Special guardianship allowance calculator

About this site

My name is Patricia Hughes. In 2024 I became a special guardian for my granddaughter, after she had been living with me as a kinship foster child.

Why I built this

Because I could not check my own allowance, and nobody would show me how it had been worked out.

She had been with me for some time before the Special Guardianship Order was made. By then we had a routine. School, meals, homework, appointments, and all the ordinary things that come with raising a child.

The order changed the legal arrangement. I did not expect it to change something as important as the money without anyone explaining why.

At one meeting I was told what my new allowance would be.

£127 a week.

I wrote it down.

Then I asked how they had arrived at it.

Before the order I had been receiving £226 a week as a kinship foster carer, which included a skills payment. After the order that became £127.

Nobody explained the difference to me in the meeting.

What I went looking for

A national table of special guardianship rates. There is not one, and I looked for a long time before I accepted that.

I went home and started going through the paperwork from when I was fostering her. The national fostering rates were easy enough to find. So was the guidance about special guardianship allowances.

But the fostering rate was not a special guardianship rate.

There was no national table saying that a special guardian caring for a child of a certain age should receive a set amount each week. I had assumed there would be. There was not.

Then I found the thing I had missed.

I later learned that there was a rule about the reward element of a fostering allowance continuing for a period after a Special Guardianship Order, depending on what had been decided before the order was made. I went back through my old fostering paperwork to see whether a decision about that had actually been made in my case.

I could not find a clear answer.

That was the part that bothered me most.

I had been asking the wrong question. I was hunting for a national special guardianship rate when what I needed to understand was what had happened to my own fostering allowance when the order was made.

I also discovered that my allowance was means tested. I was receiving Universal Credit at the time, and Child Benefit had been deducted from the calculation.

That explained part of the £127.

It did not explain everything.

What happened when I asked

Four months later I was sent the policy I had already read.

I asked the council to review the calculation. At one point I was told to speak to the social worker. The social worker sent me back to the finance team.

I also had to work out that the relevant council was the one responsible for my granddaughter's care, rather than simply the council where I lived.

The letter, when it came, said they were satisfied that the allowance was correct.

Nothing changed for me.

I have never been told that my figure was wrong. What I could not do was check it for myself.

My experience is not an answer for anybody else, either. A different set of circumstances produces a different allowance, and that is one reason I wanted to be precise about what can be checked and what cannot.

So I made a table

The rates went in one column, the dates in another, and beside each figure I wrote down where I had found it.

Where I could verify something, I recorded the source. Where I could not, I left the space blank. Until then what I had was a pile of separate pieces: the fostering rates were published, the statutory guidance was published, my council had its own policy, and none of them together let me reproduce the calculation that turned my circumstances into £127.

The table separated two questions.

What does the published guidance say?

And how did my council arrive at my particular figure?

The first can often be checked. The second is not always published in a way that lets you reproduce the calculation yourself. This site is built on that distinction, which is why the calculator is as specific about what it cannot tell you as about what it can.

I am not a solicitor or a social worker. I am a grandmother who needed to understand a payment affecting my family, and who spent months working through policies, rates, letters and calculations.

I built this site because I wished I had found that table when I first needed it.

I still have the notebook.

£127 a week.

My editorial policy

Every figure traces to a source

Rates live in versioned data files with an effective date, not in the text of a page. When the April uprating lands, every figure across the site changes at once. A number typed into prose goes silently wrong every April, so the build refuses to accept one.

I do not publish what I have not verified

Where I cannot confirm a figure against its original source, I leave it out and say why. That is why one year of Welsh rates is missing. Working a historic rate out from an uplift percentage would give a number that looks precise and could be wrong by a few pounds, and a few pounds across two years is exactly what gets a carer's complaint dismissed.

I do not name a council without a source

Saying what a particular council does, especially where an Ombudsman has criticised it, requires a stored, dated, public source. Where I hold information about a council but have not re-sourced the link, the calculator ignores it entirely and uses the national figures instead. I currently cover 153 English authorities for regional rates.

My checks run before anything is published

Review schedule

Each of my 16 guides carries my name, a “last reviewed” date and a review interval, and I am told when one falls overdue. Rate data is reviewed every April; the Kinship Zones pilot every three months; council information annually.

What this site is not

This site is not a law firm, a charity, or part of any council or government department.

I do not give advice on individual cases. Where your situation needs that, the advice organisations I point to throughout the site can help, and they are independent of me.

Corrections

If I have something wrong, I want to know. See my corrections policy.