We are pleased to share the report from our exploratory study, conducted for the Youth Endowment Fund, on how the care system in England and Wales can protect children from involvement in violence.

Read the full report here: Review of the Care System and Violence full report

Read the youth-facing summary here: Review of the Care System and Violence youth facing report

The study aimed to understand how the risk of children in care becoming involved in violence is shaped by features of the care system and the responses of professionals, the barriers local authorities face in safeguarding children, and how these can be overcome.

We identified two main pathways through which children in care can become involved in serious violence: violent incidents occurring within care settings, and violence linked to exploitation. It also found that risk is shaped by wider pressures across the care system, including placement instability, shortages of suitable homes, gaps in therapeutic and educational support, workforce pressures, and inconsistent responses to children’s needs and identities.

Our findings show that change is needed in three key areas:

• Strengthening the protective potential of the care system. Children in care need access to appropriate, safe and stable places to live, with support that helps them to thrive. This means improving placement sufficiency and matching, strengthening foster and residential care, ensuring children’s mental health, neurodivergent and educational needs are met, providing culturally appropriate support, and maintaining trusted relationships during and after the transition out of care.
• Safeguarding children in care who are at risk of, or already involved in, exploitation or violence. Children in care should be proactively included within multi-agency safeguarding pathways for extra-familial harm, with targeted support available at key “reachable moments” such as missing episodes, school exclusion, drug use, behavioural incidents in care settings and disengagement from education. Care staff and foster carers also need the training, confidence and support to recognise and respond to risks of exploitation and violence.
• Reducing the unnecessary criminalisation of children in care. Behaviour linked to trauma, unmet need or distress should not unnecessarily draw children into the criminal justice system. Local protocols, trauma-informed responses from care staff, child-centred policing and effective diversionary pathways are all needed to ensure incidents are handled proportionately and children receive support rather than punitive responses wherever appropriate.

These findings have informed the Youth Endowment Fund’s practice guidance for senior leaders in children’s services on how to protect children from involvement in violence, particularly its recommendation to proactively safeguard children in care from violence.

Read the full YEF guidance here.

We hope these resources will support local authorities and their partners to build on the many promising areas of practice identified through the review. However, the report also highlights that making protective practice consistent will require both local action and national support to address the wider pressures facing children’s social care.