Nursery World - Positive Relationships: Working With Parents

To improve their relationships with kinship carers, and to help make these people feel less isolated, practitioners should understand their particular challenges. By Nicola Stobbs and Alison Prowle

When practitioners open their doors at the beginning or end of the day, it is not uncommon to find grandparents, aunties and uncles, as well as family friends, waiting to collect children on behalf of their working parents. However, an increasing number of children live with family members or friends on a full-time basis.

This arrangement is known as kinship care, officially defined as ‘relatives, friends and other people with a prior connection with somebody else’s child who are caring for him or her full-time’ (Department for Education 2011).

The official number of children in England living in kinship care arrangements is estimated to be around 173,200. However, taking informal arrangements into consideration, the number could be closer to 300,000.

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