The National Audit Office's examination of children's residential care contained a finding that received less attention than its headline on cost. The Department for Education, the NAO concluded, lacks up-to-date information on children's needs, lacks the financial data to establish what places should cost, and has not articulated what a well-functioning market would even look like. In plainer terms: England spends over £3bn a year on residential care for around 16,000 children and cannot systematically say which provision produces which outcomes for which children.
The gap runs through the whole system. Inspection tells us about quality of care at a point in time; it is not longitudinal outcome tracking. Local authorities hold rich data on their own children but rarely in a form that connects placement characteristics to long-term trajectories. Providers (ourselves included) measure what we choose to measure, in frameworks of our own design, which makes comparison across the sector close to impossible.
This matters for a reason beyond accountability. Without shared outcome evidence, commissioning defaults to the two things that are measurable: price and headline inspection grade. Both matter; neither tells a commissioner whether a particular home actually helps children like the child in front of them. The absence of evidence does not make the market neutral. It makes it price-led.
What would better look like? Not a single national metric. Childhood recovery resists league tables, and a crude measure would distort practice the way crude measures always do. But a realistic core set is well within reach: placement stability and planned versus unplanned endings; education engagement and attainment trajectory; health and emotional wellbeing measured on validated tools at admission and at intervals; the child's own reported experience; and destination outcomes at 18, 21 and 25, a horizon the Staying Close extension in the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 now makes both possible and necessary.
Providers do not need to wait for the Department to mandate this. Any provider can adopt a published outcomes framework, apply it consistently, and share the results with commissioners, including the uncomfortable results, which are the ones that make the comfortable ones credible.
A question for commissioners and providers alike: if a provider offered you its outcomes data, warts and all, as a standard part of every placement review, would your processes know what to do with it?
