Issue - meetings

Background:

This report presented the Annual Fostering Report for 2025–2026 and provided the Cabinet with an overview of the performance, activity, achievements and challenges of the Medway Fostering Service during the reporting period. The report outlined progress made in strengthening fostering sufficiency, improving permanence planning, supporting foster carers, and responding to increasing demand for kinship care services.

The report highlighted positive developments, including increased foster carer approvals, improvements in permanence planning, expansion of Mockingbird Constellations, strengthened governance arrangements, and Medway's successful inclusion as one of seven national Department for Education Kinship Allowance Pilot authorities. It also identified the ongoing challenges relating to placement sufficiency, recruitment and retention of foster carers, and increasing complexity of children's needs.

The recently published national level report into the increased risk of death amongst care leavers and the risk of them feeling abandoned when they turned 18 was highlighted, along with the need for ongoing support.

The report also presented the Annual Private Fostering Report for 2025–2026, that outlined the safeguarding role of the fostering service fulfilling its statutory responsibilities in relation to Private Fostering arrangements.

The report had previously been considered by the Children and Young People Overview and Scrutiny Committee on 12 August 2026, and the Cabinet thanked the Committee for its comments which were set out in an addendum report within Cabinet Supplementary Agenda No.1.

Reasons:

The National Minimum Standards for Fostering (2011) require that Fostering Agencies report the activity of the fostering service to its governing bodies.