Beyond Cultural Awareness: What Anti-Racist Practice Actually Looks Like in Children's Residential Care

There is a default move in children's residential care when the subject of race comes up, and it is a move toward training. Staff attend a half-day on cultural awareness. The home adds a diversity statement to its statement of purpose. A manager notes, in the self-evaluation, that the team has considered its equalities obligations. None of this is worthless, but none of it is anti-racist practice, and treating it as if it were has allowed a significant number of children's homes to believe they have done something they have not. The difference between cultural awareness — knowing that certain foods are important in certain traditions, having some familiarity with religious observances, understanding that hair care practices vary — and anti-racist practice is the difference between learning facts about cultures and examining the ways in which racism operates inside an organisation and the systems surrounding it. A home can be comprehensively culturally aware and simultaneously fail a Black teenager who experiences a racial micro-aggression from a peer and is told, by a staff member who means well, that it was probably not intended as they took it. Cultural awareness does not, on its own, build the reflexes required to respond to that moment well. Anti-racist practice does.

The structural context that children's residential care operates inside is not racially neutral, and homes that do not understand this cannot respond to it effectively. Black children, children of mixed heritage, and children from other racialised minority backgrounds are significantly overrepresented among those who enter the care system in England, and substantially overrepresented among those in residential care specifically. This is not an accident or a reflection of differential need. It reflects the well-documented operation of racial bias at multiple points in the child protection and care pathway: in how thresholds are applied, in how families are assessed, in what level of support is offered before a statutory intervention, in which parents' accounts are believed and whose are scrutinised. Research by the Race Equality Foundation, the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory, and others has documented these differentials with enough rigour to make the general finding robust, even where the mechanisms in any particular local area remain contested. What this means for residential homes is that they are not neutral recipients of whatever flow of young people the system produces. They are institutions positioned downstream of a set of decisions that have a racial character, and the young people placed with them arrive having already been through a process shaped, in part, by their race. A home that has not understood this is a home that does not yet fully understand who it is caring for or what they have already experienced before they arrived.

Anti-racist practice in a residential home shows up in the granular texture of daily life in ways that training days do not reach. It shows up in whether a young person's records name their racial identity and cultural background as relevant context or treat it as demographic data to be noted and then ignored. It shows up in how staff respond when a young person comes home from school having been called a racist name — whether they treat it as a welfare concern that has happened to the young person, or as a serious harm that the home will take seriously and pursue. It shows up in whether a Black young person who challenges a staff member's decision is described in the contact log as aggressive, and in what happens when someone reads that description at the next placement review. It shows up in whether the group dynamic inside a home — particularly in mixed-ethnicity groups — is observed and understood, or allowed to produce dynamics in which racialised social hierarchies organise peer relationships without adult awareness. It shows up, most importantly, in whether the staff team is able to name race when it is relevant, to have direct conversations with young people about their racial identity and experience, and to do so without either overclaiming expertise they do not have or retreating into a studied neutrality that leaves young people alone with something important. A team that cannot speak about race cannot accompany a racialised young person through the part of their life that race shapes.

The workforce composition question is not the same as the anti-racist practice question, but it is related to it in ways that are worth being direct about. Residential care in England has a predominantly white workforce, working with a population in which a substantial minority of young people are from racialised minority backgrounds. This creates a structural mismatch that no individual practitioner can resolve through good intentions alone, and that the sector has been too slow to take seriously. The response this sometimes generates — recruiting one Black member of staff and treating the diversity problem as solved — is both tokenising and practically ineffective. A Black practitioner hired into a team whose culture has not examined its own assumptions is not being given good conditions to do the work; they are being asked to represent a category while operating within a system that has not changed. The value of workforce diversity, when it is pursued thoughtfully, lies not in meeting a representational target but in building teams in which a wider range of relational reference points, experiential knowledge, and cultural fluency are present and valued. That is a different ambition from ticking a box, and it requires homes to think about recruitment, about how they develop and retain staff from minority backgrounds, and about whether the culture of the team is one in which a diverse workforce can actually thrive, or one in which the dominant norms are white and professional assimilation is the implicit price of belonging.

Anti-racist practice is not a project that a home completes. It is a discipline that a home either maintains or does not. It requires regular examination of outcomes data — whether young people from different racial backgrounds are having different experiences within the home, whether behaviour is being interpreted and responded to differently across the group, whether records tell a consistent story across young people regardless of race. It requires a culture in which staff can raise concerns about practice without the observation being heard as an accusation. It requires managers who are prepared to name what they see in supervision rather than waiting for a formal equality review to do the work that honest, ongoing professional attention could do continuously. And it requires homes to understand that racism is not only something that happens outside the building — in schools, in communities, in the systems the young person navigates. It is something that can be reproduced inside the building, by well-meaning people who have not examined what they are doing carefully enough, in a sector that has too long treated a half-day training as the full answer to a structural question. The young people who live in these homes deserve better than that, and a sector that takes its safeguarding obligations seriously should be embarrassed that it has taken this long to say so.