Foster carers needed in Basingstoke
South Coast Fostering is recruiting foster carers in Basingstoke and the villages around it, including Chineham, Old Basing, Oakley, Bramley, Sherfield on Loddon, Kingsclere and Tadley. Children from Basingstoke who come into care are placed by Hampshire County Council, which runs children's services for the whole county apart from Southampton and Portsmouth.
In February 2026, 372 Hampshire children were living with independent fostering agencies rather than council carers, roughly 40 per cent of the county's fostering placements. Two in five is not a fringe arrangement, and it is worth knowing before you assume fostering means applying to the council. Hampshire was looking after 1,711 children altogether in May 2026, 21 more than a year earlier, on council figures reported by the Local Democracy Reporting Service that June.
Ofsted rated Hampshire's children's services Outstanding after a short inspection in June 2024. That was under the overall effectiveness judgement Ofsted stopped issuing on 1 April 2026, so read it as a grade with a date attached. A well-run department still cannot place a child with a carer who does not exist.
Sharron is the supervising social worker for Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, so she is the person you would work with in Basingstoke. Supervision visits happen at least monthly, and she sees the child at least every eight weeks. The phone line is staffed round the clock, 365 days a year, with a dedicated out-of-hours team.
Ofsted inspected South Coast Fostering over five days in January 2026 and rated the agency Outstanding in all three judgement areas, with no requirements and no recommendations. Just over 20 families were fostering with us in July 2026.
What fostering pays, and how it fits around a job, is set out further down this page. If you would rather just ask, ring 023 8235 2020.
What do you need to be a foster carer?
Assessment starts with the house. You need a bedroom that will be the child’s and nobody else’s, and it needs to stay that way. Applicants fostering a baby get some latitude at the outset, since a baby can sleep in a crib alongside you, but the room has to exist.
Then your week. School runs happen twice a day. Review meetings and health appointments land inside working hours, and six weeks of summer needs covering. A commute that puts you an hour from home with no way back before evening is hard to reconcile with the role, and it is worth being honest with yourself about that early.
What is being assessed after that is whether you are steady enough for a child to predict what happens next. You will be asked about your own childhood, your relationships and your money. The process is more personal than most applicants expect, and it takes months.
Support you'll receive from us
- 24/7 support from your supervising social worker
- £507.50 a week in fostering allowance and fees to foster
- Intensive training program to help you be the best you can be
Where are we recruiting?
In Basingstoke itself, and out across Basingstoke and Deane: Chineham, Old Basing, Oakley, Overton, Bramley, Sherborne St John, Sherfield on Loddon, North Waltham, Kingsclere, Tadley, Silchester and Whitchurch, plus Hook and Odiham just over the Hart boundary.
The borough recorded 185,200 residents at the 2021 Census, a rise of 10.4 per cent since 2011. That number covers the whole borough rather than the town, because no official town-only population is published for Basingstoke.
So the area is growing, and Hampshire’s number of children in care rose again in the year to May 2026. Carers in and around Basingstoke let those children keep the same school and the same friends. A placement forty miles away costs them both.
If you live in the borough and have a spare room, start with a phone call on 023 8235 2020. Our coverage across the rest of the county is set out on the Hampshire fostering page.
Basingstoke
Next Steps
Depending on where you are in your fostering journey, we have a few suggested next steps.
Download Our Guide To Fostering
Arrange for a call back
Ask us a question via whatsapp
We keep your personal information safe, and only use it to contact you in the way you’ve asked us to.
Fostering around a working week
Basing View sits a short walk from Basingstoke station. The borough council describes it as a 65-acre business park with more than 180 national and international businesses and around 4,500 people at work. Network Rail, Waitrose, The AA, BNP Paribas, WSP and the Ministry of Defence all have offices there. Eli Lilly’s 45,000 square foot headquarters building is finished, and The Grosvenor stacks 56,000 square feet of offices into eleven storeys.
Plenty of Basingstoke’s working population travels further. The town sits on junctions 6 and 7 of the M3, with the A339 coming in from Newbury and the A33 from Reading, and Love Basingstoke, the town centre partnership, puts London Waterloo at 50 minutes by direct train. Trains also run to Reading, Oxford, Southampton, Portsmouth and Bournemouth.
Which is the objection we hear most. People have the spare room. They do not believe they can afford to drop their hours.
The numbers deserve a proper look. Fostering pays £479.50 a week for a child aged 0 to 10 and £507.50 for a child of 11 or over, per child. Additional needs placements pay between £550 and £850. Parent and child placements pay £987. Council tax is covered to between £330 and £1,500 a year, rising the longer you foster. Most of that income falls under HMRC’s qualifying care relief and is not taxed, which means putting it side by side with a gross salary understates it. A good number of people find the arithmetic works better than they had assumed.
That is not the whole picture and we will not pretend otherwise. Fostering is not something you clock out of, and the first months of a placement are the hardest work most carers have done. But if the mortgage is the only thing in the way, ring 023 8235 2020 and we will go through it with you. Details of our wider coverage are on the Hampshire fostering page.
book a call about fostering:
We’d be happy to give you a 15-20 minute call to tell you about fostering. Don’t worry, there’s no pressure from us – it’s honestly a chance for you to ask us any questions you have about fostering, and your suitability. Just complete this short form
