Supporting Birth Parents Fund Report

Having a child taken into care can be an extremely traumatic experience. It has a profound impact on the child, birth parents, and their families.

Scotland is undertaking important work to ‘Keep the Promise’ to all of Scotland’s children and young people, and to uphold children’s rights through incorporation of the UNCRC into law. However, birth parents are often forgotten in policy and practice.

Care and support for birth parents often disappears when the decision to remove a child is made – as support interventions most often follow the child. The effect of having your child removed from your care is devastating, and often, birth parents are left without support, having to deal with their pain, shame and trauma alone.

The Supporting Birth Parents Fund is managed by Corra Foundation on behalf of the Scottish Government. Since 2022, the fund distributed £1.924m to 13 organisations supporting birth parents who no longer have care of their children because of intervention by the state. Funding supported organisations to sustain, stabilise or increase capacity, extend or improve services and fill gaps in service provision for birth parents. In total, these services directly supported 473 birth parents with 88% of those supported identified as women.

The Supporting Birth Parents Fund report shares more information about the scope of the fund and the impact it has had.