Two Truths
Who Speaks for Care?
Residential care was not absent. Residential caregivers were.
The Independent Review of Children’s Social Care did not ignore residential care. It discussed children’s homes, residential workers, managers, qualifications, regulation, commissioning, cost and the care market.
But residential care was more often understood through the system surrounding it, while fostering was more readily understood through the relationships within it.
This paper asks whether residential caregiving knowledge was less visible in the way the Review organised evidence, whether that helped shape a narrower diagnosis of residential care, and what happens when that diagnosis becomes policy.
It follows the evidence through family support, fostering, residential care, complexity, cost and the different forms of knowledge brought to decisions about children.
We should have been at the same table.
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