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Sarah Anderson’s LinkedIn post sent me back to a Times article published when Now Foster launched. She had seen the posts celebrating Now Foster’s Weekenders programme at the House of Lords and questioned what was being called fostering innovation. I went back to the original article to read its language again. Emma Duncan’s 2023 column called for a new “foster army”. It described fostering as a “low-wage, working-class business” and suggested that children who had lived in c

Residential care was not absent from the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care. But the residential caregiver, the person sharing a child’s daily life, was much harder to see. This paper asks whether that mattered, and whether the way different forms of knowledge were organised helped shape the understanding of residential care now being implemented as policy.

This paper asks whether the evidence supports the assumptions behind current children’s social care reform, and what happens to children if those assumptions prove wrong.

What a privilege to attend the Extreme Teamwork & Decision-Making Mini Conference at the University of Liverpool. The conference brought together people from across the blue light services to explore decision making in high-pressure and extreme situations. Coming from a very different professional world, I was struck by how many of the themes resonated with children’s social care. Decision making under pressure. Uncertainty. Conflicting information. Cognitive load. Trust. Rel

Too many children were failed in care. Too many were abused by the very adults entrusted to look after them. Too many experienced harsh regimes, repeated moves, broken relationships and decisions that caused lasting harm. That cannot be denied. But that history has repeatedly been used to justify reform. By the end of the 1990s, inquiries into residential care had exposed appalling abuse and serious failures across the system. Yet they had found more than abuse. Utting identi

Residential child care is once again being reshaped. Government has already stated that residential care should be used for fewer children, while expanding fostering and developing a smaller, more specialised residential sector. But before residential child care is redefined, there is a more fundamental question: What does the evidence actually tell us? This critical narrative review looks beyond children’s homes themselves to the wider history of children’s social care. It e