Children’s social care has been in crisis for decades, yet the voices of the children and families who live through it have rarely shaped how the system works. This project is the first major historical and emotional study of children’s care from 1800 to the present, combining archival research with creative, participatory methods to centre the experiences of Care-Experienced people. The problem is that current reform efforts lack a deep understanding of how care practices evolved—and how children themselves felt about them. Without that long view, policymakers risk repeating past mistakes. The research matters because it directly confronts the mindset that has kept the system stuck, offering an evidence-based framework for rethinking what care is, what it does, and what it could become. If successful, the project will reshape how care agencies, practitioners, and policymakers design services—not by imposing top-down solutions, but by embedding the perspectives of those who have been through the system. This is not a quick fix; it is a fundamental reorientation of how society understands care itself.
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Children's social care has long been in crisis with reports of abuse, growing numbers of children entering care, declining numbers of carers and diminishing quality of care. The 2022 inquiry into children's social care in England and Wales called for a radically different mindset alongside significant investment to 'reset' the care system and ensure it effectively meets children's needs. The state of care in the present day has in part resulted from an enduring lack of attention to and understanding of child and family perspectives about welfare needs and experiences from the long view. Meaningful transformations to current care systems cannot happen without a deep understanding of the complex contexts in which children's care has developed over modern history, and a comprehensive knowledge of how children in both the past and present have felt about their diverse experiences of care. Caring Communities offers a critical and timely intervention into what will be a radical programme of transformation for the children's social care system over the next decade. This project provides the first major cultural and affective study of children's care between 1800-present that will help shift this mindset to imagine new and radical possibilities for children's social care in the future. It develops an innovative, interdisciplinary framework that combines historical research with creative and participatory approaches to privilege the subjectivities, voices, and views of Care-Experienced people and to elucidate new understandings about care practices and experiences across time. Crucially, the research sheds important light on the complex interplay of emotions, care, and politics and explores how these have shaped care practices in the past and present. The project draws attention to the multiple ways in which current understandings, policies, and practices are the result of long-term processes of cultural, political, and social change and thus embedded in the past. It adopts a historical vantage point while collaborating creatively with partners including major UK care agencies (Coram, The Children's Society, Who Cares? Scotland) and Care-Experienced groups to emphasise the relevance and significance of historical forms of care to current policy and practice, offering a unique opportunity to generate new thinking about the value, meaning and impact of distinct care practices. Taking a historical perspective that is attentive to current policy and practice means that the project offers significant and meaningful ways of approaching the study of children's care for the benefit of policymakers, practitioners, carers, and care agencies. The Future Leaders Fellowship (FLF) will fundamentally change the way we think about social care: this research uses historical evidence and collaborates with care professionals and recipients to confront ideas about what care is, what it does, its value, and crucially, what it could be. In addition, it fosters innovative creative and participatory techniques to develop insights that will shape debates about the future of care that cannot be derived from conventional historical methods alone. Embedding collaboration and co-production from the start, the project offers Care-Experienced groups a platform to make a significant contribution to ground-breaking research and the opportunity to demonstrate that the history of children in care is really the story of all children's care. In creating a better understanding about the world of children's care over time, the FLF will generate an emotionally- and historically-informed framework for developing compassionate and effective practices for the future.
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