Foster carers needed in Southampton
South Coast Fostering is looking for foster carers in Southampton and the neighbourhoods around it, from Woolston and Bitterne across to Redbridge, Totton and Marchwood. Southampton runs its own children's services as a unitary authority, separate from the county, so a child taken into care here is placed by the city council.
The city had 249,000 residents at the 2021 Census, up 5.1 per cent on 2011. It is not an easy place to be a child on a low income. The Department for Work and Pensions put 24.7 per cent of Southampton children aged 0 to 15 in relative low-income families in 2023/24, against 22.0 per cent across England. In 2024/25 the Department for Education recorded 37.9 per cent of the city's pupils as eligible for free school meals, against 25.7 per cent nationally.
Southampton had 142 fostering households at 31 March 2025. A year earlier it had 168, and in 2017 it had 255. The city council's scrutiny panel set out the consequence in September 2025: "With fewer carers, there is greater risk that siblings will be separated, children may be placed out of area or into residential care." That sentence is the reason this page exists.
We pay £479.50 a week for a child aged 0 to 10 and £507.50 for a child aged 11 or over. Additional needs placements run from £550 to £850, parent and child £987. There is £330 to £1,500 a year towards council tax, rising with length of service, and most fostering income is tax free under HMRC's qualifying care relief.
Your supervising social worker would be Sharron, who covers Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. She visits at least every four weeks and sees the child at least every eight. Telephone advice runs 24 hours a day, every day of the year, backed by a dedicated out-of-hours team.
Ofsted inspected South Coast Fostering in January 2026 and rated us Outstanding in all three judgement areas, with no requirements and no recommendations. Just over 20 families were fostering with us in July 2026. Call 023 8235 2020 if you want to talk it through.
What do you need to be a foster carer?
A spare bedroom and time. Those are the two things that decide whether an application gets anywhere. The bedroom has to be the child’s own room, not a box room shared with one of your own children. If you are applying to foster a baby that requirement relaxes at the start, since a baby can sleep in a crib in your room, but you will need the room eventually.
Time is the harder one. School runs sit at both ends of the working day. Contact sessions get arranged around the birth family’s availability rather than yours. There are review meetings and health appointments, and six weeks of summer to cover. Plenty of foster carers keep a job, but it has to be a job that lets you leave at short notice.
After that it is temperament. You will be holding a routine together while a child tests whether it is real. You do not have to be unflappable. You do have to be predictable, and you have to be willing to take advice from people who have seen this before.
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
Southampton
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
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Fostering in a port city
Southampton’s economy runs on the water. Associated British Ports says the port supports 45,600 jobs and contributes £2.5 billion to the national economy each year. It handles 600,000 vehicles, more than any other UK port, and £40 billion of exports. It is also Europe’s leading turnaround cruise port, with five terminals and around three million passengers a year; 2025 brought 449 ship calls and a second consecutive year above three million. Add University Hospital Southampton, with more than 12,000 staff and specialist services reaching 3.7 million people across central southern England and the Channel Islands, and you have a city that works shifts.
That matters for fostering. Shift work and fostering can sit together, but only if somebody is home for the school run and free at two in the afternoon when a social worker rings. If you and a partner can stagger your hours, that is often the thing that makes it possible.
Deprivation in the city is uneven. The 2025 English Indices of Deprivation, published on 30 October 2025, put Southampton 76th most deprived of 296 local authorities, in the third decile nationally and 21 places better off than under the 2019 indices. Even so, 18 of the city’s neighbourhoods sit in the most deprived tenth of England, and 24.3 per cent of residents live in the two most deprived deciles. The council’s own analysis names Woolston, Thornhill and Redbridge as its most deprived wards, and Bassett, Bitterne Park and Portswood as its least.
Ofsted had already named the cause. Inspecting Southampton City Council’s children’s services in June 2023, it rated them Good overall with leadership Outstanding, and recorded that “successful recruitment is not yet leading to a larger pool of carers because of the numbers who are leaving the service”. Read that grade with its date, because Ofsted replaced the framework behind it in April 2026. The council was looking after 488 children in 2023/24. The national carer base is shrinking as well, though nothing like as fast: Ofsted’s national count was 42,190 fostering households in England on 31 March 2025, 1 per cent down on the year and 7 per cent down since 2021.
We are recruiting across Southampton and out into the settlements on the city’s edge: Totton, Marchwood, Hythe, Nursling, Rownhams, North Baddesley and Romsey to the west and north, Woolston, Netley, Bursledon and Hamble-le-Rice to the east. A carer in Totton can keep a child at the same Southampton school. A carer two counties away cannot. That is the whole argument for recruiting locally.
From April 2028 Southampton and Eastleigh become one council, South West Hampshire, following the government’s decision of 25 March 2026, with elections in May 2027. The boundary a child’s paperwork sits behind will change. The need for somebody in Shirley or Bitterne with a spare room will not.
More on our coverage across the county is on our Hampshire fostering page, or call 023 8235 2020.
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
