Can you foster a child you might go on to adopt?

Some people come to fostering hoping it will lead to adoption. Others come to adoption and are asked whether they would take a child home earlier, before the courts have decided anything. Both roads meet at the same place: a route called early permanence, where a child goes to live with the family who may end up raising them for good, while the outcome is still genuinely open. This article explains what that means in law, what it asks of the adults who do it, and what South Coast Fostering can and cannot offer if it is what you are looking for.

Please note: this is general information about the law in England, not advice about any particular child or family. Figures are the most recent published at the time of writing and are attributed to their source. If you are weighing up fostering against adoption, speak to a local authority, an adoption agency or a fostering service before you commit to anything.

What early permanence actually means

Early permanence is an umbrella term for two arrangements that look similar from the outside and differ in the paperwork underneath. In both, a baby or young child who is the subject of court proceedings goes to live with adults who have been approved as adopters, rather than moving first to one foster family and then, months later, to another. The child gets one set of arms instead of two. The adults carry the risk that a court may decide the child should go back to their family.

Coram, which runs the national early permanence information service, separates the two routes plainly. In concurrent planning, the carers are “dually approved as both foster carers and adopters and it is therefore possible to place children during proceedings”. In fostering for adoption, a provision introduced in 2014, the agency decision maker temporarily approves “adopter/s as foster carers for a particular child during proceedings”. Either way, the child is legally in foster care for as long as the case runs, and the adults are legally foster carers, whatever their longer hope may be.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. Until an adoption order is made the child is in care and the local authority shares responsibility for them. Family time goes ahead as the court directs, and the adults looking after the child keep daily records and attend reviews like any other foster carer. It is fostering. What is different is who is doing it and why.

The duty that sits behind it

Early permanence is not a scheme somebody invented. It is written into the Children Act 1989. Section 22C(9A) applies where a local authority “are considering adoption for C, or are satisfied that C ought to be placed for adoption but are not authorised” to do so yet. Where it applies, section 22C(9B) says the authority:

“(b) must consider placing C with an individual within subsection (6)(a), and (c) where the local authority decide that a placement with such an individual is not the most appropriate placement for C, the local authority must consider placing C with a local authority foster parent who has been approved as a prospective adopter.”

Read that in order and you can see the thinking. A relative or family friend who is already an approved foster carer comes first. If that is not right for the child, the authority has to at least consider an approved adopter. The authority has to weigh it rather than do it, and the duty bites at the moment adoption first comes onto the table rather than at the end of the case.

The practical machinery sits in the Care Planning, Placement and Case Review (England) Regulations 2010, where regulation 25A lets a local authority temporarily approve an approved adopter as a foster carer for one named child. It can only do that where the most appropriate home for the child is with someone “who is not approved as a local authority foster parent, but who is an approved prospective adopter” and where it “is in C’s best interests to be placed with that person”. Before approving, the authority must assess that person’s suitability to care for the child as a foster carer and consider whether the arrangements will safeguard and promote the child’s welfare.

The same regulation sets out how that temporary approval ends, and the list is worth reading before you agree to anything. It stops on any of five events:

• the authority ends the arrangement;
• the person’s approval as an adopter ends;
• they are approved as a foster carer in the ordinary way;
• the child is placed for adoption;
• or the carer gives written notice, which takes effect 28 days after the authority receives it.

How long the uncertainty lasts

This is the part most pages skate over, so here are the real numbers. Parliament set a 26 week limit on care proceedings in the Children and Families Act 2014, with extensions of up to eight weeks at a time. Reality has never matched it. The Ministry of Justice’s Family Court Statistics Quarterly for January to March 2026 records that the average time for a care and supervision case to be disposed of was 37 weeks, two weeks faster than the same quarter a year earlier, and that 36 per cent of care proceedings finished inside the 26 week limit.

So the honest planning assumption is not six months. It is closer to nine, with a real chance of longer, and the evaluation of the national early permanence programme published in April 2026 found exactly that pressure: proceedings “becoming more protracted” meant carers were “having to manage uncertainty for much longer” than the model originally assumed. Anyone telling you this is a quick route to adoption is selling you something.

What the numbers say about how it ends

Adoption England commissioned an evaluation of eleven early permanence projects running from April 2022 to March 2025, carried out by the Institute of Public Care at Oxford Brookes University and published in April 2026. It is the best current picture in England, and it is more encouraging than most people expect.

• 530 children went to live with early permanence carers in 2024/25, around 19.3 per cent of all adoptions that year.
• The equivalent figures were 500 children and 17.5 per cent in 2021/22, so the share has grown, slowly.
• The evaluation estimates that most children in early permanence arrangements go on to be adopted, and that around 4 per cent return to the care of their family.

Roughly one child in twenty-five goes back to their family. Small odds are still odds, and the whole point of the model is that an adult absorbs that risk so a baby does not have to move house twice. One carer quoted in the evaluation put it better than any brochure: “we had the strength to take on that risk on behalf of the child because the purpose of Early Permanence is us taking on that risk”.

It is worth setting those figures next to the alternative. Department for Education statistics for the year ending 31 March 2025 show 3,040 children adopted from care, and an average of about two years and three months between a child coming into care and an adoption order being made. Early permanence does not shorten the legal process. It changes where the child spends it.

What it asks of you

The Oxford Brookes evaluation is blunt about the cost to the adults. It describes early permanence as an emotionally demanding route marked by uncertainty, and concludes that it is a complex option for carers, carrying “a significant level of emotional stress”. One carer who was offered therapeutic counselling said the service “was offered to us at a time when we were almost at breaking point”.

The specific demands are not the ones people imagine. They are these.

• Supporting family time with the child’s parents, and doing it warmly, while hoping the court reaches a different conclusion.
• Keeping daily records that may be read in court.
• Telling friends and family something truthful without inviting a running commentary on whether you will get to keep the baby.
• Holding two futures in your head at once for the better part of a year.
• Being assessed on how you would manage if the child left, which Coram says the adopter assessment should cover directly.

If that list makes you hesitate, that is a reasonable response and not a disqualification. The people who do this well tend to be the ones who took the risk seriously in advance rather than the ones who assumed it away.

If the child goes home

For about one family in twenty-five, the court decides the child should return to a parent or a relative. The National Minimum Standards for fostering services do not spell out early permanence anywhere, which is itself telling, but two of them apply squarely. Standard 11 requires that children leaving a foster family are helped to understand why, and supported through the move. Standard 11.6 adds that “foster carers are supported to maintain links with children moving on, consistent with their care plan”.

That last line is small and it matters. A child who leaves your house does not have to vanish from your life, and a good service will help you work out what staying in touch can look like. Your supervising social worker’s job at that point is not to congratulate you on a job well done and move on. It is to sit with you.

Who arranges early permanence, and where we fit

Early permanence carers are approved as adopters, and adopters are approved by adoption agencies: local authorities and voluntary adoption agencies. South Coast Fostering is an independent fostering agency covering Hampshire, Dorset, Sussex, Kent, Surrey, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Somerset, Bristol and the Isle of Wight, and we do not place children for adoption. If early permanence is what you want, the route runs through your local authority or an adoption agency, and we would rather tell you that plainly than keep you talking.

What we can do is the other half of the same question. Plenty of people who arrive asking about adoption actually want what long-term fostering offers: raising a child through their childhood without severing their legal relationship with their family. We have written about the difference between fostering and adoption in detail, and about the different types of foster care, including the long-term and permanent arrangements that make up about four in ten of ours.

Two of those types sit close to this question. Fostering a baby often means caring for a child whose long-term plan has not been decided yet, and parent and child fostering is the arrangement in which a parent is given the chance to show they can care for their baby with support. Both involve living with an open outcome, which is the skill early permanence asks for.

Fostering first, adopting later

There is a second route to the same outcome and it starts from where you already are. A foster carer can apply to adopt a child who is living with them. It is not common and it is not a plan you can make in advance, because the child’s plan is set by their local authority and reviewed by a court, not by you. It does happen, though, and one of our own carers has told the story of going from fostering to adoption on this site.

The law sets how long the child must have lived with you first. Under section 42 of the Adoption and Children Act 2002, a child placed with you by an adoption agency must have had their home with you for ten weeks before you apply. A local authority foster carer applying in their own right must wait a year, unless the court gives permission to apply sooner. A partner of the child’s parent waits six months, and in other cases the period is three of the previous five years.

Two National Minimum Standards support you while that question is live. Standard 15.1 says a fostering service only suggests a carer as a match for a child “if the foster carer can reasonably be expected to meet the child’s assessed needs and the impact of the placement on existing household members has been considered”. Standard 15.3 is the one worth remembering: “Once placed, a child is not removed from a foster carer who is willing and able to continue caring for the child, unless that is in their best interests.” Stability, in other words, is the default rather than the favour.

Questions worth asking before you say yes

Whether you are talking to an adoption agency about early permanence or to us about long-term fostering, the same handful of questions will tell you most of what you need to know.

• How many of these arrangements has this service supported in the last two years, and how did they end?
• Who is my social worker while the case runs, and who answers the phone at 11pm?
• What therapeutic support is available to me, not just to the child, and is it funded?
• What happens to my approval if the child returns to their family, and can I carry on?
• How will family time be arranged, who supervises it, and how much of my week will it take?
• What will I actually be told about the case, and when?

If a service cannot answer the fourth and the sixth without hedging, keep asking. Those are the two that catch people out.

You won’t have to do this alone

Whichever of these routes turns out to be yours, the thing that makes it survivable is the support around you rather than your own reserves of patience. Every South Coast carer has a named supervising social worker with a manageable caseload, out of hours advice at any time of night, and training that starts before approval and carries on afterwards. You can read more about the support you get as a South Coast foster carer, and about what the fostering assessment involves if you are at the stage of working out whether any of this is for you.

We would rather have a twenty minute conversation that ends with us pointing you somewhere else than sign up a family who wanted something different. A child isn’t just given a home, they’re given a chance, and that is as true of the child who goes back to their parents as it is of the child who stays.

Frequently asked questions

Is fostering for adoption the same as concurrent planning?

No, although they are both early permanence and they feel much the same day to day. In concurrent planning the adults are dually approved as foster carers and as adopters. In fostering for adoption they are approved adopters whom the agency decision maker temporarily approves as foster carers for one particular child, using regulation 25A of the Care Planning, Placement and Case Review (England) Regulations 2010.

How likely is it that the child goes back to their family?

The Adoption England evaluation published in April 2026 estimates that around 4 per cent of children in early permanence arrangements return to their family, with most going on to be adopted. That is roughly one in twenty-five. It is a small risk and it is a real one, and the model exists precisely so that an adult carries it rather than a baby.

How long will I be waiting for a decision?

Longer than the law intends. Care proceedings are meant to conclude within 26 weeks, but the Ministry of Justice reported an average of 37 weeks for January to March 2026, with only 36 per cent of cases finishing inside the limit. Plan for the best part of a year and treat anything faster as a bonus.

Can I do early permanence through South Coast Fostering?

Not directly. Early permanence carers are approved as adopters, and that approval comes from a local authority or a voluntary adoption agency rather than from an independent fostering agency like ours. If it is the long-term care of a child you are after, rather than the legal change of parenthood, then long-term fostering with us may be closer to what you want than you think. We are happy to talk it through either way.

Can a foster carer adopt a child already living with them?

Yes, though it is not something you can plan for at the outset, because the child’s plan is decided by their local authority and the court. Section 42 of the Adoption and Children Act 2002 requires a local authority foster carer to have had the child living with them for at least a year before applying, unless the court gives permission to apply earlier.