By Sorcha Morgan, head of service, CFAB
Recently, I closed Baby Leo’s case. His mother had been unable to care for him due to her substance misuse and consideration was given to him being cared for by his maternal grandmother in Italy, who had been identified as a potential carer earlier in proceedings.
The local authority had initially sought an assessment through the Central Authority for the Hague Convention 1996 (see box) but the standard of reporting and analysis was too brief and so the local authority approached Children and Families Across Borders (CFAB) to assist.
With our partner agency in Italy, we carried out a comprehensive and robust assessment and provided recommendations that met the UK requirements for a special guardianship assessment.
Our partner also spoke with children’s services in Italy, who gave assurances about the support they would provide for Leo if he were to be placed in Italy.
Based on our assessments, the court approved the local authority’s care plan for Leo to be placed with his grandmother. CFAB were then asked to work with the local authority to help prepare Leo’s transition to Italy and, subsequently, to provide post-placement reports.
A third of children likely to have potential carers abroad
Leo’s situation isn’t unusual. CFAB works on numerous cross-border cases each year, in which we are asked to assess family members overseas as part of both pre-proceedings and care proceedings for children in the UK.
Indeed, with one in three children in England and Wales having a foreign-born parent, we estimate that approximately a third of looked-after children (over 30,000) are likely to have family members who could and should be explored as potential long-term carers.
Yet the findings from recent research we carried out demonstrate that this isn’t happening in practice. In 2023, we sent a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to 216 local authorities across the UK to better understand the extent to which international family connections are considered for looked-after children.
Overseas placement numbers rising but remain low
Though our findings indicated a 71% increase in the number of children in care placed with family abroad between January 2020 to December 2022 compared to the three years prior, there were only 196 children placed with family overseas during the latter time period.
While this confirms that overseas placements are a viable option for looked-after children, this remains less than 1% of the estimated 105,000 children currently in care in the UK.
Furthermore, our results demonstrated that fewer local authorities were considering family members overseas as potential carers than was previously the case.
How few councils place children with family abroad
Of the local authorities that responded, only 26 across the UK placed children overseas. With an increasingly diverse society, this seems to contradict the ‘family-first’ approach of prioritising kinship care when a child cannot remain with their parents, set out by the Department for Education in last year’s Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy.
While it may not always be appropriate to place a child with extended family, we hope that family members, both locally and internationally, are always considered during the permanency planning process, without bias or discrimination.
This is how we can best promote optimal long-term outcomes for looked-after children and ensure they can be raised with a strong sense of identity, belonging, heritage and culture.
Lack of data on overseas placements
CFAB’s FOI report also demonstrated the considerable lack of data surrounding overseas placements for children.
Only 25% of local authorities could provide a response to CFAB about the number of children who had family members overseas explored as an option for their care and 47% were able to provide a response on the number of children actually placed with family abroad.
Our previous FOI reports (in 2018 and 2021) confirm this is not a new issue and that little progress has been made. The lack of progress in data collection continues to impede the successful monitoring of international placements and potentially places children at risk.
Support for local authorities
CFAB works with 80% of the local authorities in the UK and we fully appreciate the challenges and barriers many social workers are facing.
But we are here to help and assist. Through our advice line, we offer guidance on international child protection and international kinship care.
Through our casework, we offer a range of services from record checks and child protection alerts to full assessments and post-placement visits.
We have partners in over 130 countries, and we will be able to provide you with full details of timescales and what you can expect on an individual case basis.
Beyond this, we also run free Lunch & Learn sessions for social workers who want to understand better how to assess family members overseas and place children abroad and have several free factsheets on our website. We also run training sessions for social workers and child protection professionals.
The framework for overseas placements
The 1996 Hague Convention is an international treaty aimed at improving the protection of children in cross-border situations.. Each contracting state has a designated Central Authority to carry out the duties imposed by the Convention to facilitate communication and co-operation between states. For England, this is the International Child Abduction and Contact Unit (ICACU).
In relation to requests from local authorities for cross-border assessments, the ICACU channels these to their Central Authority counterparts in the overseas country, who then pass it on to the relevant statutory agency. The relevant statutory services will then complete an assessment and report using a template relevant to their own practice.
This would meet the criteria for an inter-country placement under Article 33 of the Convention, and cover some key issues that cannot be covered by the UK local authority remotely, such as home environment, community resources, social service records, etc.
However, it can be brief, covering what the statutory service considers to be standard to inform an assessment, which often differs significantly from UK practice and expectations.
Alternatively, CFAB is able to prepare a case note to help our partner overseas make sense of the request(s).
In many cases, this would include a list of questions and areas for our partner overseas to cover to inform the assessment.
In some of these countries, depending on our partner there, we would also support the partner and quality-assure the assessment before sharing it with the UK local authority.
Our assessments can include genograms, several photos of the home environment, medical checks, identification, social security checks, police checks, bank statements, payslips, etc.
Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole 
Hampshire County Council 
Lincolnshire County Council 
Norfolk County Council 
Northamptonshire Children’s Trust 
South Gloucestershire Council 
Wiltshire Council 
Wokingham Borough Council 
Children and young people with SEND are ‘valued and prioritised’ in Wiltshire, find inspectors 
How specialist refugee teams benefit young people and social workers 
Podcast: returning to social work after becoming a first-time parent 
Podcast: would you work for an inadequate-rated service? 
Family help: one local authority’s experience of the model 
‘We are all one big family’: how one council has built a culture of support 
Workforce Insights – showcasing a selection of the sector’s top recruiters 
Facebook
X
LinkedIn
Instagram
When I was in practice I was fortunate enough to undertake two family assessments, one in Jamaica and the other in Barbados both were proactive in involving the birth mother and paternal family.One simply stemmed from visiting the father in prison.
A huge learning curve working within international jurisprudence and child care agencies but the outcome was mutually achieved