Remand fostering explained: caring for a young person awaiting court

Most people who enquire about fostering picture a seven-year-old on the doorstep with a rucksack and one favourite toy. Remand fostering looks different. It is a 15-year-old sitting in a court corridor in south London while a magistrate decides where they sleep tonight, and whether that place is a bedroom or a cell. If your first thought is that you could never take that on, read on anyway.

Please note: this is general information about the law in England and Wales, correct as at August 2026, and not legal advice about any individual case. The remand framework for children sits in Part 3, Chapter 3 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, as amended by the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022.

What remand fostering actually is

When a young person is charged with an offence and the court decides not to release them on bail, they are remanded while the case works its way through. The court in England and Wales then has a choice. It can remand the young person to local authority accommodation, which is where remand fostering comes in, or to youth detention accommodation, meaning secure accommodation such as a young offender institution. Remand to local authority accommodation is the starting point. Custody is the exception, and the court has to justify it against strict statutory conditions.

The local authority then decides where the young person actually lives: at home with conditions attached, with a relative, in a children’s home, or with a foster family. When it is a foster family, the young person is in your house, eating at your table, needing a lift to a solicitor’s appointment on Tuesday morning. It sits alongside the other types of fostering we recruit for, and it is the one carers know least about.

One thing surprises people. Since December 2012, a young person on remand is a looked-after child, whether they are remanded to local authority accommodation or into secure accommodation. So they have a social worker, a care plan and a looked-after review, like any other child in care. The local authority must prepare that care plan within five working days of the remand and hold the first review within twenty working days.

Who can be remanded, and at what age

The age brackets matter more than people expect.

• Children aged 10 and 11 can only be bailed or remanded to local authority accommodation. Secure remand is not available for them.
• Young people aged 12 to 17 can also be remanded to youth detention accommodation, but only if strict conditions are met.
• A tag, properly called electronic monitoring, can only be attached to a remand for someone aged 12 or over, and only where the offence criteria are met.

For a 10 or 11-year-old there is no secure option at all. A foster home is the alternative to sending them back somewhere the court has decided is not safe enough.

The court’s tests got tighter in 2022

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 came into force for youth remand on 28 June 2022 and raised the bar for holding a child in custody before trial. A court now has to be satisfied:

• that a custodial sentence is “very likely”, replacing the looser test of a “real prospect” of custody
• that the young person has a recent and significant history of imprisonable offences or bail breaches, relevant in all the circumstances
• that the risks they pose cannot be managed safely in the community
• that it has considered the young person’s welfare and best interests

The court also has to record its reasons. Parliament’s intention was plain: fewer children in cells before anyone has decided whether they did it. That only works if there are carers willing to take these young people in.

The young person in your spare room has not been found guilty

This is the part that gets missed, and it should change how you think about the role. The Youth Justice Board’s annual statistics for 2024/25 report that 62% of children remanded to custody did not go on to receive a custodial sentence at the end of their case. A quarter of that group were acquitted outright or had the case against them dismissed. Meanwhile the average time from offence to case completion reached 230 days, the highest on record.

So a young person can lose the better part of a year to a case that ends in an acquittal. Where they spend that year is a real question, and a foster home is a better answer than a young offender institution. It also means a remand placement is not always a fortnight. Plan for months, in the way you would for any of the shorter-term placements we ask carers to take.

What the days actually look like

Less dramatic than you would think. Most of the rhythm is admin and lifts.

The young person has appointments they must attend: their solicitor, the youth justice service (still widely called the youth offending team), sometimes the police, and the hearings themselves. Getting them there on the right day at the right time is your job, which for a 16-year-old who has never kept a diary means you are the diary. If the court has attached a curfew or a tag, you notice when they are cutting it fine at 9.40pm.

The youth offending team will be in your life. They advise the young person, remind them of dates, and make sure they have an appropriate adult looking after their rights and welfare. If the case ends in a conviction, that team writes the pre-sentence report and keeps working with the young person afterwards.

Around all of that is ordinary teenage life. College, dinner, a phone charger that keeps disappearing, an argument about whether 11pm counts as late.

Safer caring, and the parts that are genuinely hard

Every GLF household has a Safer Caring Plan, and for a remand placement it needs to be more specific than usual. Your supervising social worker will work through it with you before the young person arrives. It will cover things like:

• protecting against inappropriate contact, including with a victim or a co-defendant
• online safety, which in some cases matters as much as the front door
• what happens if the young person stays out late or goes missing
• sensible limits on access to anything that could be used as a weapon
• the agency’s position on physical intervention

Being honest: this is harder than a settled long-term placement. A young person facing a court date is frightened, whatever they show you, and what looks like defiance is usually fear. Some will test whether you are going to give up on them, because plenty of adults already have. There will be an evening when you sit up at midnight wondering whether to ring the police. Ring our out-of-hours number first. A person answers it.

Your records may end up being read in court

Foster carer recording matters in every placement. In a remand placement it can become evidence. What you wrote about the Thursday the young person came home at seven and sat down to their homework may matter at a hearing months later. Write it up the same day, stick to what you saw and heard rather than what you concluded, and your supervising social worker will read the recordings through with you.

Court days

The Youth Court is less frightening than television suggests, and it helps if the young person hears that from you in advance. The case is heard by either three magistrates or a district judge, with no jury. The young person sits at a table in front of the bench rather than in a dock. Members of the public are not allowed in and everyone is called by their first name. For anyone under 16 a parent or guardian must attend, and in practice that is often you.

Visit the court building beforehand if you can. Arrive early, expect a long day, dress smartly. Two things worth telling the young person: tell the truth, and if a question does not make sense it is fine to say so and ask for it again.

How it ends

Sometimes bail is granted at the next hearing and the placement stops with a day’s notice. Sometimes the case ends in an acquittal and the young person goes home. Sometimes there is a conviction, and the sentence might be a discharge, a fine, a referral order of three months to a year, a youth rehabilitation order of up to three years, or a detention and training order of four months to two years. The Sentencing Council publishes the current list.

Prepare the young person for the worst outcome as well as the best. It is a rotten conversation to have, and worse not to have had it. Occasionally a young person needs a foster placement on the way out of custody rather than on the way in, and that is remand fostering too.

What GLF pays for a remand placement

Remand pay does not work like our standard rates. The fee is negotiated with the placing local authority for that individual young person, so there is no single published figure, and the rate can reach up to £1,200 a week. That is not a headline dressed up. It reflects what the placement actually asks of you: the court dates, the appointments, the recording, the being there.

For context, our standard weekly fee as at August 2026 is £479.50 for a child under 11 and £507.50 for a young person aged 11 or over, paid per child while they are placed with you, as one fixed fee covering both the child’s allowance and your reward. Our foster carer pay page sets those standard rates out in full. If it is remand you are asking about, ring us and ask what the rate looks like at the moment. We will tell you straight.

You won’t have to do this alone

Very few of our carers currently take remand placements, and we would like that to change, so nobody here will let you sink. You get a supervising social worker who knows your household, training on the court process before a young person arrives, a phone number that a person answers out of hours, and a carer who has done it before to talk to. If you want the detail, we have written separately about the support foster carers actually receive from us. Ofsted inspected GLF from 21 to 25 July 2025 and rated us Outstanding in all three judgements.

It is completely normal to read all this and decide it is not for you. It is also normal to read it and think, quietly, that you could probably manage a 15-year-old who needs somebody to turn up. If that is you, have a look at how becoming a foster carer with us works, or just talk to us. You do not have to decide anything today.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need experience of the youth justice system to be a remand foster carer?

No. Most of our carers had none before they started. What matters more is that you can hold a boundary without falling out with a teenager, and that you will ring us when you are unsure. We train you on the court process and on recording before a young person arrives.

Does taking a remand placement mean having a convicted criminal in my home?

Not usually, and not necessarily ever. A young person on remand before trial has not been found guilty of anything. The Youth Justice Board’s 2024/25 figures show 62% of children remanded to custody did not go on to receive a custodial sentence, and a quarter of those were acquitted or had the case dropped.

How much would I be paid for a remand placement?

It is negotiated with the placing local authority for the individual young person rather than set by a rate card, and it can reach up to £1,200 a week. Ring us and ask what it looks like at the moment.

Do I need a spare bedroom to take a remand placement?

For a young person of this age, yes, they need their own room. That is not true of fostering generally at GLF, because a baby under two can sleep in a cot in your own bedroom, which is why we can approve baby carers with no spare room at all. For a teenager on remand, their own door matters.