When Innovation Needs a Failing Past

Amanda Knowles

Sep 26

5 min read

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 children’s homes were more likely to become “delinquent”. The proposed answer was affluent empty nesters whose life experience could transform children’s lives.

I found that language offensive then. I still do.

Why must people already caring for children be diminished before a new recruitment idea can be celebrated? What makes an affluent person’s spare room more valuable than the home, skill and commitment of an existing foster carer? And why describe children in residential care as though their future behaviour has already been decided?

Children and the adults they become, kinship carers, foster carers and residential caregivers should be at the same table. We are all part of the story of care. Some care is valued by the people who receive it; some is not. Good intentions do not guarantee good care. That reality should be examined, not erased to serve a political purpose.

Three years later, we have not been shown the army that article imagined. Now Foster promotes Weekenders, through which people care for a child for one weekend a month. A regular, trusted adult may make a real difference to a child. Foster carers have provided respite and regular weekend care for decades. Giving it a new name does not make the care itself new.

Nor does weekend care create a full-time home for a child who needs one.

Room Makers offers another example. The government is funding adaptations to foster carers’ homes so that more children can be cared for there. That can be useful. But Rotherham approved a scheme to fund extensions and adaptations to carers’ homes in 2012. In a February 2026 parliamentary debate, an MP described a similar budget for loft conversions and other alterations in Plymouth. The question is not whether the idea has merit. It is why established practice is presented as a discovery when it becomes part of a new reform programme.

Weekenders was recently celebrated at an event in the House of Lords. Photographs and congratulations circulated on LinkedIn. The government has cited weekend fostering while promoting its Fostering Innovation Fund. That announcement does not establish that Now Foster received an award, but it places this kind of care within the government’s story of innovation.

That distinction is easy to lose once the celebration begins. A programme is applauded in Westminster, associated with government policy and praised online. What should come next is a public account of how many people became approved carers, how many children received support, what changed for them and how this approach compares with the weekend care already provided.

Instead, the appearance of progress can arrive before the evidence.

The government’s Enduring Relationships agenda has also been given a prominent parliamentary presentation. Children need lasting relationships. Foster carers, families and residential caregivers did not need a new strategy to discover that. The questions are which relationships children already have, how policy will protect them and what will change in their daily lives.

I call this propaganda because it promotes a preferred account of reform before the results have been established. A familiar need is given a new name. A public event gives it authority. People who support it are visible. Those asking harder questions risk being cast as opponents of the very thing children need.

Personal experience is part of this story too. Children who have lived in care know things no professional can know for them. Parents and relatives know what it is like to seek help or face separation. Foster carers and residential caregivers know what it takes to care for other people’s children day after day. All of that is lived experience. These accounts are different and individual; none can stand for everyone else.

This method was visible in MacAlister’s review. Its Experts by Experience Board included people who had spent time in care, parents, foster carers, kinship carers and adopters. In the review’s own foreword, board members said they did not have the final say over its recommendations. They questioned how meaningful their involvement was. They also described influencing the review and championed much of what it proposed.

Their account deserves to be read in full. Participation was neither absent nor blanket agreement with every conclusion or with the policies that followed. The Children’s Homes Association has since warned that involvement in the review was treated as endorsement, even where contributors later questioned its evidence and direction.

Support and opposition become separate conversations, and policy moves forward in the space between them. That gap grows wider when selected accounts give reform a human face while other children, families and caregivers must fight to have their experience heard. Meanwhile, the people providing care every day can be praised as unsung heroes in one breath and portrayed as the inadequate past in the next.

This matters because billions of pounds and children’s futures are involved. Government projections show £2.96 billion of investment in children’s social care reform from 2026 to 2029. They predict £2.44 billion in net efficiencies over ten years. The calculation depends on estimates of what care would cost without the reforms and what it will cost if they work.

A predicted saving is not a saving.

The Children’s Homes Association has challenged the government’s decision to commission a review to define the purpose of residential care after ministers had already said it should be used for far fewer children. CHA supports stronger family help, kinship care and fostering. It has also warned that reducing residential care without developing the right alternatives could leave children in unsuitable or illegal settings and increase costs.

A shortage of suitable homes can fail children. Poor commissioning can fail children. Repeated moves can fail children. None of those facts establishes that residential care itself is the failure. Yet the government says it expects the residential care market to reduce. What happens if the foster homes it anticipates do not materialise, or if a child needs the care a children’s home can offer?

I hear an echo of the Blair years. Public services were to be modernised through reform, choice and new providers. That language helped open them to greater competition. Now another Labour government is trying to address serious problems in the children’s care market while presenting its own preferred changes as the answer.

There is an arrogance in assuming that what comes next must be better understood than what came before. Foster carers and residential staff have spent decades building relationships with children, finding ways to support them and raising concerns when the system gets in the way. Their work does not need to be made smaller to make a new idea look bigger.

When a report or celebration presents innovation as an achievement, journalists should ask whose experience is being heard, whose objections have been answered, what has actually been tested and where children will live if the promised alternatives are not there. Readers must ask why they do not.

When Innovation Needs a Failing Past

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