Fostering an Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Child: What to Expect

A social worker rings on a Tuesday afternoon. There is a boy of 15 sitting in an office in Norwich. He arrived in the country four days ago, on his own, and he has about twenty words of English. Could you take him tonight?

That is often how these placements begin. Very little notice, very little paperwork, and a young person who does not yet know what your house looks like.

If you have read that and thought “I could not do that”, stay with us. Most of the carers who do it well were not sure either.

Please note: This is general information for people thinking about fostering. It is not advice about any individual young person or any asylum claim. Immigration rules changed in March 2026 and are still changing, so everything below is correct at 20 August 2026 and worth re-checking. The Home Office publishes its own guidance on assessing age, and the Department for Education publishes the statutory guidance on care of unaccompanied migrant children and child victims of modern slavery. A young person’s own solicitor and local authority social worker are the people who advise on their case.

Who are these young people?

Children who have come to the UK alone and claimed asylum. In official paperwork you will see them called UASC, which stands for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.

At 31 March 2025 there were 6,540 of them in care in England. That is about 8 per cent of all children in care, and it was down 12 per cent on the year before (Department for Education, children looked after in England, reporting year 2025).

Most are teenagers. Most are boys. Beyond that they have very little in common with each other, which is the first thing carers tend to notice.

Why would a young person arrive on their own?

The reasons are not interchangeable, and they shape what a young person walks in carrying.

• Conflict at home, or persecution because of race, religion, sexuality or politics
• Family separated on the way here, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not
• Trafficking, forced labour or being made to carry drugs
• A family who could only afford to send one person and chose the child

You will not always be told the full story. Sometimes the young person does not know all of it themselves.

How much notice would I get?

Usually not much.

Some young people are placed by the local authority where they first arrived. Others move under the National Transfer Scheme, which every UK local authority has been directed to take part in since February 2022. An authority already supporting unaccompanied children at or above 0.1 per cent of its child population can refer a child on to another area, and the protocol allows ten working days from referral to the move (National Transfer Scheme protocol, version 8.0, 27 June 2025).

In practice that can mean a phone call in the afternoon and a doorbell in the evening. If that is unfamiliar, our piece on emergency fostering covers what a same-day arrival looks like.

What does the first evening look like?

Smaller than you would think. Nobody is expecting a speech.

• Show them the bed, the bathroom and the light switch
• Food, and ask before you cook it. Halal, vegetarian, or just plain rice if that is what they can face
• Your name and phone number written on a piece of paper they can keep in a pocket
• A charger, and the wifi password. For a lot of young people, contact with family is the phone and nothing else
• Sleep. Many arrive exhausted in a way that takes weeks to shift

A card signed by everyone in the house costs nothing and tends to get kept.

Do I need to speak their language?

No.

You need patience and a phone. Translation apps do the heavy lifting early on. Slow down, use your hands, point at things, draw. Cooking together works when talking does not.

Ask the local authority about English for Speakers of Other Languages classes, and about interpreters for anything that matters. The Refugee Council runs a national service for unaccompanied children and can help with both.

Am I responsible for the asylum claim?

No. That belongs to the young person’s solicitor and their local authority social worker.

What you will do is go with them. An adult they trust needs to be at their Home Office interviews, and that adult is often the foster carer. You may also sit through an age assessment if the Home Office or the local authority doubts the age the young person has given. Some of those assessments are carried out by the National Age Assessment Board, and the current Home Office guidance for staff was published on 24 June 2026.

Being asked the same painful questions by four different sets of officials is hard on a child. Your job in the room is to be the familiar face, not to answer for them.

One thing to know if you read older material. Until this year, refugee status came with five years’ permission to stay. For anyone claiming asylum on or after 2 March 2026 it is 30 months, with a default 20-year wait for settlement. Unaccompanied children were left out of that change for now while a separate route is worked out, confirmed in a written ministerial statement on 5 March 2026. It will move again, so check the date on anything you read, including this.

What about school and health?

School will be strange for a while. Subjects, uniforms, the way pupils speak to teachers. There will be gaps in what they have been taught, and being a new arrival is not in itself a special educational need, so the extra help varies from school to school. Ask early what the school is actually putting in place.

Health needs attention quickly. Immunisations are often incomplete. Teeth may not have been seen by a dentist in years, and some young people arrive physically run down from the way here. Our article on promoting the health of foster children explains how the health assessments work.

Then there is faith and food: a prayer mat, a holy book, a shop that sells the flour their mother used. Small things. They do a lot of work.

One rule here is firm. You do not make decisions about a young person’s religion on your own, in either direction. If they want to stop praying, or want a mosque three towns over, that is a conversation with your supervising social worker and the child’s social worker.

Is it risky?

There are real risks and it is better to name them.

Unaccompanied young people are at higher risk of exploitation, and at higher risk of going missing in the early days of a placement, sometimes because the people who brought them here are still in contact. They trust nobody here yet, which makes anyone offering them belonging very persuasive.

You are not left to work that out alone. Every placement comes with a risk assessment and a safer caring plan, and if a young person went missing you would follow the agency’s missing from care procedure with your supervising social worker rather than making a judgement call on your own. Our piece on safer caring and house rules shows how that works day to day.

What happens when they turn 18?

Many stay. Staying Put lets a young person carry on living with their foster family after 18, on a different footing and usually with less money attached, and for a young person whose immigration status is unsettled the value of not moving again is hard to overstate. We have written about how Staying Put works in more detail.

Do I need to be a particular sort of person?

You need to be over 21, reasonably steady, and able to offer a settled home. You do not need to own it. You do not need to be married, or have children, or hold a qualification in anything.

For a teenager you will need a spare bedroom. A cot in your own room can work for a baby under two, but not for a 15 year old. Across rural Norfolk and Suffolk, being able to drive makes a real difference, because the bus that gets a young person to college may run twice a day. In Norwich or Ipswich it matters much less. If you are weighing up whether your circumstances rule you out, fostering a child aged 8 and over covers the same ground for older children generally.

You will not be doing this on your own

Our supervising social workers hold around six families each, which is why you can usually get hold of yours the same day.

• A lead education consultant who tracks how children are getting on at school and pushes when progress stalls
• Independence workshops covering first aid, vaping, and rights and entitlements
• Pocket-sized cards young people carry with the numbers they need to raise a worry
• A Youth Council that has written questions for our own fostering panel to ask
• A financial contribution towards your council tax as part of the reward package

Ofsted inspected us in November 2024 and described us as a good agency with outstanding leadership and management. One of our carers told the inspectors: “My supervising social worker has been an absolute lifeline for me. I feel so much more confident in my role because of her.”

Fostering a young person who has crossed a continent alone is not about knowing the right thing to say. It is about being the same person every morning.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to speak the young person’s language?

No. Translation apps and patience get you through the first weeks, and the local authority should arrange interpreters for anything important and English classes for the young person.

Am I responsible for the asylum application?

No. That sits with the young person’s solicitor and their local authority social worker. You may be asked to attend Home Office interviews as the trusted adult, and to offer support around them.

How much notice would I get before a young person arrives?

Often only hours. Some arrive through the National Transfer Scheme, which allows ten working days from referral to the move, but many placements start with an afternoon phone call.

Can I do this if I have never fostered before?

Yes. You need to be over 21 with a spare bedroom and a settled home. Approval takes four to six months, including the Skills to Foster course, and you would not be matched with a young person your supervising social worker did not think was a sensible fit.