National award for Greater Manchester fostering scheme

Greater Manchester Combined Authority’s (GMCA) ‘Room Makers’ fostering initiative has won the Children in Care Award at the Children and Young People Now Awards.

The scheme provides funding and support for foster carers in all 10 boroughs of the city-region to renovate spare rooms in order to foster more children. As part of the scheme, 26 new bedrooms have been renovated and made available to support children and young people in need of foster placements across Greater Manchester.

Cllr Mark Hunter, leader of Stockport Council and the city-region’s portfolio lead for children and young people, commented:

“We are delighted to see this innovative project win this award. Here in Greater Manchester we pride ourselves on doing things differently and this project really gets to the heart of that approach. Our foster carers are amazing people and we want to be able to provide opportunities to provide more stable and loving homes for local children in care who really need them.

“This is another key piece of work that we’re delivering as part of our innovation in fostering, alongside our Fostering Unfiltered campaign, we’re working hard to not only get more people to foster with us, but to also support our current foster carers through a variety of programmes like this and Mockingbird.”

Fostering Unfiltered sees all 10 Greater Manchester council’s come together with GMCA to promote fostering across the city region, celebrate our fostering community and provide honest and unfiltered information on the role of fostering. GMCA is also now exploring options to expand the Room Makers scheme in 2024.

The award win for the Greater Manchester fostering scheme comes alongside Stockport Council’s recent commitment to treating being care-experienced as a protected characteristic when conducting equality impact assessments in designing and implementing future policies.