University of Sunderland and Team Fostering KTP 24_25 R3

Foster care agencies in the UK are still tracking placements, payments, and carer approvals on paper or in spreadsheets, and this project will replace those manual systems with a single digital platform. This matters because the social care sector is chronically under-digitised. Foster care involves dozens of moving parts—matching children to carers, logging training records, managing allowances, and maintaining compliance with Ofsted regulations—and doing this by hand wastes time and risks errors that can delay a placement or cause a child to bounce between homes. The University of Sunderland is partnering with Team Fostering, a private fostering agency, to build a system that automates these workflows and gives managers real-time data on carer availability, placement stability, and financial reporting. If the system works, it could cut administrative overhead significantly, allowing social workers to spend more time with families and less time on paperwork. The same platform model could then be adopted by other agencies across the UK, quietly improving the infrastructure that keeps foster care running. This is applied research with a direct operational target—there is no fundamental science component, and the impact is measured in efficiency gains and better decision-making for vulnerable children.