The Resi Shift

Did you know the average placement in a children's home costs over £6,000 a week?
Most of us working on the floor have never been told that. Nobody brings it up in handover. It doesn't come up in supervision. But it shapes almost everything about the environment we work in — which beds are available, how far from home young people are placed, who's running the homes we work in and why.
I've written about it in the latest issue of The Resi Shift. It's not a finance lecture — it's a plain-English breakdown of the placement market and what it actually means for practitioners.

The Placement Market: What Practitioners Don’t Know (But Should) The Resi Shift — Issue 4: The System and Its Structures

There's a moment in this work that doesn't get talked about enough.

A young person — who months ago wouldn't sit in the same room as an adult they didn't know — coming to find you just to tell you about their day. Not because they had to. Just because something has changed.

That's what all the hard shifts build toward. The consistency, the calm, the showing up even when it's difficult.

Residential care workers don't always see the full picture. You do your shifts, hand over, go home. But every person who showed up for that young person is part of why that moment happened.

If you work in residential care — this is your reminder that the small, quiet moments are the whole point. Thank you for staying in it. 💙

Most residential workers have sat through the ACEs training at some point.

The ten categories. The PowerPoint. The moment someone does the ACE score exercise and the room goes quiet.

And then the shift starts — and a young person kicks off at 11pm — and all that knowledge doesn't automatically make you calmer, more curious, or better placed to help.

There's a real gap between understanding ACEs and actually using that understanding in the moment. I wrote about it in this week's Resi Shift issue — what the research actually showed, why it matters that ACEs aren't destiny, and what that means for how a children's home should work.

Worth a read if you work in residential care 👇

ACEs Aren't Destiny What the research actually showed, and what it means on a Tuesday night shift

The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act has just become law — and there's a lot in it that matters for residential care workers.

Most of the coverage has been about schools. But for those of us in residential care, the bit worth paying attention to is this: the government now has the power to cap profits in children's homes.

They've said they won't use it straight away — they want to see if other reforms work first. But the power is on the statute. That's new.

This comes off the back of some eye-watering numbers. Some placements are costing councils over £60,000 a week. Residential care spending has nearly doubled in five years. The biggest private providers were making close to 23% average profit margins.

The Act also brings in better support for kinship carers and care leavers — both things a lot of us will have seen the need for up close.

Change is coming to how placements are commissioned and how providers operate. It won't happen overnight, but the direction is set.

Interested to hear what others in the sector make of it — do you think the market will rebalance on its own, or will the profit cap eventually need to be used?

A new report this week from the Institute for Government has called England's children's care system "broken."

It's not just language. Local authorities are so short of placements that they're sending kids wherever there's a bed — not wherever is right for that young person. Children are being placed far from home, far from their schools, far from everyone who knows them.

Some are going into accommodation with no proper safeguards at all.

The average week in a children's home now costs £7,800. £8.9 billion was spent on children in care last year. And still the system can't find the right placement for the right child.

Those of us working on the ground already know this. We see the rushed referrals, the beds taken because they're available, the young people who arrive having had three placements in six weeks.

The report just says out loud what practitioners have known for years.

When the placement drives the care plan — and not the other way around — something has gone very wrong.

Article:

Children’s care system in England is ‘broken’, warns think tank England’s children’s social care system is ‘broken’, with young people increasingly placed in unsuitable homes and councils struggling with rising costs. A new report, published by the Institute for Government, found local authorities are too often forced to make care decisions based on what...

Nearly a third of children's homes are regularly turning away referrals because they don't have enough trained staff.

Let that sink in.

The children being turned away aren't going somewhere better. They're ending up in unregistered settings, miles from home, with no one checking on them properly.

The complexity of need in residential care has shot up — 80% of homes now support children with complex needs, compared to 66% just two years ago. But the workforce hasn't grown with it.

Staff are burning out, leaving, and not being replaced fast enough.
This is the reality on the ground that rarely makes the headlines.

If you work in residential care, you already know this. The question is whether anyone outside the sector is listening.

Link to what I've been reading: https://www.ovcare.co.uk/blogs/29-staff-turnover-in-childrens-homes-the-hidden-crisis-affecting-care-quality

29% Staff Turnover in Children's Homes: The Hidden Crisis Affecting Care Quality Staff turnover in UK children's homes has reached 29%, threatening care quality and stability for vulnerable children. Discover the causes, costs, and solutions to this workforce crisis.

Every time a young person in care moves placement, something happens that doesn't get recorded anywhere.

They decide — again — not to unpack. Not to invest. Not to trust the next adult who says they're here to help.

We know placement instability causes harm. The research is clear. And yet it keeps happening — not enough beds, not enough stability, children moved at short notice to places far from everything familiar.

What residential workers deal with on the other side of that is a young person who has very good reasons not to let anyone in. Building relationship in that context is slow, careful, relational work. It doesn't look dramatic. But it matters enormously.

Reducing placement breakdown isn't just a commissioning problem. It's a therapeutic one.

I've been thinking a lot about what "therapeutic" actually means in residential care — not as a buzzword, but as a way of describing what good workers do every day.

I wrote about it over on The Resi Shift if you want a read 👇
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The Resi Shift | Substack Frontline writing about children's residential care. Practice, policy, commissioning and the young people at the centre of it. By someone who works in the sector, on shift.

I've written a new piece on The Resi Shift about something that's been on my mind for a while.

The word "therapeutic" gets used constantly in residential care — on placement adverts, Ofsted reports, commissioning documents, you name it. It also commands a higher daily fee.

But ask what model underpins it and you often get something vague back. PACE-informed. Trauma-aware. Therapeutically-led. All of which could mean almost anything.

In the new issue I've tried to write honestly about what actually makes therapeutic practice possible — not what the certificate on the wall says, but what it looks like to build it properly. Consistent staffing. Proper reflective supervision. Leadership that doesn't revert to control and containment the moment things get difficult.

And I've written about the bit we rarely say out loud: a team that turns over every eight months, or a rota that's a third agency on any given shift — that's not just a workforce problem. That's a therapeutic failure.

If you work in residential care and you've felt the gap between what "therapeutic" promises and what it actually delivers on the floor — this one's for you.

Please give my post a read and let me know what you think:

What Therapeutic Actually Means We've all heard it before.

Two children's homes in Leicester just got Outstanding in every area from Ofsted. Every single domain. 🏆

That's genuinely rare and it deserves a moment.

Because Outstanding doesn't come from great paperwork or the right policies on the wall. It comes from the team — from people showing up the same way on a tough Friday night as they do on a quiet Monday morning. From a culture built slowly, shift by shift, over a long time.

To everyone working in those homes: this is your result. Well done. 👏

Have you ever worked somewhere that earned an Outstanding?

What made the difference?

De-escalation gets talked about a lot in residential care.

We learn the techniques — tone of voice, body language, giving choices. All valid. But honestly? The most effective de-escalation I've seen doesn't happen in the moment at all. It happens in the weeks before.

It's knowing that this young person needs ten minutes before they can talk. Knowing what music helps. Knowing the early signs before anything is even said out loud.

That kind of knowledge doesn't come from a training manual. It comes from showing up, paying attention, and building something over time.

By the time things are escalating, the window for technique is already closing. The real work happened earlier — in all the ordinary moments that didn't look like work at all.

De-escalation is a relational skill before it's a practical one. ✅

If you work in residential care and want practical resources to support your practice, I've got a growing range of guides and toolkits over on Etsy 👇
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TheResiShift - Etsy Shop The Resi Shift: Practical resources for practitioners by TheResiShift located in United Kingdom.