DEE WILSON CONSULTING
The Mockingbird Family Model
(Originally published July 2026)
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The Mockingbird Family Model (MFM) is a foster care services delivery model developed in Seattle, Washington in the early 2000’s that utilizes a hub home to support a constellation of 6-10 foster homes with training, care coordination, sleepovers/respite care and social activities. The number of MFM constellations in Washington State increased from one in 2004 to sixteen in 2016. These constellations were in five counties in Western Washington (King, Pierce, Snohomish, Whatcom and Thurston). As part of the 2022 D.S. tort settlement agreement, the Washington State Department of Children, Youth and Family Services (DCYF) committed to expanding the number of MFM constellations to 30 by 2027, mostly in large urban areas across the state. The D.S. class action lawsuit was brought by Disability Rights Washington on behalf of children and youth placed in five or more homes/residential care facilities by DCYF, or who had experienced an out-of-state residential placement, hotel placement, or who were awaiting a mental health CLIP placement.
MFM has also been implemented in a few other states and been widely employed in the United Kingdom (UK) since 2016. The model has been evaluated several times, including by the Washington Institute of Public Policy (WSIPP) in a study released in December 2017, and by a group of English scholars in 2020. Both the WSIPP study and the UK study utilized propensity matching to compare outcomes for children and youth placed in MFM homes with similar children placed in foster homes or residential care facilities. WSIPP also completed a cost benefit analysis of the model in 2018, and English scholars did the same in their 2020 study. Despite utilizing different methodologies, both cost benefit analyses found that MFM generated financial benefits roughly equivalent to the model’s cost when considering savings in several public benefit programs.
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There was a period of several years after 2016 when expansion of MFM in Washington stalled, in part due to the cost to the state’s child welfare agency of hub homes, and also because after DCYF became administratively responsible for the state’s child welfare agency in 2018, DCYF Secretary Ross Hunter adopted the goal of reducing the number of children in foster care by 50%, a goal seemingly incompatible with initiatives to improve foster care.
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The political calculus for MFM was dramatically altered by the D.S. tort settlement agreement that envisioned using MFM hub homes for youth at risk for hotel placements or residential care, both extremely costly, e.g., $2,000- $3,000 per day for hotel placements and more than $10,000 per month for some residential care placements. The monthly rate for hubs that support homes caring for “high needs” children and youth has been set at $4,500 per month, or $54,000 annually. Additional administrative costs could raise the annual cost of a “high needs” hub to $60-65,000 annually, a bargain given that foster parents will be reimbursed according to foster care rates that are less than $3000 per month for high needs youth, 6-11 and 12-17. Each constellation of satellite homes can care for 10-18 children. When the cost of hubs is divided by 10, the total cost per high needs youth is expected to be about $3,500 per month, and much less when satellite homes are at full capacity. It is likely the prospect of greatly reducing the cost of placement for high needs youth, i.e. behaviorally troubled youth, who would otherwise be placed in hotels, DCYF staffed facilities or residential care facilities that explains why the state of Washington has committed to an expansion of MFM.
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The Mockingbird Society is taking a huge risk in agreeing to expanded use of MFM for youth who would otherwise be placed in residential care, hotels, or in DCYF staffed facilities utilized to eliminate hotel placements. MFM was not developed to care for a concentration of behaviorally troubled youth in “high needs” hubs. The Fostering Network, the organization licensed by the Mockingbird Society to oversee implementation of MFM in the UK, recommends the following: “sites should create a constellation of children and young people who were mixed in terms of age, gender, behavior, stability in placement, permanent plans and placement with or away from siblings ….” (Ott, et al, 2020).
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WSIPP’s 2017 evaluation of MFM in Washington included 790 children and youth placed in satellite homes from 2004-2015. Sixty-eight percent of these children were younger than 11 years of age at entry into an MFM home; and almost three quarters were “low needs,” as indicated by the lack of exceptional cost payments. MFM has not been evaluated in Washington or the UK regarding its ability to stabilize and provide therapeutic services for a largely “high needs” population in constellations funded for this purpose. Neither the WSIPP evaluation nor the UK study describes outcomes by age group or children’s behavior problems at entry into an MFM home. This is a new undertaking for MFM, one that violates a key tenet of the model, per the guidelines for creating constellations set forth by The Fostering Network.
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Supporting foster parents
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MFM embodies the key principle that “fostering services should explore ways to provide greater networks and peer support for foster carers and young people in care.” Evaluations that have included interviews with foster parents (including the 2020 UK evaluation), contain heartfelt testimonials from foster parents regarding their appreciation of the concrete and emotional support they received from the hub home and other foster “carers,” their gratitude for being treated as equals, with reduced bureaucracy, and for an approach to providing foster care through a community of “carers” that normalized the experience of foster care for children and youth. The UK evaluation found that only 6% of foster parents deregistered (i.e., gave up their foster care license during the 3 years of the evaluation vs. 23% of other foster parents). In addition, foster “carers” in MFM satellite homes were less likely than other foster parents to be taking a break from caring for a foster child or youth. (34% vs. 44%).
The 2017 WSIPP evaluation also found a higher retention rate for MFM foster parents than other foster parents but cautions that foster parents who were part of a MFM constellation might have had different characteristics than other foster parents before becoming part of MFM. However, when higher retention rates are combined with numerous testimonials from foster “carers” regarding the emotional benefits of the model (as in the UK evaluation), the caveat that foster parents who voluntarily participated in MFM might have been different to begin with, e.g., more committed to providing foster care, seems less plausible. A main benefit of MFM is that the model supports the well-being of foster parents, which, in turn, benefits the children and youth in their care. The UK evaluation states: “A common message from the evaluation is that you cannot separate the outcomes for children and young people from those of carers, and that Mockingbird is as much about the carers as it is about the kids.” This is a message that transcends MFM and should inform all other foster care improvement initiatives.
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The WSIPP evaluation of children and youth outcomes
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WSIPP’s evaluation of MFM (referred to in the report as the Home Hub Mode) was released in December 2017. The evaluation describes a range of outcomes for 790 of 802 children placed in an MFM foster home from 2004 through 2016. The evaluation is quantitative, i.e. does not include interviews with MFM foster parents or youth placed in MFM homes, and compares MFM outcomes with those of a matched group of children and youth. It is descriptive, does not interpret findings or give them perspective, and does not break out findings by age group or the behavioral status of children and youth at initial entry into a hub home, which is referred to as an “index event.” Given these deficiencies, the evaluation’s findings raise as many questions as they answer, e.g., why is the large positive effect of MFM on placement stability accompanied by longer lengths of stay and a lower percentage of completed permanent plans? Why is the rate of running away from the index MFM placement almost three times higher than the run-away rate in the comparison group (14% vs. 5%)?
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One plausible hypothesis is that MFM homes included a larger number of kinship placements than the comparison group, as kinship care in multiple studies is associated with greater placement stability and delayed permanency. It is also possible that older youth ran away with the intention to disrupt their placements when oppositional behavior did not cause foster parents to give up on the youth. This is speculation, as the evaluation’s appendices do not provide information regarding rates of kinship care or the behavioral health status of youth who ended their index placement by running away.
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At first glance, the MFM advantage on measures of placement stability is impressive. The WSIPP evaluation found that 39% of children and youth in care for at least 12 months remained in the same home for at least nine months vs. 26% of the matched comparison group. Forty-three percent of children and youth in care for at least 18 months had an index placement of at least nine months vs. 29% of the comparison group. MFM children and youth averaged 3.76 placements prior to entering an MFM home, i.e., already had unstable placement histories, a pattern difficult to reverse. However, running away to disrupt a placement is a type of placement instability which, at the very least, calls into question MFM’s effect on placement stability described in the WSIPP evaluation.
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The WSIPP evaluations found no MFM effect on sibling placements, in part because it was extremely rare for siblings to be placed in different homes within the same constellation.
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The WSIPP evaluation is far more interested in outcomes for adolescents, especially older adolescents, than in developmental indicators and indicators of emotional well-being for children younger than 11 years of age. The evaluation contains measures that apply mostly to older adolescents such as rates of high school graduation, arrests, teen births, employment, receipt of food stamps or TANF and homelessness, and no indicators of educational achievement, social development or cognitive development of younger children, even though only 12% of youth placed in MFM homes were older than 15 at initial placement.
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The WSIPP evaluation found no statistically significant differences in measures of adolescent development between youth in MFM homes and youth in the comparison group, though receipt of TANF benefits approached statistical significance (.08). The most distressing finding was that 50% of MFM youth 18 or older on January 1, 2017, experienced homelessness vs. 44% of the comparison group, an indictment of the state’s foster care system rather than an outcome that can be blamed on a specific service delivery model.
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The 2020 UK evaluation
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The UK evaluation summarized in Mockingbird programme: Evaluation report (Ott, et al, 2020) analyzed administrative data for 398 children and youth placed in an MFM home from April 2016 to March 31, 2019, and 7197 children in other placements. These children and youth were placed in 41 constellations in 11 sites. The UK evaluation included many interviews with foster parents (referred to as “carers”), MFM staff and children and youth which contribute to an understanding of the model’s strengths data alone cannot provide. For example, foster carers emphasized the importance of hub parents and of hub liaisons, i.e., project managers, to effective implementation of MFM and the disruptive effect of turnover in these positions. The enthusiastic support of carers for MFM comes across strongly in these interviews.
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The UK evaluation found markedly different outcomes than the WSIPP evaluation. There was no significant difference in placement stability for MFM children and youth vs. a matched comparison group, though in interviews carers asserted that children and youth who had disrupted placements often were placed with another family in the constellation. Unfortunately, the evaluation does not provide data to support this assertion. The evaluation did not find a significant difference in permanent planning outcomes for MFM children and youth compared to the matched comparison group. Unlike the WSIPP evaluation, MFM was found to support sibling connections; a large percentage of youth with a sibling in the same constellation stated that the amount of contact with their sibling was “just right.” The evaluation did not find a significant difference in rates of youth “going missing” between MFM youth and the comparison group.
Interviews with children and youth indicated that MFM contributed to the development of friendships. During interviews, carers frequently mentioned improved educational outcomes among children and youth, though the evaluation did not measure educational performance among younger children, a puzzling oversight. The evaluation found that on a self-report measure of child well-being MFM children and youth scored approximately the same as a community sample.
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The UK evaluation found that MFM supported carer well-being and satisfaction with foster parenting, as discussed above. The evaluation also found that more than three quarters of children and young people placed in MFM homes “felt like an important part of their community (77% in 2018 and 88% in 2019). Overall, 9 0f 10 children and young people agreed that there were adults in their community they could go to for help if they needed … Almost all children … said that they had an adult who they trusted, who helped them and sticks by them no matter what.”
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In my view, the UK evaluation makes a stronger case for MFM than the WSIPP valuation, in part because of the interviews and surveys with participants, and because benefits are not juxtaposed with trade-offs, e.g., improved placement stability combined with poorer permanent planning and a much higher rate of youth running away, in Washington State. What stands out in the UK implementation of MFM is the emphasis on constellations of foster homes that care for a highly diverse child population, including adopted children, children in guardianships, children living with birth parents, children in residential care and children in kinship care, etc. It’s possible that MFM in the UK has been implemented with greater fidelity to this element of the model than MFM implementation in Washington.
It appears that in both the UK and Washington, MFM has been used to stabilize foster children who have already experienced multiple moves, with mixed success. How effective MFM would be in stabilizing diverse child populations when used at initial entry-into-care is an unanswered question.
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References
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Goodvin, R. & Miller, M., Evaluation of the Foster Care Hub Model (December 2017), Washington State Institute for Public Policy, Olympia, Washington.
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Goodvin, R. & Miller, M., Evaluation of The Foster Care Hub Model: Supplemental Benefit- Cost Analysis (2018), Washington State Institute for Public Policy, Olympia, Washington.
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Mockingbird Family Program: Recommendations and Strategic Considerations for Expansion in Washington State (2023), Camber Collective, Seattle, Washington.
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Ott, E., McGrath- Lone, L. Pinto, V.S., Sanders- Ellis, D., Trivedi, H., Mockingbird programme: evaluation report (2020), Department for Education, London, UK.
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Sole Source Filing Justification, Contractor: The Mockingbird Society, Contract # 243257668, 8- 29-24, available online.
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​See past Sounding Board commentaries
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©Dee Wilson
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