1) On average, how many therapy hours per package were provided for i) LA-provided foster care and ii) IFA-provided foster care, over the past 12 months (or the most recent 12-month period that you’re able to process)?
1)a) If possible, please provide a breakdown of this for each IFA
Devon County Council believes compliance with this request would exceed the appropriate cost limit under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 which is £450 or 18 hours of officer time.
This is because as therapy hours are agreed on an individual basis dependant on young peoples needs we would need to look through all Individual Placement Agreements (IPA) for fostering placements both internally and with Independent Fostering Agencies (IFA). This would involve identifying the young people in these placements, going through Eclipse to find these IPAs, and pulling out the therapy hours information in each one which we cannot guarantee would be included in these IPAs.
We currently have 611 young people in fostering arrangements and as an estimate it would take 20 minutes to go through each of these records to pull out this information which equals 203.67 hours, which would be in excess of 18 hours. This does not take into consideration the additional request for breakdown per IFA (Q1a).
2) Can you please provide a breakdown of NEET %s (Not in Education, Employment or Training), for children in i) LA-provided foster care and ii) IFA-provided foster care?
(Only for the cohort eligible to be in Education employment and training – over 4 years old).
In house NEET% = 4.3%
IFA NEET% = 9%
2)a) If possible, please provide a breakdown of NEET %s for each IFA
NEET Breakdown – Action For Children Family Breaks Devon & Fostering Southwest:
Peninsula 0%
Anchor Foster Care Services 0%
Birmingham Children’s Trust Fostering Agency 0%
Blue Sky Fostering 6%
Bridging Gaps Fostering Agency 100%
Capstone Foster Care (South West) 0%
Compass Fostering South 0%
Empower Fostering Limited 0%
Family First Fostering Agency 0%
Five Rivers Fostering Service – West Country 6%
Foster Care Associates Ltd 0%
Fostering UK Ltd 0%
Fusion Fostering 0%
Mosaic Foster Care 0%
National Fostering Agency 0%
New Life Fostering Agency 0%
Pathways Care South West 0%
Rainbow Fostering 0%
Sunbeam Fostering 67%
SWIIS Foster Care Ltd 50%
The Fostering Foundation (South West) 11%
The National Fostering Agency 7%
True Fostering Ltd 0%
This is based on relationships to EET organisations and attendance data. It wasn’t possible to validate every individual record due to the time constraints
3) What is the average weekly fee per placement, spent on i) LA-provided foster care
For the financial year period April 2022 to March 2023:
Internal Fostering £509 – Average unit cost per week.
This can include training support allowances, birthday and festival allowances, enhanced and enhanced plus allowances, plus one-off payments such as mileage, holiday allowance etc.
and ii) IFA-provided foster care, for children placed over the most recent 12-month period (as per question 1)?
Independent Fostering £1,029 average unit cost per week. This would also include the agency fee.