This series draws on the webinar Seen, Counted and Protected convened by Family for Every Child as part of the Children on the Move 2026 campaign. Six civil society organisations working across Guatemala, Mexico, Nepal, Greece, the UK, and Colombia came together to share what identity rights look like in practice for children on the move. Each post in this series focuses on one organisation and one dimension of the problem.
It is easy to think of identity rights for children on the move as primarily an issue for children outside of a system. But Children and Families Across Borders (CFAB) works in the UK, and what they have identified is a quieter failure, one that happens not in the absence of a system but inside one.
With one in three children in the UK having a foreign-born parent, and around 90,000 children currently in care, CFAB estimates that roughly a third of those children may have family connections overseas. For many of them, those family connections are not being fully explored. And when family connections are not explored, a child’s identity, their sense of where they come from, their cultural heritage, their right to know and be known by their family, is at risk,not through conflict or disaster but through institutional inaction.
Why international family connections get overlooked
CFAB is the UK’s only member of the International Social Service, a global network working on cross-border child protection cases. They work with local authorities across the UK on cases involving children with international family connections: children on the move, looked-after children, international kinship care, family reunification, and child protection alerts with a cross-border dimension.
Judi Martin of CFAB describes the lack of recognition of international kinship care in care decisions as a capacity and knowledge gap at a system level that has serious consequences. Social workers working with children in care are under significant time and resource pressure. International family finding, which requires navigating different legal systems, cultural contexts, languages, and logistical challenges across borders, sits beyond the day-to-day training and experience of most local authority teams.
The result is that international kinship options are often not considered with the same thoroughness as domestic ones. A child who has family in Nigeria, or the Philippines, or Brazil, may have their care placement determined without any meaningful investigation of whether those family members could provide a safe and permanent home.
What the research says
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child codifies family finding as best practice. The body of evidence is consistent: children placed with family connection have better outcomes. They are more likely to reach their potential. They have a stronger sense of belonging. The preservation of cultural identity and connection is listed among the documented benefits of kinship care.
None of this is obscure. It is established, cited, and accepted in principle by the frameworks that govern child protection in the UK. The gap is in practice and in the lack of an official requirement and pathway to consider international family connections in care decisions .
When local authorities make decisions about permanency for children in care without adequately considering international family options, they are not usually acting in bad faith. They are acting within the limits of what they know how to do, with the time they have, using the networks they have built. The problem is that those limits exclude too many children in their care.
Practice that is reactive rather than preventative
Judi also points to a broader pattern. Local authorities often confront these questions only once a case has become urgent or complex. By that point, a child may have been in a domestic placement for months or years. Their international connections may have weakened through lack of contact. The practical and legal complexity of pursuing a family placement overseas has multiplied.
Early, proactive attention to a child’s international family connections would, in many cases, produce better outcomes. It would also prevent the kind of decisions that, while not wrong in isolation, cumulatively result in children growing up without the cultural identity and family belonging they had a right to.
What CFAB is doing about it
CFAB is currently running a substantial research programme, using Freedom of Information requests to local authorities across the UK, to understand the scale of this gap and how it manifests in practice. The findings will be used to work more effectively with local authorities, embedding identity rights as a real consideration in care proceedings rather than a principle that is acknowledged in policy but inconsistently applied on the ground.
CFAB is also the organisation with the expertise to handle these cases when they do arise. They can assess international family members, facilitate cross-border communication, navigate the legal and social work frameworks of different countries, and advocate for outcomes that keep children connected to their families.
The work is less visible than some of what other organisations in this series describe. There are no registration drives, no advocacy campaigns in front of hostile officials. It happens in case files, in meetings with local authority teams, in careful cross-border social work. But its stakes are the same: a child’s right to know who they are and where they come from.
This is part 3 of a six-part series.
Family for Every Child’s Children on the Move 2026 campaign runs from 15 to 21 June. Join the conversation on Changemakers for Children.
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