FosterScope is a dashboard and consultancy for local authority fostering services and regional fostering hubs in England. The dashboard shows how easy your service is to find on Google and in AI assistants, and whether you or independent fostering agencies (IFAs) are winning local families. Our consultants help you improve both, as much or as little as you want. The free, public FosterScope rankings sit behind both, and nobody can pay to change their place in them.
Built from experience in this space.
We have worked alongside local authorities for years, and we used what we learned to build a way for them to attract more foster carers directly, ahead of the IFAs competing for the same families.
We make you findable and measure whether you are winning.
Every task goes to a named person in your team.
Nothing you share with us is used in the public rankings.
We can only read your data, never change it, and you can remove our access yourself in seconds.
Every FosterScope client starts with the dashboard, not a one-off report. You sign in on your first day, and most local authorities need nothing more.
Your Findability Score (how easy you are to find, 0 to 100) and your Share of Local Fostering Voice (how much of the Google results local families see come from you rather than IFAs). Both update every month, with your change since last month.
Your numbers beside neighbouring local authorities, your regional hub and the IFAs working in your area, including which IFAs pay for Google adverts on local fostering searches and on your local authority’s name.
Tasks in priority order, each written as a plain instruction and given to a named person in your team. Each month, when we measure again, the dashboard checks which tasks are done.
Connect Google Search Console, Google’s free report of how people find your site, to see your real searches and clicks beside our measurements. You add 1 email address as a read-only user, and you can remove it yourself at any time.
A plan for recruiting the foster carers your children in care actually need, based on the ages and needs of the children you look after. It names the communities where you need more carers and shows the evidence for each. It doesn’t affect any score.
A weekly email showing what changed and the 1 thing to do next. Weekly checks on IFA activity, AI assistant answers and your enquiry process. A check on which family questions your website answers. Briefs your web team can act on. These features are in development and aren’t part of the dashboard today.
The FosterScope dashboard has 7 sections of measurements and 1 action plan. Every sentence in it comes from a measurement or a fixed rule, so it can’t tell you that you’re doing better than you are. Sections stay empty until your own data arrives, rather than showing sample figures. In a demonstration you see the real dashboard, and the example below shows the layout only.
Consultancy clients use the same dashboard as everyone else. The difference is who does the work and how often we talk.
Priced well below the value at which procurement law requires a formal tender, so most local authorities can buy under their own quotation rules. Pay by purchase order and invoice. Regional fostering hubs are priced per member local authority.
FosterScope promises more fostering enquiries, and a bigger share of local enquiries coming to your local authority instead of to IFAs, visible in your own data. We can also make your enquiry page work better, which is the one step between enquiry and application that we can influence.
We don’t promise more approved foster carers.
That depends on your assessment capacity and your offer, and on how long each step takes. We say so before we’re asked. Our foster carer recruitment playbook sets out what sits between an enquiry and an approval.
The draft Fostering Quality Standards, consulted on from July to September 2026, expect fostering services to publish their approach to recruitment, give clear and honest information about the role, and publish their statement of purpose on their website. They’ll replace the 2011 National Minimum Standards, and Ofsted will inspect against the final version. The FosterScope dashboard uses the same language, and its record of what you changed and what improved can go straight into a report to your senior leadership team.
A regional fostering hub is a group of neighbouring local authorities that recruit foster carers together through one front door. A hub sees every member local authority in one FosterScope view: each one’s score, rank and anything we couldn’t measure, plus the share of local results by area wherever we can publish it. Coming soon: an outside check that families who contact the hub really do reach a single point of contact. What happens after a family applies belongs to your local authorities and your hub, not to us.
Because that work starts once a family has found a fostering service. It does nothing to make sure a family finds your local authority in the first place. FosterScope measures and improves that first step, and shows who is taking the families you miss.
No. Only real improvements in how easy your service is to find move your ranking. The rankings are never adjusted for a client, or against one.
Then the dashboard on its own is probably right for you, and most local authorities buy it that way. It tells your web team what to fix and why, gives each task a named owner, and exports each one as a ticket your web team can work from.
So you can see your real searches and clicks beside our measurements. We ask for the smallest access that works: 1 email address added as a read-only user in your own Google Search Console. You can remove it yourself in seconds. We hold no password or key, and your data never reaches the rankings or any score.
Yes, and we say so first. A Findability Score can move by up to 2.6 points between 2 measurements on the same day, so we never judge a service on a single month’s position. We look at the trend, your movement against other services, and your share.
Our own re-measurement, 7 August 2026. Checked 2 September 2026.
Yes. The dashboard shows which IFAs advertise on your local searches. Adverts appear beside your score but never count in it. The free Google results and AI assistant answers are where a local authority can win without matching IFA advertising budgets.
A free conversation, no report to buy first. We reply to every message.