A Kinship Carer's Guide to Helping With School Work

The support that exists — take it, then come back

What you are entitled to depends heavily on your arrangement (special guardianship, a child arrangements order, fostering, or an informal arrangement), so start with the people whose job is to untangle exactly that:

• Kinship — the national kinship care charity: free advice line, local support groups, and clear guides to what carers in each arrangement can ask for.
• Family Rights Group — free specialist advice on your rights and the local authority's duties.
• The school itself — every school has a designated teacher responsible for looked-after and previously looked-after children, and local authorities run Virtual Schools that champion these children's education; depending on your child's history and arrangement, one or both may owe your child active support, and extra funding may follow them. Ask the school directly: "who here has responsibility for children in kinship care, and what support applies to this child?"
• gov.uk — for the official position on kinship care and schooling.

All of that is worth an afternoon of phone calls. And when the calls are done, the child still has maths homework — so here is the part those services don't cover.

The methods have changed — work with them, not against them

The single most common frustration we hear from grandparents and older carers: "I know how to do this, but not the way they want it done." Schools now teach written arithmetic, reading and grammar differently from a generation ago — children sound out words phonetically instead of guessing from pictures, learn multiplication through grids and number lines before columns, and are taught grammar with names (fronted adverbial, subordinate clause) most adults never met at school. Your method usually still works; the trouble is a child mid-way through learning the school's method gets tangled trying to hold both.

The fix is not to relearn everything — it is to look up the one method tonight's homework uses. This is exactly what the video resources on our topic pages are for: pick the child's year and subject — say Year 4 Maths — find the topic, and watch a short checked video of the current method before you sit down together. Two minutes of video turns you from a second, conflicting teacher into backup for the one they already have. Every resource we list has been opened and checked for relevance and year-group fit, and everything is free with no accounts.

If you don't know what year covers what — reasonable, it has been a while — our printable checklists show every topic for each year and subject on one page. Print the ones for your child's year; they are a map of the whole year and quietly useful when a teacher mentions a topic name you have never heard.

A homework routine that lowers the temperature

Children in kinship care are managing more than most, and homework is often where the day's leftover feelings land. A predictable, low-pressure routine does more than any resource:

1. Same time, same place, snack first. Fed and settled beats straight-through-the-door, every time.
2. You read the task first, quietly. Thirty seconds of orientation means your first words are help, not "let me see... hmm".
3. Ask them to teach you. "Show me how your teacher does it" respects what they know, shows you the expected method, and reveals precisely where understanding stops — which is the thing you actually need to find.
4. When they're stuck on the idea itself, go to a video together. A checked video from the topic page lets the child rewind the exact missing step without anyone's patience wearing through — and lets you learn the method alongside them, which children rather enjoy.
5. Twenty focused minutes, then stop — even if it isn't finished. A note to the teacher ("we did 20 minutes, got this far, this is where it stuck") is genuinely useful information for them and completely acceptable from you.
6. End on something they got right. Always findable, always worth saying.

And be honest about your own energy. Many kinship carers are parenting a second time round, tired, and sometimes grieving alongside the child. A calm twenty minutes you can sustain every night is worth more than an ambitious hour that ends in mutual defeat twice a week.

Working with the school, and when to ask for more

Tell the school what homework looks like at home — teachers adjust for children when they know, and most will happily send the method sheet or scheme name home so you can match it. If your child came to you with disrupted schooling behind them, gaps are likely and are nobody's failure; ask the teacher which earlier topics are missing and work on those calmly using the year-below resources — nothing on a printout says what year it came from.

Some children in kinship care carry experiences that make concentration, memory or trust in adults harder, and some struggle with reading or number in ways that persist despite steady help. Neither this page nor any website can say what is going on for your child — raise persistent concerns with the class teacher and the school's SENCO (special educational needs coordinator), who can explain assessment and support routes, and use the NHS and Kinship's advice service for reliable guidance. What we can say: children's learning tends to recover in conditions of safety and patience, and a carer who shows up nightly with a snack and twenty calm minutes is providing exactly those. The resources are the easy part — and they are free, checked, and a click away for every year and subject.