The Mockingbird Family Model: How Foster Carers Support Each Other

Fostering can be busy and lonely at the same time. You can spend a whole day with a child and still have nobody to ring at half past nine in the evening, when nothing has gone badly wrong exactly, but the evening has been hard and you would like to say so to somebody who gets it. The Mockingbird family model is one answer to that problem. Here is what a constellation is, what the research found, what it did not find, and what you can put in place yourself whatever your agency does.

Please note: this is general information about a national programme, not advice about your own circumstances. Programme and funding figures are correct at 23 September 2026 and come from the Department for Education’s Renewing Fostering (February 2026) and from The Fostering Network, which runs Mockingbird in the UK.

What a constellation actually is

Mockingbird copies the shape of an extended family. One very experienced fostering household becomes the hub home. Six to ten other fostering households living nearby link to it, and those households are called satellites. Together, the hub and its satellites are a constellation. The Department for Education describes it in almost exactly those words: “a constellation of 6 to 10 satellite families supported by a hub home operated by an experienced foster carer”.

The model came from the United States. The Fostering Network runs it here, and licenses it to councils and agencies. A constellation normally has four parts:

• a hub home, run by experienced carers who are on call for the families linked to them
• six to ten satellite households, who do the same fostering everyone else does
• a liaison worker, the constellation’s line into the fostering service, ideally the supervising social worker for everyone in it
• the children and young people themselves, who get to know each other rather than being kept in separate households

Nothing about your approval changes. Satellite carers are foster carers with the same responsibilities, the same supervising social worker arrangements and the same pay as anyone else. What changes is who else is in the room.

What the hub home carer does

The hub carer is not a manager and is not an inspector. They are the person who has already made the mistake you are about to make, and they are close enough to drive over. Royal Greenwich, which has run constellations for ten years, describes a hub home as “a fostering household with at least two spare rooms, run by experienced foster carers who are always on call to offer advice and support to the families they are linked with”. Those two spare rooms are what makes sleepovers possible at short notice.

That two room requirement applies to hub homes, not to fostering in general. A baby under two can sleep in a cot in your own room, so a spare bedroom is not always the deciding factor. We cover that properly in our piece on whether you need a spare bedroom to foster.

What it looks like on an ordinary Wednesday

Most of what a constellation does is unglamorous. Somebody covers the school run because your car is in the garage. A child has a sleepover at the hub home on a Saturday so you can go to your niece’s wedding. A carer two streets away texts to say she had the same phone call from the same school and here is what she said back. Greenwich’s carers describe joint training and social events; one hub marked its seventh birthday with a shared meal and a few games.

Two things matter more than the rest. The first is that short breaks happen inside the constellation, so a child going for a sleepover is going to a house they already know, with adults they have eaten dinner with before. That is a very different experience from a break arranged with strangers, and every move a child makes costs them something. The second is that brothers and sisters who cannot live in the same home can sometimes live within the same constellation, which is not the same as living together, but it is a good deal closer than a supervised hour once a month.

What the research says, and what it does not

Mockingbird has been evaluated properly, which is rarer in fostering than it should be. The Rees Centre at the University of Oxford, with the University of York and York Consulting, published an evaluation for the Department for Education in September 2020. It covered 467 fostering households and 921 children and young people between April 2017 and March 2020. Two findings stand out. Carers taking part were less likely to de-register than carers who were not. And short breaks were rated good or excellent by 88 per cent of carers in the 2018 survey and 87 per cent in 2019, against 37 per cent in the comparison data.

Here is the part that most agency web pages leave out. On placement stability, the headline claim you see everywhere, the evaluation did not find a statistically significant difference once time in care was accounted for. The Fostering Network’s own reporting, covering 102 constellations up to March 2023, says 9.5 per cent of satellite carers would have resigned without the programme and that 16 per cent of the children involved would otherwise have had to move on from the home they were in. Those are useful numbers, but they come from what carers and workers reported rather than from a trial, and they should be read that way.

So the honest version is this. Mockingbird keeps carers in fostering and makes short breaks something a child can enjoy rather than dread. It has not been shown to stop homes coming to an end. That is still a good result, because a carer who stays is worth a great deal to the children who come after.

Where you will find it, and where you will not

The Fostering Network counted 220 constellations running in England, Wales and Scotland in February 2025. The government has put £8.9 million into 2026 to 2027 to create more than 100 new ones. Even so, the Department for Education says in the same document that Mockingbird “only reaches a small proportion of foster carers”, which is a candid thing for a department to write about its own flagship retention model.

Constellations sit with local authorities and with independent agencies, though government money for new ones has mostly gone through councils. In London, Royal Greenwich started in 2016 and now has five hubs. If you are choosing between fostering services, do ask whether a constellation exists near you. But do not let it be the whole question, because a constellation you are not in is worth nothing to you, and plenty of carers get the same things through an agency small enough to know them by name. The better question is what actually happens when you ring at half past nine on a Wednesday.

What you can build without a constellation

Our own guidance to carers makes the point that the useful parts of this model are not locked behind a licence. Three of them you can arrange yourself, starting in your first few months:

• build a small peer network. Most agencies run carer groups, in person or online. Find two or three people who live near you, and swap numbers rather than waiting for the next meeting
• find a mentor. Ask your supervising social worker to introduce you to a more experienced carer you can ring without making it a formal request for help
• ask about short breaks early, before you need one. Knowing who would look after a child for a weekend in August is much easier to sort out in March

None of that replaces a constellation. It does cover most of what carers say they get from one, and it costs nothing but a few awkward first conversations. If you want to know what an agency should be giving you as standard, we have set out the support foster carers receive in plain terms.

You won’t have to do this alone

Greater London Fostering is a small independent agency, and that shapes how our support works. You get a supervising social worker who knows your household rather than a case number, someone at the end of the phone out of hours, training you can actually get to, and carer groups where people compare notes about the same London boroughs and the same schools. When a day goes badly, and some days do, having somebody to talk it through with is usually what gets a household through the week.

On pay, we tell you the number before you ask. It is £479.50 a week for a child under 11 and £507.50 a week for a child aged 11 or over, paid per child while a child is living with you, with an enhanced fee of roughly £100 to £200 a week more where a child’s needs call for it. One weekly fee, no one off payments for birthdays. The detail is on our fostering pay page, alongside a fuller explanation of how foster carer pay works. Ofsted inspected us from 21 to 25 July 2025 and rated us Outstanding in all three judgements, which says more about the support than anything we could write about ourselves.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to be in a Mockingbird constellation to be properly supported?

No. A constellation is one way of organising support, and a good one, but it is not the only way. What you should expect from any fostering service is a supervising social worker who knows you, help you can reach outside office hours, training, and other carers to talk to. Ask any agency how each of those works in practice, and ask for specifics rather than adjectives.

Can an independent agency run a constellation, or is it only councils?

Both can. The Fostering Network licenses the model to local authorities and to independent fostering agencies, and several independent providers run constellations of their own. Government funding for new constellations has mostly gone through councils, which is why you will see more council schemes than agency ones.

Do I need a spare room to take part?

Hub homes are normally asked for two spare rooms, because they host sleepovers for the whole constellation. Ordinary fostering is a different question. A child of school age will usually need their own bedroom, but a baby under two can sleep in a cot in your room, and we are actively looking for carers who can look after babies. Talk to us before you rule yourself out on bedrooms.

Is Mockingbird just another word for respite?

Short breaks are part of it, but the difference is who provides them. In a constellation the break happens with the hub carers, who the child already knows from barbecues and training days, rather than with a household they have never met. Carers in the Oxford evaluation rated that arrangement far more highly than the usual alternative.