Kinship care's key role in supporting children

Jean Stogdon is chair and co-founder of Grandparents Plus, and a keynote speaker at Community Care's Kinship Care conference on 12 March.
While the idea of children being looked after by members of their extended families is as old as the hills, the notion of kinship care in social policy is relatively novel.
The Children Act 1989 prioritised the placement of children needing substitute care with relatives or other members of their social network, marking the rediscovery of the extended family after a lengthy period during which such placements appeared to have fallen from favour.
In its relatively short history, social work has had many phases. Currently, we seem to be in a phase which places less emphasis on working with relationships. By comparison, 30 years ago the picture was very different: many social workers were motivated into the job by a wish to work with challenging relationships to overcome what we would now call the barriers to social inclusion.
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