When did children’s social care become a story of victims and villains?

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 identified failures in recruitment, management, supervision, inspection and safeguarding, alongside too little placement choice, damaging sequences of moves, staffing difficulties and the continuing need for residential care.

The evidence contained more than one story. Policy did not give each story equal weight.

A scandal does not determine the reform that follows it. Someone decides what the scandal means.

It was the 2026 report on the premature deaths of young people who had spent time in care that prompted me to look again at how these stories are constructed.

Its title, ‘You really are on your own’, carried a powerful message about isolation, failed relationships and the loss of support. But when I reflected on my own experience and looked at the data and research beneath it, I found a much more complicated picture. The circumstances of the deaths were varied, and the evidence did not establish that loneliness or repeatedly failing relationships were their cause.

That made me ask a wider question: how does a complicated body of evidence become a much simpler public story, and what happens when that story begins to shape policy?

Children’s social care has been repeatedly reorganised in response to failure. Structures have changed. Responsibilities have moved. Regulation has moved between statutory bodies. Markets have expanded. Fostering has been the dominant placement for forty years. Local authority residential care has been substantially reduced, while independent residential care has grown.

Each reform changed something elsewhere in the system.

The children did not disappear. Their circumstances did not disappear either.

Children come into care because of what is happening in their lives. They come into care in circumstances that include neglect, abuse, family breakdown, loss or other serious adversity. Some have disabilities or needs that their families and local services have struggled to meet. Reform can change the help offered to a family, when the state intervenes, who provides a service and where a child lives. In some cases earlier help may make it possible for a child to remain safely at home.

But reform does not remove the circumstances that bring children into care or the needs they bring with them.

The system can change. The child’s circumstances do not change with it.

Placements outside the local authority were not all the same. Some children were in residential care commissioned through social services. Others were in residential special schools and had been placed through education rather than social services. Some were in secure care, where the reasons for the placement could be different again.

Budgets were separate. The public purse was not.

The reasoning behind bringing children back is familiar. Children should be closer to their families and communities where it is safe and in their best interests. Local services should be used wherever possible. But not children who need to be at a distance for their own safety.

Some of those children were settled where they were. They had formed relationships with adults and other children around them. The placement had become part of their lives. Bringing them back meant another move and the loss of relationships that mattered.

The Children’s Rights Director later reported children living outside their home authority being told they had to return for policy or financial reasons rather than because returning was in their own best interests. The Care Matters Placements Working Group also recorded children facing abrupt endings to placements in which they felt settled and happy.

So even the present ambition to bring children closer to home is not new.

Nor is the difficulty.

A distant placement can be the wrong placement. It can also have become the child’s home.

That history matters because we have arrived at another major reform programme, once again against a financial backdrop that is impossible to ignore.

Children’s social care, as it is presently organised, commissioned and purchased, has become financially unsustainable. Placement spending has risen sharply. Local authorities are struggling with escalating costs. Residential care has become extremely expensive.

Government therefore has a genuine problem to solve.

But the current solution carries a substantial financial proposition of its own. Government has committed more than £2.4 billion over three years to children’s social care reform.

The Independent Review of Children’s Social Care was commissioned by a Conservative government in 2021. Its final report was published in 2022. Its broad diagnosis was accepted by that government and began to shape policy through Stable Homes, Built on Love. When Labour came to power in 2024, it carried much of that direction into its own reform programme. Josh MacAlister was elected as a Labour MP that year and, in 2025, became Minister for Children and Families, with responsibility for children’s social care.

That continuity makes scrutiny of the original findings more important, not less.

The review drew on a substantial body of research, data and experience. But evidence does not interpret itself. Choices are made about which research is given most weight, which data is treated as significant, whose experience is given authority and how different findings are brought together.

A complicated system can be diagnosed, and evidence and experience then organised to support that diagnosis.

The research on Adverse Childhood Experiences matters here because the association between serious childhood adversity, poorer adult health and premature death was already known. Many children who enter care have experienced serious adversity before the state becomes involved. They are not a random group drawn from the general population.

That makes comparison important. If adults who spent time in care are compared with the general population and poorer outcomes are found, that tells us something about inequality. It does not, by itself, tell us what caused those outcomes or what part was played by having been in care.

To begin answering that question, we would also need to understand what happened to people who experienced comparable childhood adversity but did not enter care, as well as what happened before care, during care and afterwards.

Otherwise we risk being told again what we already knew: serious childhood adversity is associated with poorer outcomes that reach far into adult life, including an increased risk of premature death.

In relation to premature deaths, the review acknowledged the limits of the available evidence about how relationships, housing, employment and health combined to affect the life expectancy of adults who had spent time in care. MacAlister nevertheless proposed what he called a “reasonable hypothesis”: that the stark outcomes described were due to a combination of childhood or complex trauma, a failure to consistently surround people with those who loved them, and substandard support and provision when they reached 18.

That framing was challenged at the time. Rebekah Pierre, who had spent time in care and later became a social worker, challenged the review’s emphasis on families and communities, arguing that relationships and community could not substitute for properly funded services. She described relying on a loose idea of community to supplement social care as a “gross abdication of government responsibility”.

A reasonable hypothesis is a place to begin. It is not a conclusion.

The later review of premature deaths was then asked whether loneliness arising from repeatedly failing relationships was a leading cause.

The problem is not that the report found no evidence of loneliness, isolation or the loss of support. It did. The problem is that its data does not show that loneliness or repeatedly failing relationships explain why these young people died.

The circumstances of their deaths were varied. The report does not separate the effects of adversity before care from what happened during care, what happened afterwards and the many other circumstances present in the lives it examined. Nor does it establish that failed relationships were the factor that turned known vulnerability to premature death into these particular deaths.

It therefore does not answer the central question: why did these young people die prematurely?

Instead, the report sits within an explanatory frame that was already present in MacAlister’s “reasonable hypothesis”. Childhood trauma, reduced support, loneliness and failed relationships are brought together into a story that points towards the need for enduring relationships.

But the evidence does not demonstrate that story as the explanation for the deaths.

We already knew that childhood adversity can have lasting consequences. We already knew that it is associated with premature death. We already knew that young people can experience a sharp reduction in formal support as they move into adulthood. We already knew that stable, supportive relationships matter.

What we did not already know, and what the report does not establish, is that the absence or failure of those relationships explains these premature deaths.

The question is what this report has added that allows those established facts to become an explanation for these deaths.

On that central question, I cannot find that it adds anything.

What I find instead is a much more complicated reality being given a simpler explanation, one that also fits the direction in which policy was already travelling.

That is why the distinction between evidence that identifies a problem and evidence that explains it matters.

The review contract itself was closely specified. Its recommendations had to be affordable. Where new funding was required, government expected evidence showing how, and over what time period, that spending would be offset by savings elsewhere in public services.

What is much less visible is an equivalent process for testing the review’s central diagnosis before it travelled from one government to the next and became the basis for reform.

Those words, over time, matter.

Government has committed more than £2.4 billion over three years to reform. It also projects £2.4 billion in net efficiencies to local government over ten years.

The proposition is not simply that government will spend more to improve children’s lives. It is that spending differently now will reduce costs later.

Earlier help is expected to reduce the number of children needing more intensive services. More children are to remain within their families. Government has committed to 10,000 additional foster places. Residential care is intended to become a much smaller and more specialised part of the system. Regional commissioning is expected to exert greater control over the market.

This is not a minor adjustment.

The government’s own implementation plan speaks of a smaller and more purposeful use of residential care. In his foreword to the implementation plan, Josh MacAlister goes further, describing residential care as something from which only a very small number of children may benefit for a short period, with institutional care expected to be exceptional.

The question is whether expanding fostering can substitute for residential care to the extent government now anticipates.

For some children, residential care became the last resort after fostering had repeatedly broken down. The question is whether it should have been considered earlier.

Increasing the number of foster places does not make fostering the right placement for every child.

The system can change. The child’s circumstances do not change with it.

Nor should we confuse a saving in one budget with a saving to the public purse. Costs can move between social care, education, health, housing and other services without disappearing.

Moving the cost does not make need disappear.

And we do not have to rely on history alone to see the difficulty of building reform around projected future savings.

Somerset’s Homes and Horizons programme was presented as an innovative ten-year partnership bringing together small local children’s homes, specialist fostering, education and therapeutic support. It was intended to keep children closer to home and reduce reliance on expensive external placements.

The intentions were understandable.

In November 2025 Somerset approved expansion of the programme and further capital investment, with anticipated financial benefits and cost avoidance forming part of the case.

Less than a year later, Shaw Trust announced that it intended to withdraw from the partnership in 2027, halfway through the planned ten-year arrangement. Five of the eight homes operated by its subsidiary had already closed.

That does not prove the Somerset model itself was wrong. Nor does it mean nothing worthwhile was achieved.

It demonstrates something more important.

Models do not deliver because the business case says they will.

Partnerships depend upon organisations remaining willing and able to participate. Homes depend upon managers and staff. Therapeutic services depend upon clinicians actually being available. Education depends upon funded places. Savings depend upon assumptions about staffing, occupancy, demand, stability and future costs proving accurate.

That is why committing large amounts of public funds on the promise of savings years ahead requires a high evidential threshold.

Yet another part of the current programme raises the same concern.

The children’s homes workforce review is being asked to consider the purpose of residential care, the knowledge and skills its workforce needs, qualifications, training, career pathways and accountability.

Yet government had already stated the direction of travel before the review’s findings were available: more fostering, more family settings and a smaller, more specialised residential sector.

So the review is being asked to help define the purpose of residential care after important parts of its future have already been set.

That leads to a simple test.

If the review finds that residential care has several purposes, including providing a long-term home, can policy change? If it finds that some children would benefit from entering residential care earlier rather than after repeated foster placement breakdowns, can policy change? If it finds that fostering cannot substitute for residential care to the extent anticipated, can policy change?

And if those findings make reform more expensive, can policy still change?

Evidence led policy and policy led evidence are not the same thing.

Another finding in the report on premature deaths deserves at least as much attention: the sharp reduction in formal support as young people move into adulthood.

A loss of services is not the same thing as a loss of relationships.

Yet current policy increasingly looks to who remains to provide support.

That support is not only emotional. Who helps furnish a flat? Who lends money when something breaks? Who provides somewhere to stay if a tenancy fails? Who helps with forms, pays the bus fare, stores belongings, notices when someone is unwell or answers the phone in a crisis?

And even where somebody remains, another question follows.

Are they willing and able to provide it?

A former foster carer, residential worker, relative, friend or other trusted adult may care deeply and still lack the money, housing, time, transport or capacity to provide what a young person needs.

A relationship can endure without being able to carry responsibilities that services and statutory provision were designed to carry.

There is also a risk in making enduring relationships themselves part of the solution. Dependence on another person is not the same thing as entitlement to support.

A relationship may be loving and supportive. It may also become unequal, controlling or unsafe. Longevity does not guarantee safety.

Young people should not have to rely on the goodwill or continued availability of another individual for support that should be theirs by right.

Relationships matter enormously. But they should not become a convenient way of transferring responsibility beyond formal services and into the private lives of whoever remains.

There is another part of this story that troubles me.

Much of it has received remarkably little sustained scrutiny in the mainstream press.

Individual crises are reported. Profits in children’s homes make headlines. Illegal placements are exposed. Foster-carer shortages are covered. The deaths of young people who spent time in care rightly receive attention.

The title ‘You really are on your own’ illustrates the problem. The report identified isolation and a sharp reduction in support as important themes, but its evidence did not establish that loneliness or repeatedly failing relationships caused the deaths.

The title tells a clearer story than the evidence does.

That matters because the story that travels can become the headline, the public explanation and eventually part of the justification for reform.

But those stories are often told separately and through the immediate failure in front of us. A child has been harmed. A placement has failed. A home is inadequate. A provider has made excessive profits. A young person has died. The understandable search is for who failed, who should be held responsible and what must now change.

That produces a powerful public story. Children who were harmed become the evidence of a failed care system. The people working within it become its most visible representatives. Government appears afterwards, announcing the review, inquiry or reform intended to put things right.

What is much less visible is the history behind the headline. The decisions that reduced one kind of care and expanded another. The movement of responsibility between departments. The growth of markets. The loss of public capacity. The changing role of regulation. The previous reforms that helped create the conditions the latest reform is intended to correct.

What is rarely brought together is the history that led us here.

How did public residential capacity shrink? How did the independent market become so dominant? Why did fostering become the preferred answer for so many children? Who shaped commissioning, regulation and professional boundaries? What happened when earlier reforms failed to deliver what they promised? Where did the costs go when responsibility moved between services?

And why is government now committing billions of pounds of public funds to another transformation before some of its central assumptions have been demonstrated?

Without that history, the story becomes much simpler. Those who were harmed become the victims. The workforce becomes the villains. The reformer becomes the rescuer.

But that is not the whole story. Governments designed, funded, regulated and repeatedly reorganised the system they are now seeking to reform. Some caregivers harmed children. Others protected them. Adults who spent time in care cannot be defined by what happened to them as children.

The roles may change. Responsibility does not.

There were caregivers who abused children. There were failures to protect children. Some practice was indefensible. Responsibility for that should be named.

But it should also be followed.

If the failure belonged to an organisation, follow it there. If a child could not get the service they needed, ask why. If responsibility lay with a commissioner or regulator, follow it there. If legislation, funding or regulation created the conditions in which failure occurred, follow responsibility there too.

And follow the money.

If a service was reduced because it was expensive, say so. If costs moved into education, health, housing, criminal justice or another part of the public sector, follow them there. If a cheaper solution became the preferred solution, ask whether it was better for children or a false economy.

Children’s social care did not become financially unsustainable overnight. We arrived here through decades of decisions about what the state should provide, what could be purchased, where children should live, how risk should be managed, which professions should hold authority, what outcomes should be measured and which costs should sit in which budgets.

That history matters now because the financial stakes are enormous.

Government is committing billions of pounds of public funds on the promise that benefits and savings will emerge over time. History has already shown what can happen when one form of care is reduced on the assumption that children’s needs will be met somewhere else. Somerset provides a contemporary warning that apparently convincing models can prove less durable than their business cases assumed.

The question is not whether a financially unsustainable system needs reform.

It does.

The question is whether there is enough evidence to justify gambling public funds, and children’s lives, on assumptions whose consequences may not become fully visible for years.

The system can change. The child’s circumstances do not change with it.

Perhaps that is where reform should begin.

Not with the model government wants to create, but with the child it still has a responsibility to care for.

Resources

William Utting, People Like Us: The Report of the Review of the Safeguards for Children Living Away from Home, 1997.

Vincent J. Felitti et al., Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many of the Leading Causes of Death in Adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 1998.

House of Commons Health Committee, Children Looked After by Local Authorities, 1998.

Department for Education and Skills, Every Child Matters, 2003.

Children Act 2004.

Department for Education, Care Matters: Placements Working Group Report, 2007.

Roger Morgan, Children’s Rights Director for England, evidence to the House of Commons Children, Schools and Families Committee on looked-after children and out-of-authority placements, 2008.

David W. Brown et al., Adverse Childhood Experiences and the Risk of Premature Mortality, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2009.

Children and Social Work Act 2017.

Karen Hughes et al., The effect of multiple adverse childhood experiences on health: a systematic review and meta-analysis, The Lancet Public Health, 2017.

Department for Education, Terms of Reference for the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, 2021.

Department for Education, contract for the Lead Reviewer, Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, 2021.

UK Parliament, written question on scrutiny of the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care and its findings, 2021.

Josh MacAlister, The Case for Change, 2021.

Josh MacAlister, The Independent Review of Children’s Social Care: Final Report, 2022.

Josh MacAlister, Independent Review of Children’s Social Care: Recommendation Annexes, 2022.

Rebekah Pierre, England’s care system is failing children. This new overhaul is based on a middle-class fantasy, The Guardian, 23 May 2022.

Competition and Markets Authority, Children’s Social Care Market Study: Final Report, 2022.

Ofsted, Why do children go into children’s homes?, 2022.

Department for Education, Stable Homes, Built on Love, 2023.

Somerset Council, Homes and Horizons, 2025.

Somerset Council, Acquiring Homes for Children Looked After, Executive Decision Report, 5 November 2025.

HM Treasury, 10 Year Efficiency Projections, 2025.

Department for Education, Renewing Fostering: Homes for 10,000 More Children, 2026.

Department for Education, Delivering the Children’s Social Care Reset: An Implementation Plan for Local Partners 2026–2029, 2026.

Department for Education, Enduring Relationships for Care-Experienced Children, 2026.

Department for Education, Review of Professional Development for the Children’s Homes Workforce: Terms of Reference, 2026.

Department for Education, Evaluation of Regional Care Cooperatives: Phase 1, 2026.

Department for Education, Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill: Regulatory Impact Assessment, 2026.

Ashley John-Baptiste and Clare Chamberlain, ‘You really are on your own’: A Study of the Early Deaths of Young People Who Were in Care, 2026.

Rebekah Pierre, Ceremony to celebrate care leavers’ lifelong relationships risks ‘othering’, Professional Social Work, 5 August 2026.

Civil Society, Shaw Trust withdraws from £70m contract halfway through, 3 August 2026.