The scoreboard is independent
We measure every service the same way on the same day, client or not. Clients buy improvement in their real visibility, and the ranking follows. Nobody can pay to move it, and nobody ever will.
About the Index
Built by people who have spent their working lives beside local authorities.
The UK Fostering Visibility Index was made by 2 founders with more than 50 years between them in health and social care, most of it spent partnering with councils. We built it because we kept seeing the same thing in every authority we worked with: families who wanted to foster, and a council they could not find.
Why we built it
The carers are out there. The councils are not where families are looking.
England needs more foster carers, and every council knows it. The government has committed to homes for 10,000 more children, and most of those homes will have to be found locally, by the council or its hub.
Department for Education, Renewing Fostering: homes for 10,000 more children, February 2026. Checked 2 September 2026.
What we noticed, working alongside councils, is how much of the effort to find carers is lost before it starts. A family searches for fostering near them, or asks an AI assistant how to begin, and is sent to a private agency, because the agency is easier to find. The council pays for that twice: once in the carer it did not recruit, and again in the placement it then buys from the agency.
The Index exists to make that visible, area by area, every month, and to give a council a way to change it. Better findability brings more enquiries and a bigger share of them to the council. What a council does with an enquiry is its own work, and we say so before we are asked.
What we believe
We say what we cannot see
A service whose website blocks us, or that an assistant would not answer about, is shown as a data gap with the reason. Never a fake zero, never a half-measured score that looks healthy. We never rewrite a published month, and we publish our corrections beside the method.
We promise what we control
More enquiries, and a bigger share of local enquiries coming to the council instead of to agencies, visible in the council’s own data. Not approvals. Those depend on your assessment capacity and your offer, and on how long each step takes. Pretending otherwise would be the first untrue thing on this site.
Built from experience, for councils.
Between us we have spent more than 50 years in health and social care, most of it partnering with local authorities. We used that experience to build the Index and the tool behind it: a way for a council to see how findable its fostering service is, to attract more foster carers directly, and to win them ahead of the agencies competing for the same families. What we don’t do is find, assess or approve carers, or hold records about them. The application, the assessment and the approval belong to the council, its hub and the national platform.
How we work
Every number on this site is a measurement we can show you.
Made the same way for every service, on the same day each month, from the searches families actually use and the questions they actually ask. We publish the method with its version stamped on every page, the weights are there for anyone to check, and when we find our own mistake we publish that too. When a council’s real visibility improves, its rank follows, and that’s the only way a rank moves.
Find your service on the board, then tell us what you think.
We reply to every message, and we would rather hear the hard question than the easy one.