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Successive governments in recent years have prioritised different placement options or elements of care. From 2010 onwards, there was sustained focus and investment in adoption, while independent reviews into fostering and residential care, undertaken a decade ago, did not receive the same prioritisation or investment.Many of the same challenges picked up in those reviews resurfaced several years later in the Independent Review of Children's Social Care in 2022 and are still present today.While adoption can be the right permanent option for some children, it does not work for all. Over the last couple of years, the current Government has given more weight to kinship and fostering, which is welcome.However, directors of children's services think of all forms of care in a whole-system approach and seek to locally join up the interlinked strands of national reforms currently running as parallel programmes. Otherwise, the risk is that we replace one hierarchy with another.Fostering is delivering good outcomes for many of the children in our care, but there simply are not enough foster carers. Ongoing reforms do not yet do enough to address the systemic barriers to recruitment and retention, many of which remain outside the influence of children's social care.With the increased focus on fostering, what must not happen is for residential care to become the option that, implicitly or otherwise, makes children feel less valued. For some children and young people, residential care is genuinely the best option for them.There has been increased awareness and debate about the issues and challenges in the residential care market. While the focus and investment here is welcome, there are huge systemic issues to grapple with, including the rise of profit-driven providers opening up provision in places with cheaper overheads, such as the North and the Midlands, rather than where capacity is needed.Ministers are right to take this seriously. Greater co-operation among local authorities, who currently compete with one another for scarce placements, will help up to a point, but the majority of the market is privately owned and operated.With the increased focus on fostering, what must not happen is for residential care to become the option that, implicitly or otherwise, makes children feel less valued. For some children and young people, residential care is genuinely the best option for them.The new Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026, alongside other change programmes, includes a suite of measures to bring greater transparency to ownership and profits, as well as new capital investment. These may help, but they are not quick fixes.For most children, the best outcome is to remain at home with their families and never enter care in the first place.Keeping families together, where it is safe to do so, means action on the ‘cause of causes', such as poverty and housing instability.What children and young people need is a system built around individual circumstances, one that is flexible enough to serve the needs and best interests of every child.Dheeraj Chibber is chair of the health, care and commissioning network at the Association of Directors of Children's Services (ADCS)

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ADCS

Moving away from care hierarchies to better support children and young people

By Dheeraj Chibber | 29 May 2026

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