The policy context for residential care

According to the most recent Ofsted data, 6,031 children were living in residential child care as of 31 March 2015. This figure represented a fall of 0.1 per cent from the previous year and accounted for just 8.7 per cent of the 69,310 looked-after children placements on that date.

Despite being relatively small in number, residential care is increasingly being used for older children with complex needs and a history of multiple placement breakdowns. The support needs of this group of young people tend on the whole to be higher than those in other forms of care and pose a significant challenge to residential care providers, whether in the statutory or independent sector.

The factors behind these trends are multiple, complex and longstanding. High-profile abuse cases and concerns about the quality of provision has seen commissioners move away from using residential care to the point where it is now regarded often as an option for children whose needs are too great for foster carers to cope, and where adoption is not a realistic option. In addition, the high cost of providing intensive therapeutic support for those in residential care make it an economically unsustainable model for use with anything but the most troubled children. In fact, the fall in the number of children now placed by councils in residential care has seen 41 of England's 152 local authorities (28 per cent) no longer have their own provision and only commission places from the independent sector (see graphics).