

Will these reforms encourage more LGBTQ+ people in the country to foster? Ultimately we may never know. There’s little to no data on how many LGBTQ+ people currently foster in any part of the UK. Many find it astonishing that there’s so little information in the public domain on those who care for our country’s most vulnerable children. While some conclusions can be drawn from the available data on adoption, there isn’t anything equivalent for fostering.

This then undermines fostering recruitment efforts. If you don’t know what your starting position is – in terms of LGBTQ+ foster carer recruitment – how can you know where your previous strategy worked, or needed improvement? And without publicly available information on the characteristics of newly recruited foster carers, how will you know whether any targeting of your recruitment was successful?

There’s a broad consensus across the sector that change is needed to tackle the shortage of foster carers. But funding that doesn’t also interrogate where and who recruitment reaches risks further failing looked-after children who deserve the widest possible pool of potential foster carers.