For decades, debates on children’s social care in the UK have promoted foster care — both kinship and non‑kinship — as the preferred option, not because it always meets children’s needs, but because it is seen as cheaper and safer than residential care. Yet the evidence tells a more complex story: foster care has become the default, pursued even after repeated breakdowns and driven more by financial constraints than by what truly supports a child’s stability, recovery, and future.

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The original concept of permanency planning — introduced in the mid‑1970s to stop children drifting in care — was never meant to justify rushing children into any available family placement. 

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Even so the 2022 Independent Review of Children’s Social Care recommended kinship care as the first alternative when children cannot live with their parents. While kinship care can offer continuity and familiarity, treating it as a default risks overlooking its limitations and repeating familiar patterns: prioritising affordability and political appeal over a full assessment of children’s needs, and over developing the resources required to meet them.

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​The growth of foster and kinship care has been driven not only by prevailing assumptions about what is ‘best’, but also by budget pressures and a media narrative that reinforces the idea that family placements are always preferable. This mindset has shaped decades of policy, and the impact is clear: the number of children in care has more than doubled since 1976 — from 45,000 to over 107,000 in 2024, with 83,630 in England alone. Nor is it only the total that has risen; the rate per head of the child population has nearly tripled, climbing from roughly 0.3% in 1976 to about 0.8% in 2024, meaning a far larger proportion of children are now looked after by the state.

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Importantly this rise reflects not just greater volume but greater complexity: more older children are entering care; more present with trauma, neurodivergence, or significant mental health needs; and more care leavers require support well into adulthood. Crucially, rising numbers are not only driven by new entrants but by children returning after failed reunifications and disrupted adoptions. Around one in five who return home re‑enter care within a year, and over a third within six years. Adoption breakdowns are less frequent but still see hundreds of children return to care each year.

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When a child is removed by children’s services, it is because they have already suffered — or are at serious risk of suffering — significant harm. But rescue is only the beginning. Trauma and neglect do not vanish with a change of address or the passing of time; without stability and therapeutic support, those wounds can shape a child’s life for years to come. It is not possible to reclaim a stolen childhood — only to come to terms with it.

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By privileging family placements as inherently superior, the system has marginalised other options, reinforced stigma, and overlooked the principle that the best placement is the one that meets each child’s needs — while paying far too little attention to placement breakdowns, including failed reunifications.

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Many children reach residential care only after multiple failed family placements — not because their needs changed, but because residential care is still treated as a last resort. By the time they arrive, many carry deep trauma and instability, making good outcomes harder and driving up costs through repeated breakdowns, increased demand on health and specialist services, adult social care, and for too many, involvement with the justice system.

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Meanwhile, unregistered homes have surged under Ofsted’s watch. Some providers charge crippling fees, while others place children in unregulated settings staffed not by trained carers but, in some cases, by security guards. It is a scandal hiding in plain sight, attracting little media scrutiny and even less political accountability.

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These are not isolated failures but symptoms of a wider market culture in children’s social care. Costs continue to spiral despite more homes opening, and local authorities are often left paying whatever is demanded. Across fostering and residential care, finance‑driven models are replacing genuine ethical care — and this is not confined to the private sector. Even charities, often assumed to be purely mission‑driven, rely on loans that must be repaid, creating financial pressures and, in some cases, opportunities leveraged by some, which influence how they operate.

 

For example, as highlighted in Competition and Markets Authority findings and visible in some charity accounts, certain charities lease their homes from separate property‑holding entities — in some cases owned by trustees or connected parties — meaning the buildings remain in private hands while rent payments, drawn from placement fees, shape the organisation’s costs and decisions.

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Privatisation, introduced without adequate safeguards, opened the door to investors with little or no care experience, driving instability, high turnover, and escalating costs. What once cut through bureaucracy and delivered innovation has, over time, eroded consistency, weakened oversight, and in many cases undermined the interests of children themselves.

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Done well, residential care offers safety, structure, and therapeutic support that fosters recovery. It is not a fallback but a vital part of a functioning care system. It enables young people to rebuild trust, maintain safe family links, and move toward independence. For some, residential care should be the first choice — not the last resort. Reviews such as the Narey Review have repeatedly affirmed the importance of maintaining a diverse range of high‑quality care options that reflect children’s differing needs.

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Yet despite decades of reform, the legacy of past decisions still shapes the present. There is still no national dataset tracking how many placements children experience, why those placements break down, or what their long‑term impacts might be. Outcomes from residential schools are equally unclear: we know little about how children educated in these settings fare over time, whether they remain with their families or enter care. 

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These gaps limit research and reflect a deeper failure to link data across health, education, youth justice, and social care — a failure to join the dots. In the absence of clear evidence about what different forms of care and education deliver — academically, socially, or later in life — decisions about closures, funding, and policy continue to be shaped by historic battles to defend budgets and entrenched beliefs, rather than by outcomes.

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Some care‑experienced adults recall living in as many as 100 placements. For a child in care from birth to 18, that would mean a new home every two months — a level of disruption that cannot be justified in any era. Many describe the toll: trust shattered, belongings lost, faces blurred, and a lasting sense of chaos, rejection, and never truly belonging.

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Crucially, there is still no comprehensive national dataset on how many children return to care following failed adoptions. Adoption is often framed as the permanent solution, yet without systematic tracking, breakdowns remain hidden. This lack of transparency sustains the illusion of permanence, even though anecdotal evidence and small‑scale studies reveal a far more complex reality.

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Alongside these systemic gaps, the experience of Black children in the UK care system has long been shaped by invisibility, misrecognition, and institutional neglect. In the 1960s, many were privately fostered by white families, often in long‑term informal arrangements. Some were never taken home by their birth parents; they were, in effect, abandoned to the care system.

 

By the 1980s, transracial adoption had increased due to a shortage of Black adoptive families. Though well‑intentioned, it often left Black children without support for a secure racial identity, leaving them vulnerable to disconnection and racism. In 1990, the Department of Health stopped collecting this data, calling it “meaningless,” even though research links these experiences to lasting harm: adopted children are up to four times more likely to attempt suicide, with identity confusion and early trauma key factors.

 

Yet these stories are not all the same. I knew siblings who entered care following the death of their white mother. Their Black father had never been involved, and no relatives came forward. Raised in a white community, they were fostered by a white couple who helped them understand racism, develop coping strategies, and build a sense of identity. It was a placement shaped by care, not convenience. When they were older and involved in the decision, they chose to be adopted by a childless white couple.

 

When I think back to the Black in Care movement led by Black children in the 1980s, I remember how powerful and necessary their voices were in exposing racism and neglect. Yet lived experience has also shown me that a Black adoptive family is not automatically the right match. Within Black communities, colourism, cultural divides, and competing expectations can still create barriers. A child can be made to feel “not Black enough” or different because their heritage differs from those around them.

 

Looking back across these experiences, I see a reality far more complex than any single story. What matters most is whether a child grows up with acceptance, stability, and a true sense of identity and belonging. Yet the legacy of care extends far beyond childhood.

 

Some young women become mothers while still in care, navigating pregnancy and early parenthood under the constant scrutiny of the system. For many, the trauma of their own childhoods does not fade at eighteen – in fact, it often deepens.

 

Care‑experienced mothers often live with a constant, gnawing fear that their own children will be removed – and that fear is not unfounded. Research suggests that around 22% of care leavers become teenage mothers, and approximately 27% of mothers whose children were adopted spent part of their own childhoods in care. Some studies indicate that many care‑experienced parents have also lost their own children to care, but this remains under‑researched and poorly understood. 

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To understand why these patterns occur, we need far better data and informed research. Understanding the role of policy and placement breakdown in intergenerational trauma is key not only to improving outcomes but also to ending the long‑standing cycle of failure.

Within this landscape, adoption has been upheld as the gold standard of permanence. It is sold as a route to stability, belonging, and legal clarity. But it also serves another function: it removes children from state responsibility. Once adopted, children no longer fall under the legal or financial remit of local authorities. Unlike foster or residential care, adoption requires no ongoing public funding or oversight. It privatises care, shifting both emotional labour and long‑term risk onto adoptive families.

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This may suit fiscal imperatives, but it does not always serve children — especially those with complex trauma or unmet mental health needs — or the adoptive families left to cope without support. In some cases, adoptive parents have been abusive or neglectful; in the most extreme, they have killed their child. However, because adoption status is not recorded in national data on child fatalities — and because there is no national data on adoption breakdowns — the true scale of these failures remains unknown. Despite this lack of oversight and transparency, the system continues to claim permanence while concealing its risks and uncertainties.

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Compounding this, the 26‑week time limit imposed by the Children and Families Act 2014 has increased pressure on courts and local authorities to conclude cases quickly. Though designed to prevent delay, its rigid enforcement prioritises speed over substance. Kinship carers may be excluded if they are identified late, and parents showing progress may be dismissed for being “out of time.” In this context, the legal clock can fast‑track adoption — not because it is best for the child, but because it fits fiscal demands.

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These pressures play out most clearly in placement decisions. The narrowing use of Section 20 voluntary arrangements, following the Re N (2015) judgment, has further eroded flexibility. Intended to protect parental rights, it has led to swifter, more adversarial decisions — often closing the door to gradual reunification or recovery.

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For many, foster homes have provided stability and care, showing that with the right match and support, foster care can make a lasting difference. Even so it cannot always meet every child’s needs, and experiences can be inconsistent. For some children, residential care — should have been the first choice, not the last resort.

But beneath these individual decisions lies a deeper structural problem: the dominance of finance‑led care over needs‑led care, and the growing distance between the state and its responsibilities. This is perhaps most clearly reflected in the privatisation of children’s social care. Initially, privatisation brought welcome innovation, flexibility, and responsiveness that was lacking in local authority models. However, while it opened space for creativity, policymakers failed to protect what mattered most: consistency, oversight, and the best interests of the child.

 

Over time, privatisation has increasingly attracted investors and business people with no background in care. While some private providers bring genuine commitment, others enter primarily as a commercial opportunity, often without the depth of experience that high‑quality care demands. 

 

Alongside this, regulation and media attention have shaped a more defensive system. Layers of oversight and fear of blame drive decisions. Professionals work under constraint, and children are passed through a fragmented system shaped more by bureaucracy and what governments are willing to pay than by care.

 

Nothing makes this clearer than the campaign to make care experience a protected characteristic. That such a proposal is even being discussed speaks volumes about the failures of the system. Care experience is not an inherent vulnerability; it becomes one when the system fails to provide safety, stability, and support. Creating a blanket protection risks setting up a hierarchy of need. What is required is not a new label, but sustained investment in parenting and a care system built around identified need.

 

But it is not possible to repair what we do not first identify. Without data and qualitative research on placement breakdowns, adoption failures, returns to care, and long-term outcomes the patterns driving harm remain hidden, and the system risks repeating the same failures while children bear the cost.

 

Many care‑experienced adults speak powerfully about how the system failed them — and those testimonies are vital and deserve to be heard. Yet such accounts can overlook the complexity of individual circumstances. Responsibility for how a life turns out can never rest solely on parenting, whether by family or by the state. Acknowledging this is not to deny the system’s deep failings, but to recognise that responsibility for outcomes is rarely straightforward.

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I have spent a lifetime close to children in care, and what I have learned is this: behind every uncollected dataset is a child whose story isn’t counted, and behind every unchallenged assumption is a policy that may do more harm than good. If reform is to mean anything, it must begin with honesty — about what we know, what we ignore, and who is left behind, not with a narrow legal definition.

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Sources and Further Reading

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• Department for Education (2024): Children looked after in England including adoptions
  Official statistics on the number of looked‑after children and trends over time.

• Independent Review of Children’s Social Care (2022): Final Report
  Sets out recommendations on kinship care and broader reform.

• Competition and Markets Authority (2022): Children’s Social Care Market Study
  Analyses the market culture, costs, and structures (including property leasing and profit models).

• Ofsted Annual Report and unregistered provision reports
  Highlights the rise in unregistered homes and concerns about oversight.

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