Chanice's 'Weekender' who kept showing up

It takes a village to raise a child, or so the proverb goes. A new approach to fostering is embracing that idea

It takes a village to raise a child, or so the proverb goes. A new approach to fostering is embracing that idea

For Chanice, the difference began with weekends. Not a single life-changing moment, but ordinary time spent with someone who kept coming back. There were trips to the theatre, new places to visit, things to learn and a relationship that grew slowly into something enduring.

“Having a Weekender is different from having a parent,” she tells Positive News magazine. “For me it was about having someone who kept showing up, who took me to new places, taught me things, introduced me to theatre and believed I could do more. When you are in care, people can come and go, so having a consistent adult who is still there years later really matters. [Carer] Sara became part of my life, not just for a weekend, but for the long term.”

That idea – that a child in care may need not only a foster home, but a wider circle of adults who can stay close over time – is at the heart of a new effort to rethink fostering in England.

The government has launched a £12.4m Fostering Innovation Fund, designed to help modernise foster care and make it more accessible to a wider range of people. It forms part of a wider government pledge to create 10,000 additional foster care places during this parliament, amid concern that the number of approved fostering households has fallen in recent years.

At the end of March 2025 there were 42,190 fostering households in England, with numbers having declined steadily since 2021, according to Ofsted. The number of mainstream local authority fostering households has fallen particularly sharply in recent years, while charities and fostering organisations have warned that too many children cannot currently be matched with the right family, in the right place, at the right time.

The decline is less a story of people caring less, and more a sign that the system has made it too hard for many of the right people to step forward, and too hard for some existing carers to stay.

The new fund is not simply about asking more people to do an already difficult job. Its ambition is to change who feels fostering is possible for them in the first place.

The new approach aims to make fostering more flexible. Image: Pressmaster/Shutterstock

For years, fostering has often been imagined through a narrow picture of family life, built around a couple, a spare room and at least one adult with enough time to provide care in a fairly traditional way. That model will continue to be right for many children and many carers, but it does not reflect the full range of households, working patterns and support networks that exist now.

The new approach is intended to test ways of making fostering more flexible, without weakening safeguarding or lowering the level of care children receive. That could mean supporting carers to make better use of the space they already have, creating stronger local clusters of support around foster families, or developing models in which people offer regular weekend care or respite, building long-term relationships with children while supporting full-time carers.