Keeping Foster Care Records: What to Write Down, and Why

People ask us about the paperwork sooner or later, usually in a slightly apologetic voice. It is a fair question. Recording is the part of fostering that sounds least like looking after a child and most like a job, and nobody takes it up because they fancy the admin. Here is what it actually involves, how long it really takes, and why those five minutes at the kitchen table are worth protecting.

Please note: this is general information about record keeping in England, correct at 24 September 2026. It is not legal advice, and it does not replace what your own fostering service asks of you. The current sector standard is Standard 26 of the Fostering Services National Minimum Standards, and the rules on seeing your own information come from the Information Commissioner’s guidance on subject access. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own arrangements.

What a foster care record actually is

It is a dated log of what happened. Not an essay, not a report, not a piece of writing anyone will mark. Most carers keep theirs in a notebook that lives on the kitchen worktop, or type it straight into whatever system their agency uses, and the whole thing takes five or ten minutes while the kettle boils. Some days it is four lines. Ask your fostering service two questions at the start: what format do you want it in, and how often. The minimum frequency is agreed at the child’s review rather than set nationally, so it varies, and daily is the habit worth building even when weekly is what is asked for.

The practical reason for doing it daily is memory. Write up a Tuesday on the following Sunday and the day has gone soft at the edges: you remember the mood but not the sentence, the argument but not what set it off. Detail is what makes a record useful, and detail has a short shelf life.

The four jobs a record ends up doing

A record written on a Tuesday night can end up doing four quite different jobs, and none of them is filing for the sake of filing. Your supervising social worker reads it to work out what a child needs and whether more support should be put in. It can be read in court, as evidence for a child going home to their family or for staying where they are. If anyone ever makes an allegation about your household, your own notes are part of the picture. And years later it can be the raw material for life story work, when a young person wants to know what their childhood was actually like.

That last one is the one carers tend not to think about. Somewhere in a file there may be a line saying that a seven-year-old learned to ride a bike on a Sunday in March, and who was holding the saddle. Nobody else is going to write that down.

Write it as though the child will read it

Because they can, and a good number of them do. Under the care planning regulations a child’s case record is kept until the seventy-fifth anniversary of their birth, so notes you make about a nine-year-old could be read by a forty-year-old. Anyone can ask for the information held about them, and the organisation holding it has to answer within one month, free of charge.

This is not a reason to be guarded. It is a reason to be decent and accurate at once. The sector standard asks for entries that are legible, non-stigmatising and keep fact apart from opinion. It also says children should be encouraged to read their records, correct anything wrong and add their own account. So write “shouted and slammed the door at 6pm, calm by 6.30, said she was worried about Friday” rather than “difficult evening, very defiant”. One of those is information. The other is a verdict, and it will still be sitting there in thirty years.

What to write down

You will get a feel for it within a fortnight. Until then, the entries that turn out to matter most are the ones easiest to skip, because they seemed ordinary at the time:

• health: appointments, immunisations, illnesses, accidents and injuries, any medicine given, and any pattern you notice such as a rash after a particular food
• school: attendance, parents’ evenings, anything said at a meeting about their education and their Personal Education Plan, and any trouble such as bullying or a suspension
• achievements: first steps, a swimming badge, a part in the play, a good week
• family time: calls, letters and visits, and how the child was before, during and afterwards
• whereabouts: meetings with social workers, sleepovers, school trips, holidays, and dates when someone else was looking after them
• the hard things: incidents, anything that worried you, anything the child told you, any involvement with the police, and any time they went missing

Date everything. Keep a separate record for each child if you are looking after more than one. Length is not the point, and a dated line beats a paragraph of feeling every time.

What to leave out

Your opinions, mostly. Record what happened, not what you think the child is. There is a real difference between “wouldn’t get in the car outside school, we sat on the wall for ten minutes” and “attention seeking again”, and a reader in five years can do something with the first. Where a child has said something that matters, use their words rather than your summary of them.

Leave out other people’s business too. Notes about a child’s mum and dad, or about the neighbours, or about the other children in your house, do not belong in one child’s record. Use first names or initials, so a notebook left in a car boot does not identify anyone. If you find a factual error in something you wrote, correct it and show the correction, keeping the original visible. Never change a record because someone has asked you to, which comes up most often after an incident that was hard to handle. That one is not negotiable.

Keeping it safe, and what happens when a child moves on

Your records are covered by the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, which sounds heavier than it is in practice. A lockable drawer is the ideal. A folder marked private and confidential, kept somewhere only you go, is the version most carers actually manage. Set up a separate email address for everything to do with fostering. Anyone else living with you needs to understand what they can and cannot repeat about the child, which is a conversation worth having on day one rather than after something has been said at the school gates.

When a child moves on, the records go back to your fostering service, and you should not keep copies. Before you shred anything, get it in writing that they hold a copy and that you have the go-ahead to destroy yours. Carers sometimes hang on to a notebook out of affection, which is understandable and still the wrong call.

The part nobody wants to think about

Allegations are the fear that stops people applying, and we would rather give you the numbers than a reassuring noise. In 2024 to 2025 there were 2,860 allegations made against foster carers in England. Around 52% were resolved with no further action and about 17% ended with a period of agreed monitoring. The Department for Education estimates that 800 to 1,000 carers leave each year after going through the process, which is one reason it is consulting on handling allegations more supportively. One published proposal is that carers should keep access to records they wrote themselves, such as their own journals and logs, while a concern is being looked into.

Here is the blunt version. The five minutes you spend writing down what happened, on the ordinary days as well as the alarming ones, is the single most useful thing you can do to protect yourself. A contemporaneous note written before anyone knew it would matter carries weight that a memory reconstructed afterwards never will.

You won’t have to do this alone

Nobody at GLF expects you to arrive knowing how to write a record. Your supervising social worker will show you the format, read what you write, and say when you are putting in too much or too little, which almost everybody does at first. Recording is covered in Skills to Foster before you are ever approved, so you practise on the easy weeks before you need it on a hard one. It sits alongside everything else in the support our carers receive, including someone at the end of the phone out of hours.

It is also paid work, and we think it should be. GLF pays 479.50 pounds a week for a child under 11 and 507.50 pounds a week for a child aged 11 or over, per child while they are living with you, with an enhanced fee of roughly 100 to 200 pounds a week more for higher-needs homes. You can see how that is worked out on our fostering pay page. Ofsted inspected us from 21 to 25 July 2025 and rated us Outstanding in all three judgements, and the quality of recording across an agency is one of the things inspectors look at closely.

Frequently asked questions

How often do I have to write my records?

There is no single national rule. The minimum frequency is agreed at the child’s review, so your fostering service will tell you what is expected. Daily is the habit most experienced carers settle into, because detail fades fast and a week of catching up on a Sunday night is far more work than five minutes a day. Date every entry.

Will the child ever read what I have written?

Possibly, and you should write on the assumption that they will. A child’s case record is kept until the seventy-fifth anniversary of their birth, and anyone can ask for the information held about them and expect an answer within a month, free of charge. Children are meant to be encouraged to read their records and correct mistakes. Before handing anything directly to a child yourself, check with your supervising social worker.

Do I need to be good at writing?

No. Records should be clear, factual and short. Nobody is marking your grammar, and jargon makes a record worse. If writing is hard for you, say so early and your supervising social worker will find a way that suits you, whether that is bullet points, a voice note you type up later, or sitting down together for the first few weeks.