A Turning Point for Children in Care? Three Reports, One Reckoning

29 Aug

In the space of one week in August 2026, three significant reports arrived in quick succession, each addressing a different dimension of the lived experience of children in care, care leavers and those with care experience. Taken together, they represent a convergence of institutional attention on a population that, for most of modern British history, has remained at the margins of public and policy consciousness. That all three landed together, one from Parliament, one from the Royal College of Medicine and the other from an independent government-commissioned study reflects a society that is, at last, beginning to reckon seriously with what it means to grow up in, leave and take into adulthood, the care system.

The first report, published on 27 August by the Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR), concluded bluntly that the children's social care system is failing the young people it is designed to protect (Joint Committee on Human Rights [JCHR], 2026). The second, a position statement from the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCPsych), addressed the devastating and lifelong mental health consequences of non-recent child sexual abuse (NRCSA), a harm disproportionately experienced within and around the care system (Royal College of Psychiatrists [RCPsych], 2026). The third, a government-commissioned independent study authored by Ashley John-Baptiste and Clare Chamberlain, examined the early deaths of care-experienced young people aged 18 to 24, analysing 112 notifications of care leaver deaths from 2025 alone (John-Baptiste & Chamberlain, 2026). Its title, 'You Really Are On Your Own' , captures an experience that most, if not all, of those who have lived within the care system will recognise.

Three Reports, One Story

Each report, while approached through different lenses, converge on the fundamental experience that the state's relationship with the children it looks after is characterised by inadequate support, relational impoverishment and long-term harm.

The JCHR report highlights that around 400,000 children in England are currently within the social care system, with nearly 84,000 looked after by local authorities (JCHR, 2026). Its central finding described what what was first named by young people in the 1990’s, the 'cliff edge' that young people encounter when they turn 18, as support networks dissolve and statutory obligations reduce significantly. The report highlights that (of course!) this has catastrophic consequences for housing, health, education and employment. The Committee calls on the Government to fully incorporate the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child into English law and to end the use of unregulated and unlicensed accommodation, a crisis currently costing the taxpayer an estimated £353 million per year (JCHR, 2026).

The RCPsych position statement PS04/26 broadens the lens, acknowledging directly what many of those working around trauma have long recognised, but which has previously not been stated so plainly by the medical royal college. It states "Despite a significant proportion of people in contact with mental health services having experienced childhood sexual abuse, it is not well enough recognised or responded to…. it is an issue hidden in plain sight" (RCPsych, 2026, Foreword). Co-produced with survivors, the statement calls for trauma-informed, person-centred care to become the standard across NHS mental health settings. It acknowledges instances of re-traumatisation, misdiagnosis and inadequate care planning and calls for a coherent inter-agency response between statutory services and the voluntary and community sector (RCPsych, 2026). For care-experienced people, who are disproportionately represented among survivors of childhood sexual abuse and among those accessing mental health services, this statement is either validating, activating or deeply triggering.

The third report, commissioned by the Minister for Children and Families, John-Baptiste and Chamberlain's study examined the circumstances surrounding the early deaths of care leavers. Their analysis reveals young people dying in adult prisons, young women who had experienced the removal of their own children, asylum-seeking young people awaiting immigration decisions and 18-year-olds encountering adulthood entirely unsupported. Section headings tell the deeply depressing story; "Being alone, readiness for adulthood" and "Cast adrift, huge drop in levels of support" (John-Baptiste & Chamberlain, 2026, pp. 28–29). The impact of this report has rippled through the care experienced community as the collective grief and community harm has nowhere to go. (I am hosting a community gathering for care experienced people, supported by the Care Leavers Association on 9th September. You can register here.)

When No One Was Looking

Having lived through the long preceding decades of institutional silence, these reports are a breakthrough of sorts but they are also frustrating as they state what is known. We know. We have known for a very very long time.

For much of the twentieth century, children in care were regarded primarily as administrative problems to be managed rather than rights-holders deserving of sustained public attention. Young people could legally be discharged from care at 16 with little support (which was my experience in the 1980’s). It was not until the Children (Leaving Care) Act 2000 that any meaningful duty to continue supporting care leavers was placed on local authorities and even this fell well short of what family life ordinarily provides. The concept of corporate parenting, the expectation that local authorities should act as the collective 'good parent' to looked-after children, only acquired statutory force through the Children and Social Work Act 2017. That this took until 2017 is itself a measure of how slowly the conversation has moved.

The landscape around childhood sexual abuse has shifted, but no less painfully slowly. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, established in 2015 and concluding in 2022, surfaced overwhelming evidence of institutional failure and the long shadow cast over adult mental health. Yet as the RCPsych acknowledges, the translation of those findings into clinical practice has been inadequate. The same voices that were unheard during abuse continue to be unheard in care (RCPsych, 2026).

A Reckoning, Not Yet a Resolution

It would be premature to describe this week as a turning point and the reports themselves avoid any such claim. They document harm and prescribe change, but they do not assert that change has arrived. What they represent collectively is a qualitative shift in the seriousness with which the care-experienced community is now being addressed; by Parliament, by the medical royal college and by an independent study.

Reports alone do not save lives, but sustained, multi-institutional attention on care experience is, historically, without precedent. For a population that has spent too long being invisible, their deaths unnoticed, their trauma unacknowledged, their cliff-edge exits from care accepted as inevitable, being seen by Parliament, by psychiatry and by government all at once, may be the first hope of anything truly changing at all. The week will not be remembered as the moment it all got better, but it might be the moment the scale of what has been allowed to happen became impossible to ignore.