Practice Reflection
Ask a kinship carer partway through their assessment what the hardest part is and they rarely say the sessions. They say the waiting. The sessions finish, the forms go back, and then everything seems to stop, with no way of knowing whether the assessment is nearly done or stuck in a queue somewhere that nobody owns.
Having completed a great many connected persons and kinship assessments, I can tell you that most delays are not caused by the carer, and they are rarely caused by the assessment itself. They happen in the gaps between organisations, where a form can sit in an inbox for three weeks because everyone assumes someone else is chasing it. I want to explain where those gaps are, partly because families going through this deserve to understand what is happening, and partly because most of these delays are avoidable.
When a court orders a connected persons or kinship assessment, several organisations each hold a piece of it. As the independent social worker, I complete the assessment itself: the sessions with the carer, the home visits, the interviews with other household members, the personal and ex-partner references, and the report. If you want the detail of what that involves, my guide to connected persons assessments walks through it step by step.
What I cannot do, and this surprises many people, is the statutory checks. DBS checks, the medical report from the carer's GP, and local authority records checks can only be initiated by the local authority or children's trust. There is usually a business support team responsible for creating the applicant pack, setting up the DBS application, sending out the statutory reference requests, and passing the medical to their medical advisor once the GP returns it. The fostering panel then needs the whole package, assessment and checks together, by a paperwork deadline that sits some weeks before the panel date itself.
So the answer to "who is doing my assessment?" is really four answers: the assessor, the business support team, the GP surgery, and the panel administrator. Any one of them can hold the whole thing up.
The same pinch points appear across the country, and none of them are anyone's headline failure. The applicant pack can take weeks to reach the carer after the court order, because it has to be created, checked, and sent by a team handling dozens of assessments at once. The GP medical is often the slowest single item: surgeries deal with these forms rarely, some charge a fee that has to be authorised before anything happens, and routine appointment backlogs do the rest. DBS applications stall on identity verification. Statutory reference requests go out late, or sit unanswered in a referee's inbox because nobody warned them the request was coming.
None of this is dramatic. That is exactly the problem. No single failure looks serious on its own, so nothing triggers an alarm. Three weeks here, a fortnight there, and suddenly the panel date has gone and the court timetable is in trouble.
Care proceedings run on a statutory 26 week clock, and courts guard it firmly. A kinship assessment usually needs to land in time for the parties to read it, respond to it, and build a care plan around it before the final hearing. Every week lost to an unsent form is a week taken from that process.
A missed fostering panel might sound like an administrative inconvenience. It is not. Panels often sit fortnightly or monthly, so missing one paperwork deadline can add six weeks to the timetable at a stroke. And behind all of it there is a child in a placement everyone agrees is temporary, waiting to find out whether they are moving to live with their gran. Children measure that kind of waiting differently to adults. A month is an age when you are eight.
Hoping the system will sort itself out is not a strategy, so a good assessor builds the chasing into the assessment itself. That means raising the statutory checks in writing at the very start and asking who owns each one. Confirming agreed actions by email, with dates, so there is a record. Chasing politely and persistently. And keeping the parties informed early when a timetable is coming under pressure, rather than presenting them with a surprise at the filing date.
None of that is about catching anyone out. Business support teams are under-resourced and juggling dozens of assessments at once, and the individual officers involved are almost always trying their best inside a creaking process. The assessments that stay on track are simply the ones where the outstanding items are named early, owned clearly, and chased visibly.
Move fast on everything you control. Return the assessment agreement form the week it arrives. Book the GP medical the day the pack lands, and tell the surgery it is a fostering medical so they pull up the right form rather than booking you a standard appointment. Choose referees who will actually reply, and warn them the request is coming. Keep a simple log of what you sent and when, because if things drift, that log matters.
And if everything goes quiet, ask your solicitor, or the child's solicitor, to ask the local authority exactly which checks are outstanding and who owns each one. That single question, asked formally, unsticks more assessments than anything else I know. If you are heading towards a Special Guardianship Order, my SGO assessment guide explains what comes next once the assessment itself is done.
Do not settle for "the checks are in progress". Ask for a schedule of outstanding items with a named owner and a date against each one. If the timetable is slipping, a short directions hearing that fixes those dates achieves more than any amount of informal chasing. Courts are receptive to this, because judges have seen exactly this pattern before and would far rather tighten a timetable at week eight than discover a hole in it at week twenty.
It is also worth asking the assessor directly what is holding things up. We usually know, and in some detail. The difference between a connected persons assessment and a mainstream fostering assessment matters here too. If you are not sure how the two differ, I have written about that separately.
A kinship assessment done well can change the whole shape of a child's life. It deserves proper time: time to sit with a carer and understand their history, time to see the child in their company, time to test the support network rather than take it on trust. I will never apologise for that part of the timescale.
But the weeks lost to unsent packs, unowned checks, and unanswered phone lines are different. They add nothing, they cost children time they do not get back, and they are fixable with nothing more sophisticated than clear ownership and early honesty. That is not a systems reform programme. It is a list, a set of names, and a set of dates. Every case I have seen stay on track had one.
Last reviewed: July 2026
A court-directed connected persons assessment is typically completed within 8 to 12 weeks of instruction. The assessment sessions themselves are only part of that. Statutory checks including DBS, GP medicals, and local authority records checks run alongside and are frequently the last items to arrive.
The local authority or children's trust, not the independent assessor. An ISW cannot initiate statutory DBS checks, GP medical reports, or local authority records checks. The assessor completes the assessment sessions, personal and ex-partner references, and the report itself.
A party may need to apply to the court to extend the filing date or seek directions, or the report may have to be filed noting the material still outstanding. Courts expect to be told early when checks are drifting, not on the day the report is due.
Yes. Return the assessment agreement form quickly, book the GP medical as soon as the pack arrives, give referee details for people who will actually reply, and keep a simple log of what you have sent and when. If things go quiet, ask your solicitor to request a list of outstanding checks with a named owner for each one.