Funding will expand family finding programmes to help care-experienced young people reconnect
£8.4 million to expand Family Finding across England
The Department for Education has announced £8.4 million in funding to expand Family Finding programmes across England, as part of the Enduring Relationships programme published on 4 June 2026. The announcement sits within a wider implementation plan, “Delivering the Children’s Social Care Reset” setting out how the government intends to roll out the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026, which received Royal Assent on 29 April 2026. For family law solicitors and local authority legal teams, the Act represents a significant shift in the statutory framework governing children in care, and several of its provisions are already in force or coming into force this autumn.
New statutory duties under the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026
The Act introduces a range of new and amended legal duties that practitioners will need to be across. The most immediate for local authority legal departments is the family group decision-making duty. Under section 31A inserted into the Children Act 1989, local authorities in England are now required to offer a family group decision-making meeting to parents and anyone else with parental responsibility before making an application for a care or supervision order. If the offer is accepted, the meeting must be held before the application is made. The duty only falls away where the local authority considers that holding such a meeting would not be in the best interests of the child. This introduces a pre-proceedings procedural step that did not previously exist as a statutory obligation, and legal teams will need to ensure that recording and compliance procedures are updated accordingly.
The Act also creates a new statutory duty on councils under section 34 of the Children Act 1989 to allow children in care reasonable contact with their siblings, half-siblings and step-siblings. The duty applies unless disapplied by a court order. Practitioners advising local authorities on placement decisions and contact arrangements will need to factor this strengthened sibling contact obligation into their advice.
The Information Sharing Duty — consultation closes 14 July 2026
A six-week public consultation is now open on statutory guidance for the Information Sharing Duty introduced by the Act, with a closing date of 14 July 2026. The duty itself comes into force on 30 September 2026 and requires relevant organisations including local authorities, social workers, healthcare professionals and other agencies — to share information for the purposes of safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children. The guidance has been developed in partnership with the Information Commissioner’s Office.
The duty creates a clear legal basis for inter-agency information sharing without requiring parental or child consent where the purpose is safeguarding. This addresses a long-standing source of uncertainty for practitioners, following a series of serious case reviews in which failures in information sharing across agencies were identified as contributing factors. Privacy notices held by local authorities and other relevant bodies will require updating to reflect this new legal basis for processing. Legal teams advising councils on data protection compliance should treat this as a priority before the September commencement date. The consultation on guidance is the appropriate route to flag any concerns about how the duty will operate in practice.
How Family Finding connects to the new legal framework
Family Finding programmes, which the £8.4 million is intended to expand nationally, work by assigning trained coordinators to help care-experienced children and young people identify and re-establish contact with people significant to them relatives, former foster carers, teachers, social workers and other trusted adults. The programmes have operated across 25 local authorities since 2023. Official data shows participants gained an average of nearly two additional meaningful relationships over the course of the programme, and more than a third reconnected with immediate family members. A study by the Policy Institute at King’s College London for the Centre for Homelessness Impact found that one Family Finding approach reduced the risk of homelessness by 10 percent.
The expansion of Family Finding directly reinforces the Act’s new sibling contact duty and family group decision-making requirements, and sits alongside the Act’s wider shift towards placing enduring relationships at the centre of local authority obligations towards looked-after children.
The scale of the problem
Official figures set the context for these reforms. As of March 2025, more than 81,000 children were in care in England. In 2024, one in ten moved home three or more times in a single year, and more than one in five were living over 20 miles from their home community.
Announcing the programme, Children’s Minister Josh MacAlister said: “We are giving more children in care the chance to reconnect with people important to them and build the lifelong relationships that most of us rely on for love, support and stability throughout adulthood. For too long, the care system has been forced to focus on fighting fires, rather than helping children build the enduring relationships they need to achieve and thrive. This government is gripping the problem. We have passed the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act, and now we are investing and reforming to give children’s social care the heart that children deserve.”
Wider reforms with legal implications — Regional Care Cooperatives and care leavers
The implementation plan also signals the scaling up of Regional Care Cooperatives under the Act, which enable groups of local authorities to jointly plan and commission placements. This will have implications for procurement and commissioning lawyers advising councils, as well as for challenges around placement decisions where regional commissioning arrangements may affect the options available to a particular authority.
On care leavers, the Act mandates that local authorities provide Staying Close support to all care leavers in England up to the age of 25. Councils must now assess whether young people up to that age need this support and provide it where their welfare requires it. This extends a pre-existing programme into a universal statutory entitlement, with direct implications for local authority duties and potential judicial review exposure where provision falls short.
The Act separately introduced new corporate parenting duties across public bodies, reinforcing joined-up responsibility for children in care and care leavers beyond the local authority alone.
Action points for practitioners
Local authority legal teams and family law solicitors should note the following before the end of the summer:
The Information Sharing Duty consultation closes 14 July 2026. Responses can be submitted directly to the DfE. The duty itself takes effect on 30 September 2026 and will require updates to data protection and privacy frameworks across relevant agencies.
The family group decision-making duty is already in force following Royal Assent on 29 April 2026. Local authorities that have not already done so should ensure that pre-proceedings protocols reflect the new statutory requirement to offer and, where accepted, hold a family group decision-making meeting before issuing care or supervision order applications.
The sibling contact duty under the amended section 34 of the Children Act 1989 is also now in force. Solicitors advising on contact arrangements for children in care should review existing plans and orders in light of the strengthened statutory position.