Can you foster brothers and sisters together?

If your home has room for more than one child, sooner or later somebody will ask whether you could take a brother and sister together. It is one of the most useful things a fostering household in Southern England can offer, and one of the least well explained. Here is what the law actually requires, how often brothers and sisters end up living apart, what caring for two or three at once really asks of a household, and what South Coast pays.

Please note: this is general information about fostering in England, not personal legal or financial advice. Payment figures are South Coast’s own published rates at the time of writing. Statutory references are to the law as it stands in September 2026.

The law tells councils to try, not that they will manage it

The duty sits in section 22C of the Children Act 1989, which governs where a child in care lives. Subsection (8) sets out what the local authority must ensure about the home a child is given:

“(8) The local authority must ensure that the placement is such that—(a) it allows C to live near C’s home; (b) it does not disrupt C’s education or training; (c) if C has a sibling for whom the local authority are also providing accommodation, it enables C and the sibling to live together; (d) if C is disabled, the accommodation provided is suitable to C’s particular needs.”

The Act calls a child’s home a placement and calls a brother or sister a sibling. Neither word is how children talk about their own lives, so the rest of this article uses plainer ones. Read on its own, paragraph (c) sounds absolute. It is not. The sentence that governs it, subsection (7)(b), tells the authority to comply with subsection (8) “so far as is reasonably practicable in all the circumstances of C’s case”.

That qualifier is doing a lot of work, and the contrast within the same section makes it obvious. The duty to find a child a home inside the council’s own area has to be met “unless that is not reasonably practicable”, which is a harder test to escape. Keeping brothers and sisters together is something councils must work towards wherever they can, and Parliament accepted in advance that sometimes they would not be able to. Whether they can usually comes down to one question: does a household exist with the room.

How often do brothers and sisters end up living apart?

More often than most people expect. The Children’s Commissioner for England examined this in research published in January 2023 and estimated that 37 per cent of children in care who have a brother or sister, around 20,000 children, are separated from them when they come into care. The proportion climbs with age. Among older young people living in semi-independent accommodation, 93 per cent were living apart from their brothers and sisters.

What children told the Commissioner about the reasons is the uncomfortable part. Separations frequently happened because nothing suitable was available, rather than because anyone had assessed that living apart was better for them. Where a larger group had to be split, the split was often made by age or by gender because that was judged more practical. Those are decisions that shape a childhood, and they were being taken around what the system could offer on the day.

The real reason is usually a spare room

The government’s own fostering paper, Renewing Fostering: homes for 10,000 more children, published in February 2026, is blunt about where the bottleneck sits. It reports that 31 per cent of fostering households cannot accept more children because of space, and that 28 per cent, just over 9,000 households, are approved to look after one child only. Its verdict on what that costs children is worth quoting in full: “This limits sibling placements which are critical for continuity, emotional security, and a sense of identity for children in care.” In plainer words, brothers and sisters are split up because there is nowhere with two beds.

The paper does more than name the problem. It commits “up to £25 million of capital funding over the next two years” to expand the homes of people who already foster, building on a scheme that has renovated 26 bedrooms in Greater Manchester. If you have been weighing up a loft conversion or a garage that could become a bedroom, it is worth asking your local authority and your agency whether anything similar is running near you.

It also means a household with two spare rooms, or one large enough for two, is unusually valuable. If that describes you, you are in a small minority of the people offering to foster.

The fostering limit, and the exception nobody mentions

People who ask about taking two or three children usually assume there is a legal ceiling, and they are right. CoramBAAF states it plainly: “Schedule 7 of the Children Act 1989 sets a limit of three on the number of children that a foster carer may foster at any one time.”

Here is the part almost no fostering website mentions. That limit can be exceeded where, in CoramBAAF’s words, “the children are all siblings of each other”, and no exemption is needed for it. Where the children are not all from the same family, the household needs a formal exemption granted by the local authority in whose area the carer lives, naming the specific children and setting out any conditions attached. Fosterline puts the same rule from the other end: every child counts as an individual child towards the limit of three, yet a household caring for four brothers and sisters is not over it.

The limit is not the only thing that decides what you can be asked to take. Your terms of approval, agreed when your assessment goes to fostering panel, set out the number and ages of children you are approved for, and CoramBAAF is careful to say that approval for four or more is kept for the household that genuinely has the accommodation and the capability. Think of the statutory limit as the outer boundary and your own approval as the real one. If you are still working out what yours might look like, our guide to the fostering assessment walks through how those terms get set.

Together is not automatically the right answer

An honest article has to say this, and most recruitment pages do not. CoramBAAF’s practice guide Beyond Together or Apart, which covers planning for and assessing groups of brothers and sisters, is unsentimental about the evidence. Its governing principle, drawn from Featherstone and colleagues in 2018, is that “In principle, siblings should be placed together, but an individualised and nuanced response is vital.” On the research base itself the guide is franker still: “Overall, the research in the area of sibling placement is, however, only marginally favourable to sibling placement together.”

That is not an argument for splitting children up. It is an argument for assessing the particular relationship in front of you rather than assuming it. Some brothers and sisters have effectively raised each other and will not settle anywhere apart. Others have spent years being set against each other, and one of them cannot begin to recover while the other is in the room. A proper assessment asks which of those is true before anybody decides, and the same thinking runs through how children and carers are matched.

What matters just as much is what the children are told afterwards. The guide sets out a charter written in the child’s own voice, and three of its lines are a fair description of the job if a child in your home has a brother or sister living elsewhere: “I know why it wasn’t possible to place us together”, “I know where my brothers and sisters are living”, and “I have information and explanations in my life story book about my brothers and sisters”.

What changes under the 2026 Act

The National Minimum Standards for fostering services, the rulebook every agency in England works to, has remarkably little to say about any of this. Brothers and sisters appear twice in the entire document, both times in the context of keeping family relationships alive, and nowhere does it require a fostering service to keep a group of them together. For a rulebook that devotes whole standards to bedroom sizes and to record keeping, that is a real gap.

It is now being filled from a different direction. In March 2026 the Department for Education announced that councils in England and Wales will be required to promote and make possible regular family time for children in care who are living apart from their brothers and sisters, including half and step brothers and sisters, unless doing so would not be in the children’s best interests. The provision sits in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026. The Children’s Minister, Josh MacAlister, called it “a travesty” that children can lose touch with their brothers and sisters when they come into care, and said the government wanted those relationships “maintained wherever possible for the sake of their emotional stability and their futures”.

Like much of that Act, this part depends on commencement regulations before it takes effect in practice, so the date it starts to bite is worth checking rather than assuming. The direction of travel is not in doubt. Statutory guidance already points the same way: the Children Act 1989 guidance on care planning tells councils that staying close to brothers and sisters, whether they share both parents or one, “is reported by children to be one of their highest priorities”, and that where they cannot live together it “requires the active involvement of all parties”.

What it actually asks of you

Two children is not one child twice over, and anyone who has done it will tell you the same. None of what follows is a reason not to offer. It is the honest shape of the week.

• Mornings are the hardest hour. Two school runs to two different schools, two book bags, and two children who each need a calm adult at exactly the same moment.
• One child’s needs will try to eclipse the other’s. The louder distress wins unless you deliberately make room for the quieter one.
• Time alone with each of them has to be planned. Twenty minutes each, reliably, every day, does more than a shared day out once a month.
• The older one may have been doing the parenting. A nine year old who has been getting her brother’s breakfast for two years does not stop the week she moves in, and telling her to stop is rarely the answer. Letting her hand the job over slowly usually is.
• They will argue in front of you. Some of it is ordinary and some of it is the rehearsal of something much older, and it takes a while to tell them apart.
• The paperwork doubles. You keep a separate record for each child even on the days when everything happened to both of them at once, which our guide to what foster carers have to write down covers in detail.

Set against all of that is the one thing no adult can manufacture. A child who arrives with a brother or sister arrives with somebody who already knows them, who remembers the same kitchen and the same jokes and the same bad night. That is continuity nobody in the system can supply, which is precisely why the government’s own paper calls it critical to a child’s sense of identity.

What South Coast pays when two children live with you

South Coast pays a weekly amount for each child rather than a rate for the household, and we re-checked these figures on our own fostering payments page before publishing:

• £479.50 a week for a child aged 0 to 10, per child
• £507.50 a week for a child aged 11 or over, per child

Each weekly payment combines an allowance towards the child’s everyday costs with a professional fee for your role. Two brothers aged six and nine living with you would therefore be £959 a week between them. We also offer a council tax contribution, and we will talk you through how that and anything else agreed would apply to your household rather than leaving you to guess.

Fostering income is covered by Qualifying Care Relief, and most foster carers pay little or no tax on it. Our article on whether foster carers pay tax explains how the relief works and why the thresholds rise for each additional child in your home. One thing to plan for either way: a home is never guaranteed to be full, and there can be quiet spells between children.

You won’t have to do this alone

Nobody expects a household to take two or three children on instinct. Every South Coast carer has a named supervising social worker who knows the family rather than just the file, and our out of hours line, 023 8235 2020, is answered by a person at three in the morning as well as at three in the afternoon. If a group is too much to start with, there are other ways in: short break fostering asks for a weekend at a time, and our guide to the different types of foster care sets out what each one involves.

We cover Hampshire, Dorset, Sussex, Kent, Surrey, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Somerset, Bristol and the Isle of Wight, and the brothers and sisters waiting for one address between them are in those counties now. As we put it on the rest of this site, a child isn’t just given a home, they’re given a chance. When there are two of them, it is a chance to stay a family as well. You can read more about the support that comes with fostering here before you decide anything.

Frequently asked questions

Do brothers and sisters need a bedroom each?

Not always. The National Minimum Standards expect a child over three to have their own bedroom, but they allow two children to share where each child’s local authority agrees and each child has their own space within the room. Under threes can share with an adult, and a baby under two can sleep in a cot in your own room. Our article on whether you need a spare bedroom to foster goes through the rule properly, and fostering a baby covers the sleeping arrangements for the youngest children.

How many brothers and sisters can you foster at once?

The usual fostering limit under Schedule 7 to the Children Act 1989 is three children at any one time. Where all the children are from the same family that limit does not apply, so a household can care for four or more without needing an exemption. Where they are not all from the same family, the local authority where you live can grant an exemption naming the specific children. Your own terms of approval, set at panel, still decide what you are actually asked to take.

Are you paid for each child?

Yes. South Coast pays per child per week, currently £479.50 for a child aged 0 to 10 and £507.50 for a child aged 11 or over, and the payment combines an allowance for the child’s costs with a professional fee for your role.

What happens if only one of them can live with you?

Then keeping the relationship alive becomes part of your role. Statutory guidance already treats family time between brothers and sisters as one of children’s highest priorities, and the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 places a clearer duty on councils to promote and arrange it. In practice that means regular time together, knowing where the other one lives, and having the reasons recorded somewhere the child can read later.

Can you foster brothers and sisters if you already have children of your own?

Many people do. Your own children’s ages and their own views are part of the assessment, and a household that already runs on the rhythm of more than one child often manages a group well. It is a conversation to have early rather than a barrier, and it is one we would rather have honestly than gloss over.