PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
Foster Care: Merseyside (13 September 2018)

It is crucial that there are enough foster parents with the right skills in the right areas to meet the diverse needs of looked-after children.

‘Fostering Better Outcomes’ sets out how local authorities could improve their recruitment efforts by considering greater cooperation and joint recruitment, testing their approach to initial enquiries and reviewing the demographics to which they appeal during recruitment. We have committed to providing seed funding for fostering services to introduce new or expanded collaborative approaches across fostering, which includes sufficiency planning.

We have also committed to exploring how technology could give us a more accurate picture of capacity to have an impact on targeted recruitment both nationally and locally.

Alongside this, we will work with Ofsted to identify whether existing national data collection and insight from inspection reports have an impact on improved sufficiency planning to inform strategic recruitment.