Supporting Care Pathways
Strategic partnerships that help children access stable, loving care arrangements, the foundation on which everything else is built.
Local Authority Partnerships
Supporting care-experienced children to gain stability, security and permanence
Through our partnerships we support children and families, charities and local authorities in enabling different forms of family-based care. Boarding and independent day school places can provide the additional support needed to make foster, kinship and guardianship arrangements possible for young people who are unable to live with their birth parents.
Interested in finding out more?
If you are a social care professional, working for a charity or Local Authority and would like to explore whether a boarding or independent school place could secure an improved care arrangement for a young person, please get in touch or read our e-booklet to learn more about the programme, referral process and funding options.
Our work in action
““RNCSF’s commissioned school place brokerage service can promote stability for children in and on the edge of care and provide excellent outcomes whilst being good value for money. Using this service we have been able to keep a child in kinship care whilst protecting the family dynamics and, all being well, leading to excellent educational outcomes.””
Frequently Asked Questions for Local Authorities
If you have a question please feel free to email us.
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School places can – at times - be funded entirely by school bursary funding, but this cannot be guaranteed. We also broker co-funding models as part of commissioned arrangements between local authorities and schools using our knowledge of practice across the authorities in England and Wales.
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If you work within children's services and would like to talk to us about a young person or our work, you can make an enquiry by clicking the link here.
Please note that the vast majority of successful BEP scheme placements are secured for children at the natural school transition points of Year 7 or 12, but there is possibility of placements to commence in Years 5, 6, 8, 9 & 10.
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For our bursary programme, the ordinary lead-in time is approximately 12 months.
All applications must be completed by June of the year before transition (e.g. completed by June 2025 for a September 2026 start). However, we can sometimes place children outside of this timeframe. Please contact our CEVC team who are on hand to advise about any child who you would like to access our support.
Throughout the process of application through to confirmation, the BEP scheme can never guarantee that a boarding/independent day school placement will be secured. It is critical to maintain parallel state school admission applications until a school offer letter has been secured.
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For those children who the Local Authority is not the corporate parent - for example those in kinship care, SGO arrangements or young carers, our financial assessments consider household income and assets, including property value.
We understand that kinship carers may have limited disposable income despite owning property, and we aim to assess financial need with sensitivity to individual circumstances.