Picture a woman in her sixties. She has raised her children, paid off most of the mortgage, and started thinking about slowing down. Then social services ring about her grandson. A few months later she is standing in a family court, and a judge grants her a special guardianship order.

That order changes her life. It gives her parental responsibility for the child until he turns 18. It does not cut the legal ties to his birth parents, the way adoption does. It does not come with a social worker on the payroll, the way fostering does. It comes with a boy, a school run and, in most cases, whatever the local council decides to pay her.

She is not unusual. The most recent Ministry of Justice family court figures, for 2023, record 1,091 special guardianship orders (Source: Ministry of Justice, Family Court Statistics -- Family_Court_Tables__Jul-Sep_2024_ -- Table_3). Spread that across the year and it is roughly 21 a week. Three a day, near enough, every day including Christmas. Each one is a household reorganised around a child who could not stay where they were.

This is the part of the care system nobody puts in a manifesto. There is no adoption ceremony, no photograph, no press release. There is a grandmother, an aunt or an older sister filling in forms and finding a second bedroom. And because special guardians are not foster carers, the financial support that follows is discretionary, set council by council, rather than guaranteed nationally. That is the money worth following.

Here is where the transparency problem starts. The same published table sets that 1,091 against a figure of 12, and generates a change of 8,991.7%. Both numbers are labelled 2023. Nothing in family courts moved by nine thousand per cent in a year; what you are looking at is a comparison between two things that were never comparable, dressed up as a trend. Anyone skim-reading the table could repeat that percentage in good faith and be completely wrong.

That matters more than it sounds. These tables are how councils, charities and MPs work out whether kinship care is growing and what it costs. If the year labels collapse into each other, the headline number survives but the trend does not. You cannot argue for funding on the back of a statistic that falls apart when you read the column headings.

So treat the 1,091 as the fact and the percentage as noise. One thousand and ninety-one court orders, in one year, handing legal responsibility for a child to a relative who volunteered. That is the number that should be sitting in front of anyone writing a children's services budget.

And if you want to know what your own council actually pays a special guardian, the allowance policy is a legitimate freedom of information request. You can file one in about five minutes on WhatDoTheyKnow. The Ministry of Justice counts the orders. It does not count what happens to the families afterwards. Somebody should.