Carer Strategy 2025 – 2026 - Carer guide

Building a foster and kinship care system that attracts, supports, and retains exceptional carers is essential to ensuring every child and young person feels safe, valued, and connected. As leading providers with a commitment to applying imaginative and innovative approaches to best serve communities, Life Without Barriers (LWB) identified the opportunity to refine its carer attraction, recruitment and retention approaches.

The development of this Strategy has been informed by analysis of LWB’s current recruitment and management processes and data, a refined review leveraging existing foster carer recruitment evidence and exploring adjacent sector practices and a range of consultations including with carers, internal staff and sector experts.

A range of key themes arose across the carer journey on the basis of literature, practice wisdom and experience. The Carer Strategy 2025–2026 focuses on improving the recruitment, support, and experience of carers by:

attracting the right carers
simplifying the recruitment journey
creating child and carer-centric experiences.

Review the entire Carer Strategy 2025 - 2026.

Want to become a carer?

To become a foster carer your ability to care and nurture a child is what really matters.

To learn more, visit the LWB foster care website