written by Cecile Remy, current Chair of Trustees

Across the five nations of the UK, a set of reforms of the care system is underway. What does this mean for the lives of children and young people, and which insights does social pedagogy’s ethical framework offer?

So, what’s happening across the UK and Ireland?

Scotland

On the 19^th of March 2026, Members of the Scottish Parliament held the final debate of the Children (Care Experience and Services Planning) (Scotland) Bill. The remit of the law is wide-ranging, from emphasising family involvement during care planning, changes to the Hearing system, to capping profit on residential child care services or the requirement to create a register of foster carers.

On the 26^th of March, MSPs held another final debate, this one about the Restraint and Seclusion in Schools (Scotland) Bill. This requires schools to notify parents when a child or young person has been physically restrained.

Both bills will receive Royal Assent and become acts in the coming months.

England

Meantime, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is in its final stages in Westminster, England being tied to a different parliamentary timeline. This follows a similar pattern to Scotland, where a review of the system led to changes in the law and in policy. While focusing on educational provision with changes to teachers’ training and pay and conditions, or the creation of a compulsory register of Children Not in School, the bill also brings measures to implement Family Group Decision Making before care proceedings are initiated, in a bid to implement ideas from the Family First Partnership Programme, with its focus on prevention and family-based support.

Wales

In Wales, on the 1^st of April 2026, the Health and Social Care (Wales) Act 2025 came into force. From that date, new for-profit children’s home providers and fostering agencies will be unable to register, with restrictions being placed on current for-profit providers. The Bill also strengthens accountability for social care providers, through giving Care Inspectorate Wales more powers and asking providers to publish their annual reports on their own websites.

Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland also continues its Reform of Children’s Social Care Services following its 2023 independent review, with particular attention to the number of available placements in Residential Child Care.

Republic of Ireland

Finally, the Republic of Ireland has published the Child Care (Amendment) Bill 2025 on the 9^th of December 2025. It amends significantly the structure of the child protection system set out in the Irish Child Care Act 1991, to enshrine the ‘best interest of the child’ as paramount, to strengthen the legislation around child pornography and child sexual abuse through inter-agency working.

Reflections

Most of those reforms follow extensive reviews of the system and claims to change it. No doubt all are hotly debated amongst professionals, and are leading to service reorganisations, changes to professional roles and more.

Writing this, it feels daunting to make any claims about these complex pieces of work. Partly this is because the unintended consequences of legal actions are still to take effect, partly because, as professionals, we only work within one system and therefore feel unequipped to comment on something unfamiliar. Another reason is that as professionals, we operate within those frameworks, yet don’t design them, although we may contribute to shaping them.

This blog is not about evaluating the consequences of reforms or making a judgment on what system is best for children and young people. It is, as ever with social pedagogy, a rumination on how to position ourselves, ethically, professionally and relationally towards those reforms. The 3 Ps come to mind as a framework to think through those questions. But could the framework itself be adapted?

Thinking socio-pedagogically about the reforms.

ThemPra gives us a neat summary of the 3Ps, highlighting how in our interactions with children and others, we reveal and draw upon Professional, Personal or relational and Private elements of ourselves and those we interact with.  Like many others before me, I add a 4^th element: the Public sphere, which includes power and ideology. Indeed, focusing on 3 elements of ourselves, the Professional, the Personal and the Private misses out how human beings can often be, despite what Western and capitalist ideologies have us believe, primed for co-operation and collaboration. Like David Wengrow and the late David Graeber, I believe imagining ourselves as social animals involved in the Public sphere to work towards the public good is an ethical stance deeply embedded within social pedagogy.

I have extended ThemPra’s table below. Originally reminding us of the different dimensions we consider when making decisions using our Professional, Personal and Private selves, the table now also characterises the Public dimensions of our selves.

The 4 Ps	Public	Professional	Personal	Private
Basis	Community at different scales (local, national, global, communities of practice, etc….) Social change	Professionalism	Purpose-related Impartiality Objectivity	Subjectivity Partiality
Knowledge	Ideology and philosophy, current affairs Sociology	Theory Law Policy	Processed experience Self-awareness	Own experiences (more or less processed)
Influences on action	Social and community conversations	Analysis Methods Evaluation	Empathy Immediate understanding of the situation	Emotionality Chance
Approach to collaboration	Arts, debate, and community participation	Multi-disciplinary Participation rights	Willingness and eagerness to cooperate	Pursuing one’s own agenda
Needs	Others /own through infrastructure	Others	Others / own	Own

 

So how can we think through some of the reforms highlighted above, in terms of their influence on the Public part of ourselves and how it impacts on our interactions with others?

On profit from care

One ideological aspect of the reforms is that both Welsh and Scottish measures attempt to cap or discontinue profit from care providers. This is not about the quality of care, but thinking through the 4Ps, and considering Needs, we are prompted to ask: ‘How does the infrastructure help us balance the needs of everyone involved?’ ‘Who do we think is involved in this community?’. The laws are directly aimed at changing the circulation of money and curbing its accumulation into the hands of a small number of people. But much more needs to be done to address the wide economic and social inequalities so well documented across the four nations of the UK and the Republic of Ireland. Indeed, if following those measures, any money is diverted away from the wealthy, how do Scottish and Welsh communities decide whose needs it should meet? As it stands, through legal structures such as charities or not-for-profit companies, it is still the providers who will effectively reallocate the funds.  But are we satisfied with this? If yes, why? If not, why, and what else could we envisage? Again, the 4Ps matrix above tells us that an approach to collaboration should include arts, debates and community participation.

Some of our social pedagogical colleagues at Arizona State University have a long history of running School Participatory Budgeting programmes in Arizona’s schools. Would this be a model that may facilitate a different form of public debate, where a community speak to itself and considers the needs of its members across differences in ideology?

On accountability

Another discernible trend in all reforms of the five nations we work with at SPPA is a greater drive towards accountability in terms of the young people’s experience and their flourishing. For example, the new OFSTED inspection framework in England specifically focuses on this, with expectations set to reflect this. Anyone who has been part of an ‘inspection’, or any kind of institutionalised accountability process, will have experienced the gamification that can take place when focusing on outcomes rather than learning. And again, the 4Ps table above is useful in that it frames how decisions can be made by those involved, avoiding an evaluative method that alienates both workers and the children and young people living there. Using the matrix helps us centre the human in our decisions.  In that way, if the young people are truly setting the evaluation criteria of the care they are given, empathy and an immediate understanding of the situation need to be combined with more rational approaches. Here, again, the balancing of needs at the group level is really important, a way of thinking that’s familiar to social pedagogues working in residential child care. Indeed, while the policy still continues to focus on the individual needs of a child or young person, the group situation, or community level, needs to be brought back into the frame. How is that thought about, put into action? It’s impossible to answer this with the information of the reforms given above, and as ever with social pedagogy, it will depend on the people involved, their environment and their interactions.

Reflections: taking reforms one step further with social pedagogy

The legal framework I have focused on so far is only acting as a container for relationships and decisions. Many of the ways in which reforms on profit from care and on accountability can only be understood when considering individual children and young people, their hopes and dreams and their contexts.

The point of this short blog was to demonstrate how social pedagogy operates as a framework for thinking across and within systems. I would be curious to hear from colleagues working in other parts of the social care system, whether with children or adults, in the five nations SPPA works across, about their experiences of those reforms and what they will be on the ground.