Somerset Council foster carers are offered more support

People who provide foster care for children through a local authority are going to be offered more support, to try and reduce the numbers giving up fostering.

Somerset Council says the number of fostering households registered with it has dropped by around a quarter since 2020, mirroring a national decline.

The council is now bringing in a new fostering intervention team which will offer support to carers seven days a week.

It is also looking to expand a national scheme called the Mockingbird programme which emulates an extended family network by grouping together foster families who then meet up and support each other.

Councillor Heather Shearer, Lib Dem lead member for children on Somerset Council said foster care was the “best and simplest way” to make sure as many of the children in the authority’s care were living in family environments.

“To fold a child into a loving family home is a brilliant thing to do and we have, at the moment, more children needing places than we have foster carers,” she said.

Shearer said the authority was looking at a range of ways to help foster carers continue in their roles, adding the council is also making sure the allowances it pays foster carers were “reasonable to support people to give a child a really good experience at home and not have them out of pocket themselves”.

The number of children in care in Somerset went up from 635 children in May 2025 to 669 in November.

Not all of those children will be placed in foster care, and of those who are, not all will be looked after by carers working directly for the council.

Somerset Council said the rising numbers of children coming into care reflected a national trend and overall rates of children in care in the county remained lower than in other areas.

From April to December 2025, there were 13 foster carer de-registrations in Somerset, of which five were within their first two years of fostering.

In the full year 2024/25 there were 27 de-registrations.

Roger Smith, a council foster carer of 17 years, said it is “tough” to be in the role.

“What we do is 24/7, and that doesn’t fit into everybody’s lives… that is a difficult conversation to have sometimes.”

But Smith said the positives outweigh the negatives for him, adding: “We love what we do, we love seeing the impact of the work we do with the children”.

On the increase in support, he said: “Every little helps.

“One of the biggest things is just to get the communication right so when we need to make a call, there’s somebody there for it – that’s what really affects as carers on a day-to-day basis.”