Family Finding, Befriending and Mentoring Preliminary Market Engagement Notice

The Enduring Relationships (ER) programme announced 4 June, will reform the children's social care system, by putting loving relationships at the heart of it. As part of this announcement, a national rollout of Family Finding has been announced. Family Finding (FF) programmes aim to ensure that children in care and young people leaving care have a positive, lasting support network of family and trusted adults throughout their lives. FF is focused on supporting children and young people in care to reconnect to loved ones and build a network of familial/close support. Previously, the Department for Education has run a Family Finding, Befriending and Mentoring (FFBM) programme, with FF funding provided for participating Local Authorities via grant funding between December 2023 until September 2026. The FFBM evaluation has shown that FF programmes created a statistically significant impact of an average of an additional 1.8 connections for participants, and demonstrates improvements in stability, wellbeing, and long-term outcomes; we want to continue this work by rolling out a FF programme on a larger scale. The Department seeks to procure a provider to deliver and embed a Family Finding (FF) model in eligible local authorities (LAs). The provider will provide leadership, training, technical support, and quality assurance to enable local authorities to embed FF sustainably. The provider will: • Have extensive knowledge of an FF model and experience of delivering a FF programme in a local authority. The FF model must have independent evidence and proven outcomes to demonstrate its effectiveness. • Scale FF to all eligible English LAs to support DfE’s ambition. • Deliver change quickly in LAs in the most impactful and direct way possible. • Build sustainable local authority capacity. • Monitor and assure quality of the FF programme. • Gather and share learning to support ongoing improvement. Please note that we anticipate there will be an expectation for the provider to raise philanthropic investment or match funding to support the delivery of this programme. Alongside the provider, an Evaluation Partner is being commissioned to independently evaluate the implementation, delivery, and impact of the programme on its intended outcomes. Whilst the evaluation design and methodology will be finalised with the evaluation partner, we anticipate the scope will contain an impact evaluation to assess the extent to which the programme achieves its intended outcomes and delivers measurable benefits. The provider must have proven expertise in delivering an evidence-based Family Finding model. This model must have clear evidence of providing a positive impact on participants. The supplier must have experience of delivering a FF model within a UK local authority setting and have detailed knowledge of the children’s social care sector. The provider should provide coordinated implementation support, including training delivery, quality assurance, and hands-on guidance to ensure adoption of the FF model across all participating local authorities. The provider shall proactively engage with local authorities to monitor progress, address challenges, and provide tailored support to strengthen delivery and outcomes We estimate that a maximum of 129 local authorities are likely to be eligible for the rollout. Eligibility is limited to those LAs that did not receive funding for a Family Finding programme under the FFBM. LAs who received Befriending and Mentoring funding only under the FFBM programme are eligible. Any LAs that already have a FF contract in place with the selected provider would be ineligible. To support this activity the DfE has committed £1.7 million for the current financial year, followed by a further £6.7 million for 2027–28, to enable the rollout of FF across eligible English local authorities.