The Portugal child protection system is falling short of its own legal standards, with over 70% of children under six years old still housed in institutional care homes despite legislation that mandates family-based fostering for this vulnerable age group. The gap between law and practice is now under scrutiny as advocates push for a national overhaul by 2030.
Why This Matters
• Legal violation in plain sight: Portugal's 2019 law prioritizes foster care for children up to age 6, yet the majority remain in group homes.
• Financial and social cost: Institutional care is more expensive than foster placement and yields worse long-term outcomes for education, employment, and mental health.
• International pressure: Portugal ranks among Europe's worst for foster care adoption, with only 5.7% of at-risk children living in family settings—far below Nordic and Eastern European benchmarks.
The Numbers Tell a Stubborn Story
According to the most recent CASA 2024 report, 6,349 children were in some form of state protective care last year, but only 361 lived with foster families. That figure rose to 462 by the end of 2025—a 30% year-on-year increase—but still left nearly 6,000 children institutionalized.
The growth in foster placements is real but modest. In 2023, just 263 children were in family care. The jump to 361 in 2024, then 462 by late 2025, reflects increased recruitment: the number of approved foster families climbed from 388 to 520 over the same period. Yet the scale remains insufficient. For every child who finds a foster home, more than 13 remain in group residential facilities.
The discrepancy is especially acute for infants and toddlers. Law 37/2025, which took effect in April 2025, explicitly reinforced family fostering as the default placement for children under six and opened eligibility to relatives and prospective adopters—previously excluded categories. Despite this legislative push, the Aldeias de Crianças SOS (SOS Children's Villages) now reports that more than seven in ten young children in the system still wake up in institutional settings, not family homes.
Why Institutional Care Persists
Guida Mendes Bernardo, director-general of Aldeias de Crianças SOS, points to structural failures: "Investing in family-based care is not just about protecting children. It is investing in social cohesion and the sustainability of the protection system itself."
Her organization identifies several barriers blocking the transition:
• Public ignorance: Most Portuguese residents do not understand what foster care entails, how it works, or that they could participate.
• Bureaucratic drag: Approval processes are slow, and coordination between justice, health, and social services remains weak.
• Emotional hesitation: Prospective foster families worry about the temporary nature of placements, the unpredictability of case timelines, and the pain of separation when a child moves on.
• Underuse of extended family: Relatives who could provide stable, culturally continuous care are rarely tapped, partly due to legal and administrative hurdles that have only recently been lifted.
• Geographic gaps: Some regions have no foster care infrastructure at all, leaving institutional placement as the sole option.
What Research Says About Outcomes
International and Portuguese studies consistently show that children raised in family settings outperform their institutionalized peers across nearly every measure. The evidence is not marginal; it is categorical.
Children in group homes exhibit higher rates of attachment disorders, emotional neglect, and psychological trauma. Their subjective well-being scores lag significantly behind both foster children and the general child population. Cognitive and social development is slower. Exit from care into adulthood is often abrupt, cutting ties to caregivers and leaving young people without a relational safety net.
By contrast, family-based care delivers individualized attention, emotional stability, and developmental stimulation. Foster children are more likely to finish school, find stable employment, form healthy relationships, and require fewer public interventions over their lifetimes. The economic calculus is equally clear: foster care costs less per child than institutional care while delivering better results.
Portugal's own legislative preamble to the 2019 child protection reforms acknowledges this reality. Yet the country continues to privilege residential solutions. In 2017, only 3% of children in care lived with foster families. By 2024, that figure had crept up to approximately 5.7%—a glacial pace compared to countries like Bulgaria, Moldova, and Georgia, where policy shifts and targeted investment have made fostering the dominant model.
The 2025 Legal Reform and Its Limits
Law 37/2025 was designed to accelerate change. Its key provisions include:
• Mandatory family placement for children under six, with judges required to justify any exception in writing.
• Eligibility expansion to allow relatives and adoption candidates to serve as foster families.
• Economic support for foster households, set at 1.2 times the Social Support Index (Indexante dos Apoios Sociais) per child, plus access to psycho-pedagogical and social services.
The law entered force on April 1, 2025, with full budgetary implementation tied to the 2026 state budget. By February 2026, however, no adoption cases under the new rules had been finalized, and the institutional population remained overwhelming.
Legal change, advocates argue, is necessary but insufficient. The system lacks the infrastructure to operationalize its own mandates.
What This Means for Residents
For Portugal-based families considering foster care, the message is blunt: the system needs you, but it will not make participation easy. The approval process remains bureaucratic, and ongoing support—while legally promised—varies by municipality.
For taxpayers and voters, the story is one of misallocated resources. Institutional care is more expensive and delivers worse outcomes, yet it absorbs the lion's share of child protection funding. Shifting investment toward family recruitment, training, and support could reduce both cost and harm.
For social workers and child welfare professionals, the data underscores systemic fragility. High caseloads, inadequate inter-agency coordination, and insufficient training compromise the ability to implement best practices. The Modelo Integrado de Acolhimento Familiar (MIAF), now being piloted in the Lisbon metropolitan area, offers a more structured approach—encompassing recruitment, evaluation, training, and ongoing follow-up—but has yet to scale nationally.
European Context and the 2030 Target
Portugal's foster care rate is among the lowest in Europe. Scandinavian countries—Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Norway—have long embedded family-based care into their welfare models, supported by accessible public childcare and comprehensive family services. Eastern European nations like Romania have undertaken dramatic desinstitutionalization drives, closing large orphanages and shifting most children to family or kinship placements.
The European Union's 2021 Strategy for the Rights of the Child and the European Child Guarantee explicitly call on member states to phase out institutional care. Across Europe and Central Asia, an estimated 456,000 children still live in institutions—double the global average. Even in Western Europe, residential care remains overused relative to family alternatives.
Aldeias de Crianças SOS is now calling for a national desinstitutionalization plan with a hard deadline: 2030. The organization wants foster care moved to the center of public policy, supported by dedicated funding, public awareness campaigns, streamlined processes, and regional capacity-building.
The Path Forward
Bernardo argues that increasing public knowledge is the first step: "There is still enormous social ignorance about the benefits of foster care." She adds that fostering can help reduce school dropout, unemployment, mental health crises, and social exclusion—outcomes that carry long-term fiscal and human costs.
International evidence supports her claim. Children who grow up in safe, stable family environments are more likely to complete their education, integrate into the labor market, and live independently without repeated state intervention.
The technical infrastructure must follow public awareness. That means reinforced casework teams, continuous training, specialized follow-up, and better coordination among justice, health, and social sectors. It also means recognizing that foster families need not only financial support but emotional and logistical backup—particularly when managing the complex dynamics of "pluriparentality," the co-existence of biological and foster family relationships.
Portugal has the legislative framework. It has the research base. What it lacks, according to child protection advocates, is the political will and public mobilization to close the gap between what the law promises and what children actually receive. With over 5,600 children still institutionalized and a 2030 target looming, the clock is ticking.
