Foster carer recruitment: the digital playbook
Most writing about foster carer recruitment is about campaigns. This page is about the step before a campaign works: whether somebody who has decided to look into fostering can find your service at all, and what happens to them if they can.
It is written for the people who carry that problem. The head of fostering, the hub lead who owns the sufficiency duty, the recruitment officer who answers the enquiries, and the communications officer who spends the budget.
Where the enquiries actually go
In the year to 31 March 2025, 149,795 households made an initial enquiry about fostering in England. Local authorities received 29,985 of them. Independent fostering agencies (IFAs) received 119,810.
That is 20 percent of the enquiries reaching a local authority, in a market where local authorities hold 55 percent of the 33,435 mainstream fostering households.
The same collection shows what happens next. 10 of every 100 enquiries to a local authority became an application. 4 of every 100 enquiries to an IFA did. Local authorities took almost half of the mainstream households that joined fostering in the year.
Read those 2 findings together and the shape of the problem is specific. Local authorities are not worse at recruitment. They are better at it per enquiry, by a factor of more than 2, and they are starved of enquiries. The loss happens before anyone gets in touch, which makes it a findability problem rather than a recruitment one. The full national picture, with its sources, is on our fostering statistics page.
What decides whether a family finds you
We measure 4 checks. They are not a marketing framework. They are the surfaces a prospective carer actually passes through.
Whether an AI assistant names you
Somebody who asks an assistant how to foster in their area gets an answer, not a list of links. If your service is not in that answer, they may never reach your website at all.
Whether you appear in Google’s local results
Fostering search is overwhelmingly local, which makes the map results and your Google Business Profile do more work than the homepage most services spend their attention on.
Whether your site can be reached and read
An automated visitor that cannot reach your fostering page cannot report what is on it, and neither a search engine nor an assistant can recommend a page it never read.
Whether machines can read what you publish
Structured data tells a search engine and an assistant what your organisation is, where it operates and what it offers. It is extra information in your page’s code, and it is cheap to add once.
2 further things decide whether a family finds you and neither is scored today. Whether anyone links to you, which covers domain authority and your presence in sector and government directories. And whether you publish anything at all, meaning recruitment content and social proof that is refreshed rather than posted once. We hold those back by design.
The methodology sets out how each check works, and the rankings show where every service in England currently sits.
What to fix first
In the order that returns the most for the least effort, from what we see across the services we measure.
Your Google Business Profile, if fostering has one
Check whether fostering has a profile of its own rather than sharing the authority’s, and check the number it points at. It is free, it takes an afternoon, and in a market this local it moves more than a homepage redesign.
The route to enquire
Count the clicks from a cold landing to a submitted form. Then do it on a phone. Then check what happens to a form submitted at 7pm on a Sunday, which is when people actually do it.
Allowances, stated plainly
Publish your allowance against the national minimum. It answers the first question a family asks, and it is not a marketing decision.
Structured data on your fostering pages
Cheap, one-off, and it feeds both search and assistants at once. Our analysis sets out the structured data most fostering services are missing.
The questions you do not answer
Every question a family asks that your site does not answer is a question an IFA answers instead. That is where they take the enquiry.
Your own name
Check whether IFAs are advertising against searches for your local authority plus fostering. We count those adverts on every measured search and show them on your dashboard as context, and they never enter your score.
If you run a regional hub, add one more. Whether every member authority’s site actually routes to the single front door the programme describes, or whether members still run parallel doors. That is checkable from the outside, and we check it.
What improving this does, and what it does not
Improving findability lifts fostering enquiries, and it shifts the share of those enquiries away from IFAs and towards the local authority and its hub. We claim both directly, because both are what the measurement moves.
It does not by itself produce more approved foster carers. Between an enquiry and an approval sit screening, the initial conversation, the quality of the offer, assessment capacity and panel. Those are outside what any visibility work controls, and a supplier who tells you otherwise is selling you something they cannot deliver. Approvals are a partnership outcome.
That distinction is not a disclaimer. It is the diagnosis. If enquiries are weak because the service is hard to find, visibility is the right intervention. If plenty of suitable people are reaching the service and few progress, the money belongs further down the funnel. Treating both as one recruitment problem is how budgets get spent in the wrong place.
See where you stand
Every fostering service in England is in the rankings, scored the same way, client or not, with the method published and no way to pay for a better position. Find yours, then talk to us about what the number means and what we would fix first. The conversation is free and there is no report to buy before it.