What your council does: Fostering and adoption

About fostering and adoption

Every child deserves a safe, loving, and stable home. Bury Council’s Fostering and Adoption Service helps children who cannot live with their birth families to find the care and support they need to thrive.

The service works with people from all walks of life who want to make a difference by providing a family environment for a child - either through fostering, adoption, or special guardianship. Our experienced teams support carers and families every step of the way, making sure that both children and adults feel confident and cared for throughout the process.

Key services provided:

• Fostering support: Foster carers provide a temporary or sometimes long-term home for children who need care. Each foster carer has their own supervising social worker who offers regular visits, advice, and ongoing training and emotional support
• Kinship care: Some children can remain within their wider family network if it’s safe to do so. Our Kinship Assessment Team helps relatives and friends who step in to care for a child, carrying out assessments and offering guidance through the legal process
• Special Guardianship support: For families caring for a child under a 'Special Guardianship Order', our dedicated team provides practical and emotional support, advice, and activities for children and guardians. They’ve even created an allotment project where families can meet, share experiences, and support one another
• Adoption: Working as part of the regional adoption agency, Adoption Now, our adoption team helps match children across Greater Manchester with adopters who can offer them a permanent family. They provide expert guidance throughout the adoption journey - from first enquiry to when a child is settled in their new home

These teams work closely together so that children in Bury can experience care, stability, and a strong sense of belonging.

Service impact

Bury has a proud history of providing loving homes for children and supporting the people who open their doors to them. Many of our social workers have worked together for years and bring warmth, understanding, and consistency to every family they support.

The service is also part of the Mockingbird Family Model, which connects local foster families into small communities or “constellations” that operate like extended families. These networks offer peer support, shared activities, and a strong sense of togetherness for both carers and children. Plans are already underway to grow this model further across Bury in 2026.

Foster Friendly Council

Bury Council is proud to be a Foster Friendly Employer, meaning our staff who foster receive additional support and flexibility so they can balance their caring responsibilities with their work.

Bury Foster parents honoured

The Atkinsons receive Freedom of the Borough

Keith and Helen Atkinson have fostered young people for 30 years; from children, teenagers and unaccompanied minors seeking asylum, some for a few days and others for several months or years.

As ambassadors for Foster with Bury, they also help to recruit, train and encourage new foster carers.

Cllr Lucy Smith formally nominated the Atkinsons for the honour, saying their 30 years of fostering had helped to turn lives around.

“By giving a stable loving home to a child, it can open up a world of opportunities and give a young person who just needed a chance a whole new world.”

On being told they were to receive the honour Mr Atkinson said:

"We're gobsmacked! It’s been an honour to serve and look after the young people we have had”.

He also added that many of the people they had looked after now had their own families.