Before the Purpose of Residential Child Care Is Defined

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 examines how changes to fostering, adoption, family support, youth justice, secure care, leaving care, commissioning, regulation and the market have repeatedly changed who enters residential care and what residential care is expected to do.

It asks what successive reforms achieved, what they displaced, what was learned, what was forgotten and what may have been lost as one reform followed another.

Most importantly, it asks whether the current review of the children’s homes workforce is genuinely at liberty to discover that the direction already set by government may need to change.

Residential child care has never had a single purpose.

Children do not arrive in it without a history.

And the evidence cannot be understood by looking at residential care in isolation.

This is a substantial critical narrative review of approximately 50,000 words.

Amanda Knowles MBE

First published September 2026

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