Black Foster Carers Alliance is building the evidence base that Black and Global Majority children, foster carers and families in the UK have never had. Research is not a side project for us. It is how we turn what carers and children tell us every day into something the sector cannot ignore.
Asking every part of the UK fostering system the questions about race and culture that are not routinely asked.
Looking at how other countries hold kinship, community and cultural identity at the centre of children’s care.
Treating what carers, families and care-experienced people know as evidence in its own right.
We were founded by people who have fostered, and who have sat in the meetings where decisions about Black and Global Majority children are made. Time and again we watched good practice argued for on the strength of one person’s experience, and lost, because there was no data to stand behind it.
So we started gathering it ourselves. Our research programme exists to give carers, social workers, commissioners and policymakers something firmer to work with than assumption: a picture of who is fostering, who is waiting, what is offered, and what happens to children whose culture, faith and heritage are treated as an afterthought.
We are not a research institute. We are a national organisation doing the counting that has not been done, alongside the training, mentoring and carer support we deliver every week, and feeding what we learn straight back into practice.
Not because the questions do not matter, but because for the most part nobody has been counting. Ethnicity is recorded inconsistently across the UK, often in categories too broad to be meaningful, and rarely joined up with anything about placement, matching or outcome. Basic questions still have no reliable national answer:
What is not measured cannot be commissioned for, funded, inspected or improved. The absence of data is not a technical problem sitting in a spreadsheet. It lands on people.
Social workers, supervising social workers and commissioners are asked to make decisions about identity, matching and support without a national picture to draw on. Recruitment strategies are written without knowing which communities are being reached. Panels weigh cultural need against availability with no benchmark for what good looks like. Where a team does get it right, there is no shared evidence base to help anyone else learn from it, so the same ground is broken over and over.
Black and Global Majority carers who raise concerns about culturally unsafe practice are told their experience is not representative, because there is nothing to hold it against. Their expertise is received as opinion rather than evidence. Barriers in assessment, allegations, support and training go unexamined, and carers leave fostering without anyone recording that they did, or asking why.
Hair, food, faith, language and heritage get framed as preferences rather than as part of a child’s safety and sense of self. Children carry the cost of that in identity, belonging and self-worth, often long after they leave care. Because no one is counting, no one is accountable, and the harm shows up years later as something nobody predicted.
Three strands, all pointed at the same gap.
Our annual publication, built from Freedom of Information requests to local authorities across the UK, covering children in care, placements, the approved carer workforce and recruitment strategy. Published each Black History Month, as a full report and in an Easy Read version, so the evidence belongs to communities and not only to commissioners.
Report page coming soon
An international study of how children’s social care works in Ghana, the United States and the Netherlands, examining kinship, community and cultural identity in systems that approach family very differently from our own. The UK is not the only place raising Black children in care, and it has a great deal to learn.
Read more →
Everything we deliver, from cultural competency training to our mentoring programmes and carer community, generates insight. We treat that insight as evidence: it shapes the frameworks we build for local authorities and agencies, and it keeps our research answerable to the people it is about.
If a question about race and fostering is uncomfortable, that is usually a reason to ask it.
Carers and care-experienced people are contributors to our research, not subjects of it.
Our work is free to read, and produced in formats communities can actually use.
Every piece of work we publish is designed to move a decision, a policy or a practice, not to sit on a shelf.
We work with local authorities, independent fostering agencies, universities, funders and foster carers who want to understand and improve outcomes for Black and Global Majority children.