Children in kinship care are being pushed to breaking point. Change can't come soon enough

When Poppy moved in with her gran as an eight-year-old, she “knew she was safe”.

“My mum wasn’t able to look after me when I was a child,” she recalls. “I had seen and experienced things no child should at such a young age.”

The young Poppy no longer felt frightened about what might happen on a given day. But navigating her new situation was still “painful, complicated and difficult”, and her grandma – who gave up work to care for her – struggled to make ends meet.

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“She would do anything for me, and she made it work no matter what… at that young age I felt like a burden,” Poppy said.

Across England and Wales, there are 141,000 children being raised by a relative or family friend because their parents can’t care for them. This is roughly three times the number living with unrelated foster carers.

But these ‘kinship children’ don’t qualify for the emotional and financial support provided to children in other forms of care.

Now 23, Poppy is campaigning to change that. Supported by the charity Kinship, she penned a powerful open letter urging the government to provide ‘recognition and support’ to families like hers.

“Children in kinship care have been forgotten about for too long,” she says.

The letter – signed by rapper Professor Green, who was also raised by his grandmother – coincides with the release of new research into the emotional wellbeing of kinship children.

It reveals that half (51%) of kinship carers believe that the child in their care had mental health difficulties. A similar amount (48%) felt the child in their care’s adverse experiences had impacted their ability to cope in education. Only four in 10 (43%) said their children had ever accessed any emotional or therapeutic support.

Children in residential, foster, and kinship care are far more likely to have experienced Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) – “highly stressful and potentially traumatic events or situations that occur during childhood and/or adolescence,” according to the NHS. 

In a 2022 study, researchers found a 30-fold increase in learning or behaviour problems between children with high ACE scores (four or more) compared to children with no ACEs.

“The experiences we have early in our lives and particularly in our early childhoods have a huge impact on how we grow and develop,” NHS England reports. 

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It’s right that governments and local authorities want to prioritise family-first options, says Dr Lucy Peake, CEO of Kinship. But children and their carers aren’t being supported.

“Any child that cannot be raised by their parents has experienced unimaginable trauma at a very young age,” Dr Peake said.

“They’ve been separated from their parents and perhaps siblings, possibly as a result of abuse, neglect or bereavement. A relative or family friend steps up, offering the child a loving and stable home. It doesn’t make their trauma vanish. Their health and development will continue to be impacted unless they get the specialist support they need.”

Ongoing, complex, family dynamics can compound these emotional difficulties – something Poppy experienced first-hand.

“I felt guilty sometimes – my mum would ask when I was going back to live with her – I knew it wasn’t what was best for me, but it’s hard, when you’re just a kid, managing conversations like that,” she said. “There was no one to mediate between us, or counsel me through that.”

Kinship families usually receive no support to manage relationships with parents – and as a kinship child, Poppy also didn’t qualify for additional therapy. At 17, she “hit crisis point”.

“If we had been offered counselling, advice and support back then, I think it would have reduced my anxiety and helped me cope in school and at home,” she recalled. “People don’t understand kinship care and it means you’re always having to fight against systems that don’t have the space for you.”

Financial concerns put more pressure on kinship families

Unlike foster carers, most kinship carers also don’t receive any financial support to look after the child they have taken in. If they do, it is regularly means-tested, pushing thousands into needless poverty.

Kinship’s October 2023 report Breaking Point: Kinship Carers in Crisis found that more than a quarter (26%) of kinship carers surveyed said they are ‘facing severe challenges’ or ‘at crisis point,’ while one in 10 said their household had run out of food within the previous two weeks and couldn’t afford to buy more.

“Carers end up lying awake at night wondering if the child that they love would be better off in the care system,” the new Kinship report warns.

Unlike adopters, kinship carers have no statutory right to paid leave (like maternity leave or adoption leave) to settle children into their homes. These strains take their toll. As a child, Poppy worried that her gran and her could “afford our basic needs”.

“My gran obviously hadn’t known she was going to be raising another child so she didn’t have money put aside for school uniforms or sports kits or any of the other things I needed,” recalls Poppy.

“I managed to get a full scholarship to a local private school but in a way that made things harder – everything there cost so much more; books, hockey kit, school trips. I don’t know how we managed it really, but we just about scraped by. It was stressful.”

The first ever National Kinship Care Strategy, published by the then-Tory government in December 2023, committed to trialling financial allowances for kinship carers, on a par with the minimum foster carer payments. But the trial includes just eight local authorities.

Kinship is calling on the new Labour government to extend this across the country, overhauling the financial support offered to Kinship carers.

The public are increasingly aware of kinship care. The gymnast Simone Biles was a kinship child. Liberal Democrat Leader Ed Davey was raised by his grandparents after his mother passed away, and spoke at length about it during the election campaign.

In an exclusive interview with the Big Issue he explained why his party pledged to make care-experience a protected characteristic.

There is “huge potential” for the new Labour government to “rewrite the future for thousands of children in kinship care,” said Dr Peake.

According to Poppy, it cannot come soon enough.

“I don’t want any of the more than 141,000 children in kinship care in England and Wales to go without the support they need,” she said. “Or see the hardships their grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other family members are having to go through having stepped up to raise them. And I know some just can’t make it work. This must be heartbreaking.”

You can read Poppy’s open letter and sign the #ValueOurLove petition here.

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