POINT 02/100 Do You Know How Many Foster Carers You Actually Need?
Do You Know How Many Foster Carers You Actually Need?
Stage One — Strategy & Leadership
“We Need More Foster Carers” Is Not a Workforce Plan
Point 02 of The 100-Point Foster Carer Recruitment Review
There is a deceptively simple question at the heart of Foster Carer Recruitment:
How many foster carers do you actually need?
It sounds as though it should have a straightforward numerical answer.
In practice, it is one of the most important strategic questions in fostering.
“We need more foster carers” describes a problem.
It does not define the solution.
Neither does an arbitrary annual target such as 20 new households, a 10% increase in approvals, or “more than last year”.
To create a meaningful Foster Carer Recruitment strategy, a provider needs to understand not simply how many people it wants to recruit, but what fostering capacity it needs to create.
Those are not the same thing.
From headcount planning to capacity planning
In conventional workforce planning, organisations do not normally begin by asking:
How many people can recruitment find us?
They begin with the future operational requirement.
What work needs to be delivered?
What skills will be required?
Where will those skills be needed?
What existing capability is likely to be lost?
What growth is expected?
What spare capacity is required?
Only then does recruitment translate the operational requirement into a resourcing plan.
Foster Carer Recruitment should be approached in much the same way.
The objective is not the recruitment of households for its own sake.
The objective is the creation of sufficient, appropriate and sustainable fostering capacity.
That distinction has profound implications for recruitment strategy.
The apparent fostering vacancy paradox
At first sight, fostering statistics can appear contradictory.
There may be thousands of approved fostering places recorded as vacant, while the sector simultaneously talks about a shortage of foster carers.
But this apparent contradiction exposes the weakness of treating fostering capacity as one national number.
A vacancy may exist but be:
- in the wrong geographical area
- unsuitable for the age of the child
- unable to accommodate siblings
- inappropriate for the child's needs
- temporarily unavailable
- affected by the needs of another child already living in the household
- approved for a type of placement that does not match current demand
So the strategic question is not simply:
How many vacancies do we have?
It is:
How much appropriate, usable and accessible capacity do we have for the children who require it?
That is a much more meaningful measure.
Stock, flow and effective capacity
I find it useful to think about fostering capacity in three different ways.
STOCK
This is the approved population:
the number of approved households, approved carers and approved places.
Stock tells us the nominal size of the system.
It does not tell us how much of that system is usable today.
FLOW
This is movement through the system:
new approvals, transfers, deregistrations, retirements, changes of approval and periods of unavailability.
A provider can therefore recruit significant numbers of new households while its overall capacity remains static or even falls.
EFFECTIVE CAPACITY
This is the part of the approved system that can realistically meet current demand.
It takes account of:
availability, geography, approval range, skills, household circumstances, matching considerations and the needs of children already in placement.
For recruitment planning, effective capacity may be the most important of the three.
Replacement demand comes before growth
This is standard workforce-planning logic.
If an organisation needs 100 employees next year but expects 15 to leave, it does not recruit only for planned growth.
It also recruits for attrition.
Fostering providers face exactly the same issue.
If you need ten additional households but expect eight existing households to deregister, retire, transfer or reduce their availability, your true recruitment requirement is not ten.
You need to replace the eight before you begin creating ten additional units of capacity.
That means headline recruitment targets can easily be misleading.
Ten new households combined with ten households leaving is not ten households of growth.
It is replacement.
Not all fostering capacity is interchangeable
This is perhaps the most important conceptual point.
A fostering place is not a commodity.
The value of a particular vacancy depends on whether it can meet the needs of a particular child.
Recruitment need therefore has to be segmented.
For example:
Age
Where does the service experience the greatest shortage?
Sibling capacity
How many households can realistically keep brothers and sisters together?
Complex or specialist need
Which capabilities are repeatedly requested but unavailable?
Permanence
Does the provider have the right balance between temporary and permanent fostering?
Short breaks and respite
Is there sufficient capacity to support existing foster families as well as new placements?
The point is not that every provider should recruit for every possible need.
It is that recruitment should be informed by the needs the provider has strategically decided to meet.
Geography is part of the recruitment specification
Location matters.
For a Local Authority, fostering capacity in one part of an area may do little to relieve a shortage somewhere else.
For an IFA, a highly capable foster carer may still be difficult to utilise if they are located outside the areas from which the agency receives viable referrals.
This should influence:
- advertising boundaries
- community engagement
- local partnerships
- website SEO
- events
- referral strategies
- recruiter activity
- local office or hub decisions
A provider can therefore hit a county-wide recruitment target while doing very little to solve a highly localised sufficiency problem.
Twenty new households may look successful on a report.
If most of them are in areas where capacity already exists, the operational benefit may be considerably smaller.
You need some spare capacity
Another mistake is assuming that maximum utilisation equals maximum efficiency.
It does not.
If every theoretically available fostering place were occupied all of the time, placement teams would have almost no choice.
Good matching requires options.
Sibling groups may require multiple vacancies in one household.
Carers need respite.
Household circumstances change.
Emergency placements arise.
Children already living in a household affect future matching.
So the strategic requirement is not simply enough places to accommodate today's children.
It is enough appropriate capacity to accommodate children well.
That means resilience has to be built into recruitment planning.
A simple capacity-planning model
Rather than beginning with an annual recruitment number, I would encourage fostering providers to think about four components.
1. REPLACEMENT REQUIREMENT
Capacity required to replace likely losses from the existing foster carer population.
2. GROWTH REQUIREMENT
Additional capacity required because demand exceeds current supply.
3. REBALANCING REQUIREMENT
Capacity needed to correct weaknesses in geography, skills, approval range or placement type.
4. RESILIENCE REQUIREMENT
Additional available capacity required to create choice, provide respite and cope with fluctuations in demand.
Together, these create a much more useful recruitment requirement.
Local Authority and IFA perspectives
The two sectors should not necessarily arrive at their recruitment targets in the same way.
For a Local Authority
The starting point should be the needs of its children.
Relevant indicators may include:
- children entering care
- age and needs profiles
- external fostering use
- residential placements
- placement distance
- sibling separations
- internal placement requests that cannot be met
- existing foster carer availability
- projected deregistrations
- geographic gaps
For an Independent Fostering Agency
The starting point is more likely to include:
- commissioner referral patterns
- requests the agency cannot currently match
- reasons for declining referrals
- geography
- utilisation of existing carers
- void patterns
- future commissioning requirements
- strategic specialisms
- growth objectives
Different operating models.
Same planning principle.
Know what capacity you are trying to create before designing the recruitment activity intended to create it.
Recruitment marketing should follow the requirement
If the organisation needs:
more carers for teenagers,
in two specific geographical areas,
with capacity to accommodate siblings,
then that should materially affect recruitment.
It should influence:
who is targeted,
what proposition is presented,
where campaigns run,
which foster carers appear in content,
where community engagement happens,
what search terms are pursued,
what stories are told,
and how recruitment resources are deployed.
If the recruitment team is simply being told:
“Get more enquiries,”
the strategic requirement has not travelled far enough through the organisation.
Senior leaders should be able to see the gap
Management information should show the relationship between required capacity and current capacity.
I would want senior leaders to know:
What do we need?
What do we currently have?
What is genuinely available?
What are we likely to lose?
Where are the gaps?
What are we recruiting against those gaps?
And is the gap closing?
That is a very different management conversation from:
“We had 62 enquiries this month.”
Enquiries matter.
But they are several steps removed from the underlying strategic requirement.
Ten leadership questions
Before approving the next annual Foster Carer Recruitment target, I would ask:
- What precise net additional capacity does the organisation require?
- How was that requirement calculated?
- What future losses are built into it?
- Which children are currently hardest to place?
- What are the most important capability gaps?
- Where are the geographic gaps?
- How much approved capacity is genuinely available today?
- Why is existing capacity unused or unavailable?
- Does the recruitment strategy directly target those gaps?
- If the organisation achieves its headline recruitment target, will the sufficiency problem actually be smaller?
That final question is perhaps the most important.
Because it is entirely possible to hit a recruitment target without solving the problem the target was created to solve.
From Point 02 to Point 03
Point 02 establishes the destination.
Only when we know the capacity we actually need should we begin designing the recruitment funnel required to deliver it.
That leads directly to:
POINT 03 — Has Your Recruitment Target Been Built Backwards?
If the organisation needs 20 particular types of new fostering households, how many assessments need to begin?
How many applications?
How many home visits?
How many qualified enquiries?
And ultimately, how many people need to become aware of the organisation?
That is where strategic need becomes recruitment mathematics.
Where FCR Specialist fits
My Foster Carer Recruitment Diagnostic and Re-tune examines whether recruitment activity is genuinely aligned with what the service needs.
That can include looking at:
the recruitment target,
existing fostering capacity,
geography,
carer profile,
recruitment messaging,
pipeline performance,
assessment capability,
and the management information connecting them.
The objective is not simply to recommend recruiting more foster carers.
It is to help answer a much more useful question: