Point 05/100: Does Everyone Agree What Success Looks Like?
100 points.
10 stages.
Rolfe Pearce MBA An end-to-end examination of Foster Carer Recruitment.
Imagine I walked into your organisation tomorrow.
I speak first to your marketing team and ask:
“How is Foster Carer Recruitment going?”
They tell me campaign reach has increased, website traffic is improving and the latest advertising campaign is performing well.
I speak to recruitment.
They tell me enquiries are ahead of last year.
I speak to assessment.
They tell me assessments are progressing and several families are approaching panel.
Finance tells me the cost per enquiry is within budget.
Senior management tells me how many households have been approved.
Everything sounds positive.
Then I ask one more question:
“Have we actually created the fostering capacity the organisation needs?”
And suddenly the answer becomes less certain.
That is the subject of Point 05.
Because before an organisation can properly measure Foster Carer Recruitment, everyone involved needs to agree what success actually means.
Different teams can have different versions of success
This is not particularly unusual.
Organisations divide work into functions for very sensible reasons.
Marketing markets.
Recruiters recruit.
Social workers assess.
Finance controls budgets.
Managers manage.
But that functional structure can create an unintended problem.
Each part of the organisation begins judging performance according to the part of the process it controls.
Marketing may understandably focus on impressions, clicks, engagement, website traffic and leads.
Recruitment may focus on enquiries, information sessions, Initial Home Visits or applications.
Assessment may focus on assessment workloads, completions and panel dates.
Finance may focus on expenditure, cost per enquiry or cost per approval.
Senior leaders may focus primarily on the number of new approvals.
None of those measures is wrong.
The problem begins when one of them becomes the definition of success for the entire Foster Carer Recruitment operation.
Enquiries are not the objective
I have spent most of my professional life in recruitment.
One lesson applies whether you are recruiting engineers, senior executives, temporary workers or foster carers:
A recruitment pipeline only has value if it eventually produces what the organisation actually needs.
Generating enquiries matters enormously.
But an enquiry is an input into the recruitment system, not its ultimate outcome.
The same applies to reach, clicks, event attendance and social-media engagement.
They can tell you whether parts of your recruitment activity are working.
They cannot, by themselves, tell you whether Foster Carer Recruitment is successful.
There is another important warning here.
Ofsted's analysis of recruitment data has previously noted that even the apparently straightforward measure of an “initial enquiry” has had inconsistent interpretation across providers, making headline enquiry numbers difficult to compare without understanding exactly what has been counted.
That is a powerful example of why organisations need clarity about both the definition and the purpose of the measures they use.
Applications are not the objective either
Moving more people from enquiry to application is clearly important.
But applications are another stage in the journey.
The latest published Ofsted statistics show the scale of what can happen beyond that point.
During 2024–25, 8,290 mainstream fostering applications were received. Of the 5,370 applications completed during the year, 2,050 were approved, while 3,290 were withdrawn and 30 rejected.
So simply celebrating application volume tells a senior manager relatively little about the ultimate result.
It tells you that people entered a particular stage of the system.
What happened afterwards matters just as much.
Surely approvals are success?
They are certainly much closer.
A new approved fostering household is a significant organisational achievement.
But even here we need to be careful.
Suppose an organisation approves ten new households.
On the surface, that sounds excellent.
But what if the organisation needed carers for teenagers and most of those households are only able to consider very young children?
What if its greatest shortage is in one part of its geography and nearly all the new carers live somewhere else?
What if several households need a considerable period before taking their first placement?
What if approval numbers rise but existing carers leave at the same or a faster rate?
The headline number alone cannot answer those questions.
Ofsted reported 56,345 approved mainstream foster carers in England at March 2025, 12% fewer than in 2021. It also reported 69,825 approved mainstream fostering places, but around 60% were filled, 17% were vacant and approximately one in five were unavailable.
That distinction matters.
Approved capacity and genuinely usable capacity are not automatically the same thing.
Success has to connect to the needs of children
This is where Foster Carer Recruitment must reconnect with the wider purpose of the organisation.
The Department for Education and Ofsted's July 2026 work on children's social care sufficiency makes an important point: sufficiency is not simply about the volume of provision. It also depends upon whether provision is suitable, where it is located and whether it can meet children's needs.
The analysis also found an association between limited foster carer availability and greater use of residential provision for younger children.
That gives us a much stronger definition of Foster Carer Recruitment success.
It is not:
How much advertising did we do?
It is not:
How many enquiries did we receive?
It is not even simply:
How many foster carers did we approve?
The organisational question is:
Did our recruitment system create more of the fostering capacity we actually need?
From departmental KPIs to one organisational outcome
This does not mean abandoning departmental measures.
Quite the opposite.
Marketing still needs to know whether campaigns are reaching people.
Recruitment still needs enquiry and conversion information.
Assessment managers still need to understand applications and assessments.
Finance still needs to know what recruitment costs.
Those measures help each part of the system understand its contribution.
But they should all point in the same direction.
Think of it as a chain.
Marketing activity
→ appropriate interest
→ qualified enquiries
→ applications
→ assessment
→ approvals
→ available fostering capacity
→ better ability to meet children's needs.
Success at the beginning of that chain matters only because it contributes towards success at the end.
Here is the test
Try this exercise at your next senior management or recruitment meeting.
Give everyone a blank piece of paper.
Ask them to complete this sentence independently:
“By the end of this year, we will know our Foster Carer Recruitment strategy has been successful if…”
Do not give them the answer.
Ask the Director.
Ask the Registered Manager.
Ask recruitment.
Ask marketing.
Ask assessment.
Ask finance.
Then compare the responses.
If one says “we generated 1,000 enquiries”, another says “we approved 20 households”, another says “we stayed within marketing budget” and another says “we increased our social-media reach”, you have learned something important.
Those may all be useful measures.
But the organisation has not yet established one shared definition of success.
What might a shared definition look like?
The precise answer should be different for every provider because the need established in Points 02 and 03 of this Review should determine it.
But conceptually it might look something like this:
Our Foster Carer Recruitment operation is successful when it creates and sustains sufficient additional fostering capacity, with the capability, geography and genuine availability required to meet the needs the organisation has identified.
Beneath that shared outcome, individual departments can then understand what contribution they make.
Marketing does not stop measuring marketing.
Recruitment does not stop measuring enquiries.
Assessment does not stop measuring assessments.
Finance does not stop examining cost.
The difference is that everyone knows what those measures are ultimately trying to achieve.
Local Authorities and IFAs may express the outcome differently
For a Local Authority, successful recruitment should ultimately contribute to local fostering sufficiency: having enough appropriate family-based options to meet the needs of children for whom the authority is responsible.
For an Independent Fostering Agency, the organisational objective may be expressed differently. Recruitment needs to create a sustainable population of carers whose skills, location, preferences and availability align with the needs being referred by commissioning authorities.
The commercial structures are different.
The underlying recruitment principle is the same.
Recruitment success is determined by organisational need, not simply recruitment activity.
Why leadership needs to settle this first
Point 04 of this Review asked:
Who actually owns Foster Carer Recruitment?
The conclusion was that individual departments can own stages, but the organisation must own the outcome.
Point 05 takes the next logical step.
If the organisation owns the outcome, leadership must define that outcome clearly enough for everyone else to work towards it.
Otherwise different teams can optimise different parts of the process without anyone noticing that the whole system is underperforming.
This does not require an enormous new reporting structure.
That comes later in this Review.
It starts with something much simpler:
Agreement.
Agreement about what the organisation needs.
Agreement about what successful recruitment must produce.
Agreement about how each team contributes.
And agreement that activity and outcome are not the same thing.
One final question
Imagine that every Foster Carer Recruitment KPI currently reported to your senior leadership team turned green tomorrow.
Would that automatically mean you had enough of the right foster carers available for the children you need to place?
If the answer is no, ask yourself:
What are those KPIs actually measuring?
Because everyone can be hitting their numbers.
And the organisation can still be missing the point.
The 100-Point Foster Carer Recruitment Review
Point 05/100 — Does Everyone Agree What Success Looks Like?
Next:
Point 06/100 — Is Your Recruitment Plan Actually a Plan?
Because once everyone agrees what success looks like, the next question is whether there is actually a coherent plan capable of delivering it.
Point 05/100: Does Everyone Agree What Success Looks Like?
100 points.
10 stages.
One end-to-end examination of Foster Carer Recruitment.
Imagine I walked into your organisation tomorrow.
I speak first to your marketing team and ask:
“How is Foster Carer Recruitment going?”
They tell me campaign reach has increased, website traffic is improving and the latest advertising campaign is performing well.
I speak to recruitment.
They tell me enquiries are ahead of last year.
I speak to assessment.
They tell me assessments are progressing and several families are approaching panel.
Finance tells me the cost per enquiry is within budget.
Senior management tells me how many households have been approved.
Everything sounds positive.
Then I ask one more question:
“Have we actually created the fostering capacity the organisation needs?”
And suddenly the answer becomes less certain.
That is the subject of Point 05.
Because before an organisation can properly measure Foster Carer Recruitment, everyone involved needs to agree what success actually means.
Different teams can have different versions of success
This is not particularly unusual.
Organisations divide work into functions for very sensible reasons.
Marketing markets.
Recruiters recruit.
Social workers assess.
Finance controls budgets.
Managers manage.
But that functional structure can create an unintended problem.
Each part of the organisation begins judging performance according to the part of the process it controls.
Marketing may understandably focus on impressions, clicks, engagement, website traffic and leads.
Recruitment may focus on enquiries, information sessions, Initial Home Visits or applications.
Assessment may focus on assessment workloads, completions and panel dates.
Finance may focus on expenditure, cost per enquiry or cost per approval.
Senior leaders may focus primarily on the number of new approvals.
None of those measures is wrong.
The problem begins when one of them becomes the definition of success for the entire Foster Carer Recruitment operation.
Enquiries are not the objective
I have spent most of my professional life in recruitment.
One lesson applies whether you are recruiting engineers, senior executives, temporary workers or foster carers:
A recruitment pipeline only has value if it eventually produces what the organisation actually needs.
Generating enquiries matters enormously.
But an enquiry is an input into the recruitment system, not its ultimate outcome.
The same applies to reach, clicks, event attendance and social-media engagement.
They can tell you whether parts of your recruitment activity are working.
They cannot, by themselves, tell you whether Foster Carer Recruitment is successful.
There is another important warning here.
Ofsted's analysis of recruitment data has previously noted that even the apparently straightforward measure of an “initial enquiry” has had inconsistent interpretation across providers, making headline enquiry numbers difficult to compare without understanding exactly what has been counted.
That is a powerful example of why organisations need clarity about both the definition and the purpose of the measures they use.
Applications are not the objective either
Moving more people from enquiry to application is clearly important.
But applications are another stage in the journey.
The latest published Ofsted statistics show the scale of what can happen beyond that point.
During 2024–25, 8,290 mainstream fostering applications were received. Of the 5,370 applications completed during the year, 2,050 were approved, while 3,290 were withdrawn and 30 rejected.
So simply celebrating application volume tells a senior manager relatively little about the ultimate result.
It tells you that people entered a particular stage of the system.
What happened afterwards matters just as much.
Surely approvals are success?
They are certainly much closer.
A new approved fostering household is a significant organisational achievement.
But even here we need to be careful.
Suppose an organisation approves ten new households.
On the surface, that sounds excellent.
But what if the organisation needed carers for teenagers and most of those households are only able to consider very young children?
What if its greatest shortage is in one part of its geography and nearly all the new carers live somewhere else?
What if several households need a considerable period before taking their first placement?
What if approval numbers rise but existing carers leave at the same or a faster rate?
The headline number alone cannot answer those questions.
Ofsted reported 56,345 approved mainstream foster carers in England at March 2025, 12% fewer than in 2021. It also reported 69,825 approved mainstream fostering places, but around 60% were filled, 17% were vacant and approximately one in five were unavailable.
That distinction matters.
Approved capacity and genuinely usable capacity are not automatically the same thing.
Success has to connect to the needs of children
This is where Foster Carer Recruitment must reconnect with the wider purpose of the organisation.
The Department for Education and Ofsted's July 2026 work on children's social care sufficiency makes an important point: sufficiency is not simply about the volume of provision. It also depends upon whether provision is suitable, where it is located and whether it can meet children's needs.
The analysis also found an association between limited foster carer availability and greater use of residential provision for younger children.
That gives us a much stronger definition of Foster Carer Recruitment success.
It is not:
How much advertising did we do?
It is not:
How many enquiries did we receive?
It is not even simply:
How many foster carers did we approve?
The organisational question is:
Did our recruitment system create more of the fostering capacity we actually need?
From departmental KPIs to one organisational outcome
This does not mean abandoning departmental measures.
Quite the opposite.
Marketing still needs to know whether campaigns are reaching people.
Recruitment still needs enquiry and conversion information.
Assessment managers still need to understand applications and assessments.
Finance still needs to know what recruitment costs.
Those measures help each part of the system understand its contribution.
But they should all point in the same direction.
Think of it as a chain.
Marketing activity
→ appropriate interest
→ qualified enquiries
→ applications
→ assessment
→ approvals
→ available fostering capacity
→ better ability to meet children's needs.
Success at the beginning of that chain matters only because it contributes towards success at the end.
Here is the test
Try this exercise at your next senior management or recruitment meeting.
Give everyone a blank piece of paper.
Ask them to complete this sentence independently:
“By the end of this year, we will know our Foster Carer Recruitment strategy has been successful if…”
Do not give them the answer.
Ask the Director.
Ask the Registered Manager.
Ask recruitment.
Ask marketing.
Ask assessment.
Ask finance.
Then compare the responses.
If one says “we generated 1,000 enquiries”, another says “we approved 20 households”, another says “we stayed within marketing budget” and another says “we increased our social-media reach”, you have learned something important.
Those may all be useful measures.
But the organisation has not yet established one shared definition of success.
What might a shared definition look like?
The precise answer should be different for every provider because the need established in Points 02 and 03 of this Review should determine it.
But conceptually it might look something like this:
Our Foster Carer Recruitment operation is successful when it creates and sustains sufficient additional fostering capacity, with the capability, geography and genuine availability required to meet the needs the organisation has identified.
Beneath that shared outcome, individual departments can then understand what contribution they make.
Marketing does not stop measuring marketing.
Recruitment does not stop measuring enquiries.
Assessment does not stop measuring assessments.
Finance does not stop examining cost.
The difference is that everyone knows what those measures are ultimately trying to achieve.
Local Authorities and IFAs may express the outcome differently
For a Local Authority, successful recruitment should ultimately contribute to local fostering sufficiency: having enough appropriate family-based options to meet the needs of children for whom the authority is responsible.
For an Independent Fostering Agency, the organisational objective may be expressed differently. Recruitment needs to create a sustainable population of carers whose skills, location, preferences and availability align with the needs being referred by commissioning authorities.
The commercial structures are different.
The underlying recruitment principle is the same.
Recruitment success is determined by organisational need, not simply recruitment activity.
Why leadership needs to settle this first
Point 04 of this Review asked:
Who actually owns Foster Carer Recruitment?
The conclusion was that individual departments can own stages, but the organisation must own the outcome.
Point 05 takes the next logical step.
If the organisation owns the outcome, leadership must define that outcome clearly enough for everyone else to work towards it.
Otherwise different teams can optimise different parts of the process without anyone noticing that the whole system is underperforming.
This does not require an enormous new reporting structure.
That comes later in this Review.
It starts with something much simpler:
Agreement.
Agreement about what the organisation needs.
Agreement about what successful recruitment must produce.
Agreement about how each team contributes.
And agreement that activity and outcome are not the same thing.
One final question
Imagine that every Foster Carer Recruitment KPI currently reported to your senior leadership team turned green tomorrow.
Would that automatically mean you had enough of the right foster carers available for the children you need to place?
If the answer is no, ask yourself:
What are those KPIs actually measuring?
Because everyone can be hitting their numbers.
And the organisation can still be missing the point.
The 100-Point Foster Carer Recruitment Review
Point 05/100 — Does Everyone Agree What Success Looks Like?
Next:
Point 06/100 — Is Your Recruitment Plan Actually a Plan?
Because once everyone agrees what success looks like, the next question is whether there is actually a coherent plan capable of delivering it.