FosterScope was founded by 2 people with more than 50 years’ combined experience in health and social care, most of it working with local authorities. We built it because we saw the same problem in every local authority we worked with: families wanted to foster, but when they looked online they found an independent fostering agency (IFA) instead of their local authority.
England needs more foster carers. In February 2026 the Department for Education set out plans for 10,000 more foster places by 2029, to come from local authorities and not-for-profit fostering services.
Department for Education, Renewing Fostering: homes for 10,000 more children, February 2026. Checked 27 September 2026.
What we noticed, working alongside local authorities, is how much of the effort to find carers is lost before it starts. A family searches for fostering near them, or asks an AI assistant how to begin, and is sent to an IFA, because the IFA is easier to find. The local authority pays for that twice: once in the carer it did not recruit, and again in the placement it then buys from the IFA.
FosterScope exists to make that visible, area by area, every month, and to give each local authority a way to change it. Being easier to find brings more enquiries, and a bigger share of them, to the local authority. What happens to an enquiry after that is the local authority’s own work, and we say so before we’re asked.
We measure every local authority fostering service in England the same way, client or not. Clients buy improvement in their real visibility, and the ranking follows. Nobody can pay to move it, and nobody ever will.
A service whose website blocks us, or that an assistant would not answer about, is listed as not measured, with the reason. Never a fake zero, never a half-measured score that looks healthy.
More enquiries, and a bigger share of local enquiries coming to the local authority instead of to IFAs, visible in its own data. Not approvals. Those depend on your assessment capacity and your offer, and on how long each step takes. Pretending otherwise would be the first untrue thing on this site.
FosterScope doesn’t find, assess or approve foster carers, and we hold no records about them. Applications and approvals belong to the local authority and its regional fostering hub. Our job is to help families find the local authority in the first place.
We measure every service the same way each month, using the searches families actually make and the questions they actually ask. Our method and its weightings are published for anyone to check. A score moves when a service’s visibility changes, and sometimes when we improve how we measure.
We reply to every message, and we would rather hear the hard question than the easy one.