Marriage is ‘outdated’ for fostering, says Government
Last week was LGBTQ+ Adoption and Fostering Week. The Government celebrated a 30% rise since 2024 in LGBTQ+ fostering households in Wales, according to new figures. At Lancashire-based children’s charity Adoption Matters, 40% of all approved adopters in 2025 identified as LGBTQ+. Yet, buried inside the Department for Education’s new ‘Renewing Fostering’ action plan is a sentence that should stop everyone in their tracks.
The Government declared it would update “guidance and regulations that currently reflect outdated assumptions about family structures and caring responsibilities”. It then spelled out what this means in practice: carers do not need to own their home, do not need to work part time – and do not need to be married.
That is not a neutral statement. It is a signal to every social worker, every fostering panel, and every placement decision-maker in the country: a married mother and father is no longer a relevant consideration when deciding where a vulnerable child should live. And it runs directly against the evidence.
The backdrop makes this more troubling, not less. Approved mainstream foster carers in England have fallen 12% since 2021 – from 63,890 to 56,345. More than 81,000 children are currently looked after in England. Around 3,000 are waiting to be adopted. These are children who have already known loss, instability, and disruption. What they need above everything else is the most stable home available. The Government’s response to that crisis is to tell decision-makers that the most powerful predictor of that stability no longer matters.
The evidence is not ambiguous. The Office for National Statistics found that 6% of children aged five to ten with married parents had a mental health disorder, compared to 12% of children with cohabiting parents – double the rate. The Centre for Social Justice found that by age five, 53% of children of cohabiting parents had already experienced their parents separating, compared to just 15% of children with married parents – and that family structure has a greater impact on children’s behavioural outcomes than maternal education or poverty. This research demonstrates what children need from the family into which they are placed. And what it consistently shows is that a married mother and father, raising children together in a stable home, gives those children the best possible chance.
Love matters. But love is not a placement policy. The Government has chosen an ideological signal over an evidence base – and it is the most vulnerable children in our society who will pay the price. At Coalition for Marriage, we will keep making the case that marriage between a man and a woman is not an outdated assumption. It is the foundation on which children’s futures are built.