Around 180,000 children in England are currently in kinship care — raised not by their birth parents but by grandparents, aunts and uncles, older siblings, or other relatives who stepped in when parents could not cope. These families are among the most dedicated caregivers in the country, and among the least supported. This guide is for them.
Whether you are a grandmother who took in your grandchildren last year, an aunt who has been caring for a niece for a decade, or a cousin who has just been asked to step up, this guide covers the legal landscape, the financial support you may be entitled to, how to manage contact with birth parents, and practical tools that make the day-to-day logistics more manageable.
What Is Kinship Care?
Kinship care is a broad term for any arrangement in which a child is raised by a relative or family friend rather than their birth parents. It exists on a spectrum from entirely informal arrangements — where a grandparent simply takes over day-to-day care without any legal order — to formal arrangements with court orders, social worker oversight, and legal parental responsibility.
The scale of kinship care in the UK is significant. The charity Kinship (formerly Grandparents Plus) estimates that around 180,000 children in England alone are in kinship care, with more than 90% of those arrangements unsupported by the state — informal kinship, where the family simply absorbs the child without a legal framework or financial support. Many kinship carers do not know what rights or support they are entitled to, because no one tells them.
Informal kinship care works for some families, particularly where the arrangement is stable and the parents are broadly supportive. But it creates real risks: kinship carers have no automatic parental responsibility, which means they cannot consent to medical treatment, sign school forms, or take the child abroad without the birth parents' agreement. Where relationships with birth parents are difficult, or where the arrangement needs legal underpinning, a formal legal order is worth considering.
Legal Frameworks: SGOs and Child Arrangements Orders
There are two main legal routes for kinship carers in England and Wales: a Child Arrangements Order (CAO) and a Special Guardianship Order (SGO). They have meaningfully different implications.
Child Arrangements Order
A Child Arrangements Order from a family court sets out who the child lives with and how much time they spend with each parent or carer. A CAO gives the holder parental responsibility, shared with the birth parents — so decisions about the child's life (schooling, medical treatment, travel abroad) technically require agreement from everyone with parental responsibility. In practice, day-to-day decisions are made by whoever the child lives with, but significant decisions can become contested. CAOs are less suitable where birth parents are actively hostile or where you need clear decision-making authority.
Special Guardianship Order
An SGO is stronger. It gives the special guardian parental responsibility that, while it does not extinguish the birth parents' parental responsibility, allows the guardian to exercise that responsibility to the exclusion of anyone else except another special guardian. In plain terms: you can make decisions for the child without needing the birth parents' agreement on each one. The child retains their legal identity and the birth parents retain limited parental responsibility, but you have day-to-day and long-term authority.
Courts treat SGOs as a significant step and will require a thorough assessment by the local authority before granting one. But for many kinship carers, especially those dealing with chaotic or harmful birth parents, an SGO provides the stability and legal clarity that informal arrangements cannot. It also opens the door to SGO support, including financial support, which a CAO does not.
If you are unsure which route is right for your situation, get legal advice before applying. Coram Children's Legal Centre offers free advice (see below), and many family law solicitors will give an initial consultation at no charge.
Managing Contact with Birth Parents
One of the most challenging aspects of kinship care is managing ongoing contact between the child and their birth parents. Unlike adoption, kinship care rarely means a clean break. The birth parents are still in the picture — they are your relatives, or at least known to you — and the child likely has complex feelings about them.
Contact arrangements vary enormously. Some kinship carers have cordial relationships with birth parents and manage contact informally. Others are dealing with parents who are volatile, unreliable, or dangerous — who may turn up unannounced, try to undermine the caring arrangement, or put the child in an impossible emotional position.
Whatever the situation, keep a record. Every scheduled contact visit: who attended, how long it lasted, how the child presented before and after. Every communication from birth parents: messages, calls, letters. Every incident: what happened, when, what was said, what you did. These records are not about creating a dossier — they are about having an accurate account if a court, social worker, or reviewing officer ever asks what the pattern of contact has looked like.
If contact is causing harm, document that harm carefully and speak to your social worker or solicitor about applying to vary the contact arrangement. A clear record of the impact on the child — their behaviour, sleep, emotional state in the days following contact — is the most persuasive evidence you can bring.
What to record for each contact
- Date, time, and duration of the visit or communication
- Who was present (birth parent, siblings, other adults)
- Where contact took place
- The child's mood and behaviour before contact
- Any notable events during contact (if you were present or a contact supervisor reported back)
- The child's mood, behaviour, and sleep in the 24-48 hours after contact
- Anything the child said about the visit
Financial Support for Kinship Carers
Financial support for kinship carers in England is inconsistently applied and often hard to access — but it does exist, and you should pursue it.
If you are a kinship foster carer — meaning the local authority has formally placed the child with you as a looked-after child — you are entitled to the same allowances as any other foster carer. This is currently around £450-£600 per week depending on the age of the child and your local authority, though rates vary. The local authority also retains responsibility for the child's care plan, reviews, and support.
If you have an SGO, you may be entitled to an SGO allowance. Critically, local authorities are required to carry out an assessment of need and of financial circumstances before making an SGO, and they must pay an SGO allowance where the child's needs require it and where means-testing shows it is appropriate. The level of this allowance varies significantly between local authorities — some are more generous than others. If you feel you are not receiving a fair assessment, Kinship (kinship.org.uk) can advise.
If you have a CAO or an informal arrangement, the financial picture is much less clear. You may be able to apply for Child Benefit and Child Tax Credit (or Universal Credit), and in some cases local authorities will provide a discretionary allowance — but there is no statutory entitlement. This is one of the significant inequities in how kinship care is treated in England, and it is something the charity sector is actively campaigning to change.
Practical Challenges: Schools, Medical Consent, and Travel
Without parental responsibility, kinship carers can face surprising obstacles in everyday life. Schools may ask for consent forms signed by a parent. GP surgeries may be uncertain about who can consent to treatment. Planning a holiday abroad can become complicated when passports and travel require parental agreement.
If you have an SGO, these problems largely resolve: you have parental responsibility and can act as a parent for all practical purposes. If you have a CAO, you share parental responsibility and can generally act alone for routine decisions, but significant decisions — a new school, major medical treatment, a holiday outside the UK — may require agreement from birth parents with parental responsibility.
In informal arrangements, schools and healthcare providers will often cooperate practically, especially if the arrangement has been in place for a while — but you are dependent on goodwill rather than legal right. If you are facing persistent obstacles, getting even a simple CAO can transform your practical authority.
For travel: taking a child outside the UK without the consent of everyone with parental responsibility can constitute child abduction, even if your intentions are entirely innocent. If you are planning a holiday abroad and the birth parents are not cooperative, you will need to apply to court for permission. A solicitor can advise on the fastest route.
Support Organisations
Kinship carers are not alone, even when it feels that way. The following organisations offer free advice, advocacy, and community:
How Larkling Helps Kinship Carers
Larkling is built for family arrangements that do not fit a simple two-parent mould. For kinship carers, that means you can set up your family with the roles that actually exist — a grandparent carer, a birth parent with contact rights, a co-carer — rather than forcing your situation into a "parent 1 / parent 2" template.
The features most useful for kinship carers:
If you are ever asked by a social worker, reviewing officer, or court to demonstrate how contact has been managed, how the child has been responding, or what expenses have been incurred, a well-kept Larkling record gives you that answer in minutes rather than hours spent reconstructing emails and memory.
Built for Every Kind of Family
Kinship care, foster care, adoption — Larkling works for arrangements that don't fit the standard mould. Free to start. No jargon about "parent 1" and "parent 2".
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