Kinship Care: Fostering Effective Family and Friends Placements, Elaine Farmer and Sue Moyers, London, Jessica Kingsley, 2008, pp. 254, ISBN 9781843106319, £22.99
Keeping Them in the Family: Outcomes for Children Placed in Kinship Care through Care Proceedings, Joan Hunt, Suzette Waterhouse and Eleanor Lutman, London, British Association for Adoption and Fostering, 2008, pp. 367, ISBN 9781905664528, £14.95

Extract

‘Under-researched, patchily utilised, poorly resourced and policy light’ is the description applied to kinship care as an opening gambit in one of the above books, which together attempt to address these and other issues relating to care by family and friends. Both books derive from studies funded under the Quality Protects initiative, although, in hindsight, this might appear somewhat strange, given their many areas of overlap and methodological similarities.

The policy backdrop to these studies is that, despite kinship care's identification in the 1989 Children Act as the ‘preferred alternative’ to care by parents and its ‘success’ as found in research, its use remains relatively limited. In this regard, social workers have often been criticized as being insufficiently proactive in seeking help from extended family members, while, for placements, once made, their organizations have been charged with inadequate support. Relevant search in the UK had been limited and generally small-scale and it was such shortcomings that the above studies sought to address.