7. August 2026

POINT 01/100 — Is Foster Carer Recruitment Really a Strategic Priority?

Article written by Rolfe Pearce MBA in the category Foster Carer Recruitment

THE 100-POINT FOSTER CARER RECRUITMENT REVIEW

POINT 01/100 — Is Foster Carer Recruitment Really a Strategic Priority?

Stage One: Strategy & Leadership

Almost every fostering provider I speak to will tell me the same thing:

“Recruiting more foster carers is one of our biggest priorities.”

I don't doubt the sincerity of that statement.

But I do think it deserves a second question:

What evidence would I see inside your organisation that demonstrates that Foster Carer Recruitment really is a strategic priority?

Because there is an important difference between something being important and something being managed strategically.

And that is where Point 01 of my 100-Point Foster Carer Recruitment Review begins.

The national picture makes this a strategic issue

This isn't simply a marketing challenge.

At 31 March 2025, England had 33,435 approved mainstream fostering households. The number had fallen by around 10% since 2021. There were 56,345 approved mainstream foster carers, 12% fewer than in 2021.

During 2024/25, 4,430 mainstream households joined fostering while 4,690 deregistered.

So despite all of the advertising, campaigns, recruitment events, social media activity and work being undertaken across the sector, more households were still leaving than joining.

The Government has now committed to creating up to 10,000 additional foster care places during this Parliament, accompanied by reforms to recruitment, assessment, regional coordination and foster carer support.

In July 2026, government research into children's social care sufficiency went further, identifying that a lack of available foster carers is associated with more children — including younger children — being placed in children's homes.

That moves Foster Carer Recruitment well beyond the boundaries of a recruitment team.

It is about sufficiency, placement choice, outcomes for children, service capacity and financial sustainability.

So the question for every fostering provider is reasonable:

If Foster Carer Recruitment is this important, is your organisation managing it accordingly?

The Strategic Priority Test

Imagine that I walked into your organisation tomorrow.

I haven't seen your recruitment strategy.

I haven't spoken to your recruitment team.

And nobody is allowed to tell me that Foster Carer Recruitment is a priority.

Could I work it out from what I saw?

That is the test.

Here are some of the things I would expect to find.

1. Senior leaders understand the recruitment position

Not simply:

“We need more carers.”

I would expect senior leaders to understand whether recruitment is performing, whether capacity is increasing or decreasing, where the principal risks are and whether the current approach is likely to deliver what the organisation needs.

Foster Carer Recruitment shouldn't become a subject for senior leadership attention only when enquiry numbers collapse.

If it is strategic, leadership should have regular visibility of it.

2. Recruitment is connected to sufficiency

Recruitment cannot sensibly operate in isolation from the children requiring placements.

It isn't simply about finding more foster carers.

The organisation needs the right fostering capacity, in the right places, able to meet the needs of the children requiring homes.

The Department for Education's latest work on sufficiency reinforces exactly this point: sufficiency is not simply about volume. Availability, workforce, suitability, geography and the needs of children interact.

We will examine this much more closely in Point 02 — Do You Know How Many Foster Carers You Actually Need?

For Point 01, the leadership question is simpler:

Is your Foster Carer Recruitment strategy genuinely connected to your wider sufficiency strategy?

3. Recruitment is treated as an end-to-end system

This is one of the biggest differences between my view of Foster Carer Recruitment and the way I frequently see it organised.

Recruitment does not end when somebody enquires.

Neither does it end when marketing generates a lead.

The prospective foster carer's experience continues through first contact, initial discussion, home visit, application, assessment, training, panel, approval and ultimately into fostering.

Government policy is increasingly recognising this.

The latest Fostering Recruitment and Retention Programme has explicitly moved towards a more integrated, end-to-end approach to recruiting, assessing and supporting foster carers, rather than treating recruitment simply as a front door.

That matters.

Because an organisation can have excellent marketing and still have poor recruitment outcomes.

It can generate hundreds of enquiries and lose too many of them later.

It can have an excellent recruiter and then create delays elsewhere in the process that the recruiter cannot control.

A strategic priority has to be managed across the whole system.

4. Important decisions are made quickly enough

Here is another test.

Your recruitment data identifies a problem.

Perhaps a campaign is no longer delivering.

Perhaps a particular part of the process is creating unnecessary delay.

Perhaps an audience isn't responding to your messaging.

Perhaps prospective carers repeatedly give you the same reason for withdrawing.

How quickly can your organisation change something?

Weeks?

Months?

Next financial year?

Strategic priority isn't demonstrated by how often something appears in a strategy document.

It is demonstrated by what happens when evidence tells you the strategy needs to change.

5. The organisation has invested more than money

One of the easiest answers to a recruitment problem is:

“We need to spend more on marketing.”

Sometimes that may be correct.

But money alone does not demonstrate strategic commitment.

I would also be looking for:

leadership time
recruitment expertise
appropriate systems and technology
good quality data
operational capacity
assessment capacity
staff development
community engagement
responsive decision-making
time to test and improve new approaches

You can have a substantial advertising budget and still have a weak recruitment operation.

Equally, a smaller provider can sometimes outperform a larger competitor because it understands its audience, responds faster and manages its recruitment journey better.

The question isn't simply:

“How much are we spending?”

It is:

“Have we created the conditions in which recruitment can succeed?”

One of the most important functions in the organisation

There is another reason I believe senior leaders should look at Foster Carer Recruitment differently.

For a Local Authority, increasing its own appropriate fostering capacity can reduce reliance on other, often more expensive, forms of provision and can give placement teams greater choice.

For an Independent Fostering Agency, recruiting and retaining suitable foster carers directly affects the organisation's future capacity to provide placements and therefore its sustainability and growth.

The commercial structures are different.

The fundamental principle is remarkably similar.

Without sufficient foster carers, neither organisation can deliver what it exists to deliver.

That makes recruitment more than a communications function.

It is a strategic capacity-building function.

Why I look at recruitment differently

My own approach to Foster Carer Recruitment comes from looking at it through several different lenses.

I have spent decades working in recruitment and recruitment systems, including sitting alongside senior managers in large organisations and seeing how successful businesses build, measure and improve the systems that bring the right people into an organisation.

I have studied recruitment systems through my MBA.

I have worked inside both Local Authority and Independent Fostering Agency environments.

And I have also experienced fostering from the other side — as a foster carer myself.

Those perspectives have led me repeatedly to the same conclusion:

Foster Carer Recruitment cannot be fixed by examining marketing alone.

You have to examine the entire operating system around it.

That is the reason I developed the 100-Point Foster Carer Recruitment Review.

So, is Foster Carer Recruitment really a strategic priority?

Here are five questions for senior leaders.

1. If your recruitment performance deteriorated significantly this month, how quickly would you know?

2. How frequently is Foster Carer Recruitment meaningfully discussed at senior leadership level — rather than simply reported?

3. Can your senior leadership team explain the principal risks currently affecting recruitment?

4. When the evidence suggests something isn't working, how quickly can the organisation change it?

5. If I removed the words “Foster Carer Recruitment is a priority” from your strategy, what evidence inside the organisation would prove that it still was?

That final question is perhaps the most important.

Because calling something a strategic priority is easy.

Building an organisation around delivering it is much harder.

Where FCR Specialist fits

Not every fostering provider has the time or specialist recruitment expertise available internally to step outside day-to-day delivery and examine the whole system objectively.

That is where I can help.

My Foster Carer Recruitment Diagnostic and Re-tune examines the recruitment journey end to end — strategy, marketing, enquiries, conversion, assessment, data, processes, community engagement, retention and leadership oversight.

The purpose isn't to arrive and tell your team what they are doing wrong.

It is to identify what is already working, find the areas where performance is being lost and help the organisation make practical improvements where they are needed.

Sometimes the answer is marketing.

Sometimes it isn't.

The important thing is knowing the difference.