How to contact us for advice

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Our advice service

We provide advice to parents, grandparents, relatives, friends and kinship carers who are involved with children’s services in England or need their help. We can help you understand processes and options when social workers or courts are making decisions about your child’s welfare.

Our advice service is free, independent and confidential.

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By phone or email

To speak to an adviser, please call our free and confidential advice line 0808 801 0366 (Monday to Friday 9.30am to 3pm, excluding Bank Holidays). Or you can ask us a question via email using our advice enquiry form.

Discuss on our forums

Our online advice forums are an anonymous space where parents and kinship carers (also known as family and friends carers) can get legal and practical advice, build a support network and learn from other people’s experiences.

Advice on our website

Our get help and advice section describes the processes that you and your family are likely to go through, so that you know what to expect. Our webchat service can help you find the information and advice on our website which will help you understand the law and your rights.

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Kinship Research and Practice

Research has shown that:

  • Outcomes are positive for most children living in kinship care, and considerably better than for children in unrelated foster care, e.g. the children are more securely attached to their carers, feel that they belong with their carers, and are confident they will be staying.
  • Children in kinship care have experienced similar adversities to those in the care system but they and their carers received much less support.
  • Kinship carers show a high level of commitment but half of kinship carers have to give up work to take on the child. As a result many kinship care face financial hardship. This has worsened as a result of the Pandemic.

Research Reports

Family Rights Group has been undertaking research into kinship care for more than twenty years.

In 1999 the Family Policy Unit in the Home Office agreed to fund Family Rights Group’s proposal to conduct a national survey of grandparents raising their grandchildren. The resulting report by Alison Richards, entitled Second Time Around was published in 2001.

We have since undertaken research, conducted surveys and drawn up a number of practice guidance, resulting in more than twenty publications on kinship care.

Some of the more recent of these publications are listed below and can be downloaded for free or purchased online.

Key findings from the last two decades of UK research on kinship care, December 2020

By Professor Joan Hunt and commissioned by Family Rights Group

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