The Landscape
Let’s start with the context: every day across Liverpool City Region, a child is placed in residential care. Like any child, they need a safe and happy place to call home where they can enjoy their childhood. At the moment, there aren’t enough suitable placements locally, so more than half of the children are placed outside of the City Region, away from their families, friends and schools, and the communities that are so important to them.
The National Story
There are currently 82,170 Children Looked After (CLA) in England. Children are typically taken into care because they are experiencing abuse, neglect, family breakdown or because of a parent or child's illness or disability.
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Far too many children in England have a poor experience when they become looked after. Rather than receiving the love and support they need, many children are sent away from their communities, placed in care environments that can't meet their needs and suffer further relationship breakdowns, all of which negatively affect their mental well-being, sense of worth and belonging.
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Feedback from care-experienced children and adults has highlighted that the quality and number of loving relationships every child has, whilst in care and when leaving care, should be the primary measure used to determine the success of the care system. Making relationships will set young people leaving care up with the best possible chance of having a good adult life. That is why our care model places its biggest emphasis on building strong, loving relationships – between our team, our children, our partners and our community – using social pedagogy philosophy and trauma-informed practice.
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Many care-experienced children that we spoke to when designing Juno, and staff working in the sector locally, described how a care model that prioritised profit over quality of care too often resulted in insufficient support and poor outcomes for children.
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The Challenges
Price
inflation
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Reducing
quality
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Increasing
distance
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Profit-led
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Private children's residential care providers have steadily increased the prices by an average of 3.5% after accounting for inflation during 2016-2020.
Private Residential Care Providers (supported through private equity), have a greater percentage of ‘inadequate’ and ‘requires improvement’ children's residential homes.
9% of children looked after, 7740 in total, are growing up in residential homes.
Only one-third of these children live in the area where they grew up.
Over 83% of the residential care market is owned by the private sector, with operating profit margins averaging 22.6% from 2016 to 2020.
CMA report, 2022
Independent Review of Social Care, 2022
Juno seeks to address these challenges. We want to show the rest of the UK that it is possible to offer brilliant care, whilst building a sustainable, not-for-profit residential business. We will test and learn as we grow our organisation, sharing what we do so that we can positively influence what is available to children growing up in residential homes, and, most importantly, supporting children to thrive.