Point 11/100 Which Sufficiency Gaps Are You Actually Trying to Fill?
Point 11/100 — The 100-Point Foster Carer Recruitment Review
Stage One of this Review examined the strategic operating system around Foster Carer Recruitment.
Now we move into Stage Two:
Market Intelligence, Audience & Reach.
But I am deliberately not beginning with audiences.
I am not beginning with Facebook.
I am not beginning with Google.
I am not beginning with demographics, postcodes, personas or advertising budgets.
I am beginning with the children.
Because before a fostering provider asks:
"Who should we market to?"
there is a much more important question:
"Which children and placement needs are we actually trying to recruit for?"
That distinction may sound obvious.
In practice, it changes almost everything.
MORE FOSTER CARERS IS NOT YET A RECRUITMENT SPECIFICATION
Imagine I walked into your organisation tomorrow and asked:
"How many more Foster Carers do you need?"
You might have an immediate answer.
Twenty.
Fifty.
One hundred.
Perhaps the figure appears in the business plan, sufficiency strategy or recruitment team's annual target.
Now I ask a different question:
"Twenty Foster Carers able to do what?"
That answer may be harder.
Do you need more households able and willing to care for:
- teenagers?
- brothers and sisters who need to remain together?
- children with disabilities?
- children requiring long-term or permanent fostering?
- children needing short breaks or respite?
- children with more complex needs?
- children from particular communities?
- children for whom maintaining local relationships, schools and networks is particularly important?
- children in particular towns or parts of your operating area?
Those are very different recruitment requirements.
And they potentially require very different recruitment strategies.
This is why I believe Foster Carer Recruitment needs to adopt a principle that would be entirely normal in almost any other professional recruitment environment:
Define the vacancy before you start sourcing the candidate.
You would not instruct a recruitment company to find you twenty employees without explaining the jobs that needed filling.
Yet fostering can sometimes start its recruitment conversation with:
"We need more Foster Carers."
That is the equivalent.
SUFFICIENCY IS ABOUT SUITABILITY, NOT SIMPLY VOLUME
This distinction is becoming increasingly important.
The Government and Ofsted's July 2026 work on children's social care sufficiency explicitly says that sufficiency is about more than the volume of provision. It includes whether places are suitable, available and in the right locations to meet children's needs. The research also links shortages of foster care capacity with younger children entering residential provision and with children being placed further from home where suitable specialist provision is unavailable locally.
That is the real recruitment problem.
It is not simply:
Do we have vacancies?
It is:
Do we have the right vacancy for this particular child?
Ofsted's latest annual fostering statistics illustrate why raw capacity figures can be misleading. At March 2025 England had 69,825 approved mainstream fostering places. Around 60% were filled, 17% were recorded as vacant and roughly one fifth were unavailable.
So a headline total of approved places does not automatically translate into usable placement choice.
The same logic applies locally.
You can apparently have available fostering capacity and simultaneously be unable to find an appropriate placement for a particular child.
That is a sufficiency gap.
And that is where Point 11 begins.
FOR A LOCAL AUTHORITY, START WITH THE CHILDREN YOU STRUGGLE TO PLACE
A Local Authority has the clearest starting point because it holds the sufficiency responsibility and the detailed intelligence about its children.
So I would start by looking backwards before attempting to recruit forwards.
Take the previous 12 or perhaps 24 months.
Which children were hardest to find appropriate fostering arrangements for?
Where did matching repeatedly become difficult?
Which searches took longest?
Which children were placed further from home than you would ideally have wanted?
Where were siblings separated because an appropriate household could not be found?
Where did residential care become the only available solution when family-based care might otherwise have been considered?
Where were placement teams repeatedly searching for essentially the same type of provision?
And what do your forward projections suggest is coming next?
Government's latest sufficiency analysis makes an important observation here: existing supply can itself influence placement decisions. Where foster care capacity is limited, commissioners reported children entering residential provision who might previously have been supported in foster care.
That should make recruitment leaders think differently.
Because if what we currently have determines what we can offer, recruitment becomes part of the mechanism through which we change future placement choice.
TURN THE SUFFICIENCY STRATEGY INTO A RECRUITMENT REQUIREMENT
This is where there can sometimes be a disconnect.
The sufficiency strategy may sit at one end of the organisation.
Commissioning intelligence somewhere else.
Placement data elsewhere.
Fostering operations somewhere else.
And the recruitment team receives:
"We need 40 new Foster Carers this year."
But what happened to all the intelligence between those two points?
The recruiter needs more than a number.
Imagine instead receiving something closer to:
We need to increase our ability to place sibling groups in these three areas.
Or:
We are repeatedly struggling to identify local family-based provision for adolescents aged 13–17.
Or:
Our short-break capacity is restricting our ability to support existing fostering households.
Or:
Children from this part of our authority are disproportionately being placed at distance.
That becomes actionable recruitment intelligence.
Now I can begin building a sourcing strategy.
THE IFA QUESTION IS DIFFERENT — BUT JUST AS IMPORTANT
An Independent Fostering Agency does not hold the Local Authority's statutory sufficiency duty.
But it operates inside the same placement market.
So the question becomes:
What are the Local Authorities we work with repeatedly struggling to find?
Look at the referrals you receive.
Not simply the referrals you convert.
The ones you cannot match may be more strategically useful.
What keeps arriving?
Which children repeatedly cannot be matched with your existing households?
What do commissioners ask for?
What do framework discussions reveal?
What patterns are visible across several Local Authorities rather than one?
Where is demand clearly outstripping supply?
The development of Regional Care Co-operatives makes this question even more significant. Government's current model expects RCCs to forecast demand, improve sufficiency and participate in reforming foster-carer recruitment and retention so that more children can remain in family settings and closer to home. Five additional RCCs were confirmed in July 2026, bringing the planned/current group to seven covering more than 100 Local Authorities.
That means providers increasingly need to understand not merely:
"Who can we recruit?"
but:
"What capacity will this regional system actually need?"
AN IFA DOES NOT HAVE TO TRY TO BE EVERYTHING TO EVERY COMMISSIONER
There is another important strategic decision here.
Suppose your intelligence identifies ten different gaps.
That does not automatically mean you should try to recruit for all ten.
Ask:
Which of these needs are we genuinely equipped to meet exceptionally well?
That includes recruitment — but it goes much further.
Do you have:
- the social work expertise?
- training?
- clinical or therapeutic support where required?
- appropriate supervision?
- carer support?
- respite arrangements?
- experience?
- commissioning relationships?
- organisational infrastructure?
- financial model?
There is little value in running a campaign telling prospective Foster Carers that you urgently need specialist carers if the rest of the organisation has not been designed to support them.
Sometimes the strategic answer should be:
"That is an important sufficiency gap — but it is not the gap we are best equipped to fill."
That is strategy.
THE SAME PRINCIPLE APPLIES TO LOCAL AUTHORITIES
Local Authorities should also distinguish between aspiration and operational capability.
If you want to recruit more Foster Carers for adolescents, sibling groups or children requiring more specialist support, what will those carers receive when they arrive?
Is the proposition strong enough?
Is the training appropriate?
Does your support model recognise the different demands involved?
Will the matching process use that capacity intelligently?
Will they have respite?
Will their supervising social worker have the right knowledge?
Recruitment cannot manufacture operational capability.
This is why Foster Carer Recruitment needs to be treated as an end-to-end organisational system rather than an isolated marketing activity.
THE GOVERNMENT'S 10,000-PLACE AMBITION MAKES THIS QUESTION MORE IMPORTANT, NOT LESS
The Government has committed to creating 10,000 additional foster care places by the end of this Parliament and is investing a further £88 million over two financial years in its fostering programme.
That is substantial ambition.
But 10,000 places will only deliver their full value if they add capacity that matches actual need.
The DfE itself now describes the problem in precisely those terms: there are not enough foster carers in the right places, with the right skills and support to meet the needs of all children who could benefit from foster care.
That word right matters.
Right carers.
Right skills.
Right support.
Right location.
Right children.
This is more sophisticated than a national numbers exercise.
It needs to become more sophisticated locally too.
HERE IS THE TEST
Ask your senior leadership team, commissioning team, placement team, operational fostering team and recruitment team the same question independently:
"Which five Foster Carer sufficiency gaps are we currently trying hardest to fill?"
Compare the answers.
If everybody produces essentially the same five priorities, excellent.
You have strategic alignment.
If commissioning gives one answer, placements another, fostering another and recruitment has never been given the information at all, you have discovered something important.
Not necessarily poor performance.
A system disconnect.
And that is precisely the sort of disconnect my Foster Carer Recruitment Diagnostic and Re-tune is designed to uncover: identify what is already working, locate where information or performance is being lost, understand why and make practical changes where they are required.
FOSTER — FIND STARTS HERE
This Point is also where the first element of my FOSTER System becomes particularly relevant.
F — Find.
It would be easy to interpret Find as:
Find prospective Foster Carers.
But there is a step before that.
Find the need.
Then we can find the people capable of meeting it.
That changes recruitment from:
"Who can we persuade to enquire about fostering?"
into something far more strategic:
"What fostering capacity do children need us to build — and where might the people capable of providing it be found?"
That is where Stage Two is going.
Because once we know what we need, Point 12 asks a different question:
If you could choose where those next Foster Carers lived, would you really scatter them randomly across your entire geography?
100 points.
10 stages.
One end-to-end examination of Foster Carer Recruitment.