Not Just a Placement, But a Culture: Race, Identity, and Belonging in Residential Care

The legal obligation to have regard for a child's race, religion, culture, and language when making care decisions has existed in English law since the Children Act 1989. It is not a new requirement. It is not a fringe concern raised by advocates at the edge of the sector. It is a statutory duty that has been in place for more than thirty years, and the persistence with which it is incompletely implemented — in placement decisions, in daily life within homes, in the professional relationships that surround looked-after children — is one of the more uncomfortable facts about residential care in England. Children from Black, Asian, and minority ethnic backgrounds are significantly overrepresented in the care system relative to their share of the general population. Many of them live in predominantly or entirely white residential settings, are cared for by predominantly white staff teams, and navigate daily life in homes where the cultural reference points, the food, the aesthetics, the assumptions embedded in ordinary conversation, and sometimes the language itself are those of a majority culture that is not theirs. The cumulative weight of this experience, across months and years of placement, is not neutral. It shapes identity. It shapes what a young person believes about who they are and where they belong. Treating it as incidental is not a defensible position.

Identity development is a central task of adolescence, and it is a task that is considerably harder when the question of who you are is complicated by uncertainty about where you come from, who your people are, and what it means to be you in the particular social and historical context you inhabit. For Black young people in residential care, racial identity is not an add-on to the ordinary developmental work — it is part of the foundation of it. The research on racial identity development, particularly for Black young people in predominantly white institutional settings, is consistent: the presence or absence of adults who share your background, who can model what it looks like to inhabit your identity with confidence, who understand without requiring explanation the particular pressures you navigate, matters significantly for how young people construct a sense of self that is stable under pressure. A young person who has no such mirrors in their daily life is not simply missing a cultural comfort. They are missing something more structural: the repeated, normalised experience of seeing their identity reflected back at them as ordinary, valued, and liveable. The absence of that experience does not leave a neutral space. It tends to leave something closer to a question mark.

The everyday texture of cultural erasure in residential care is worth naming specifically, because it often operates through what is absent rather than through anything actively hostile. The home that cannot provide food that is familiar to a young person from a West African background, and where mealtimes are therefore a daily reminder of dislocation. The home where nobody on the staff team knows how to care for a Black young person's hair, and where — unless the young person advocates loudly for themselves — that need simply goes unmet or is addressed in ways that cause damage over time. The home where a young person's Muslim faith is accommodated as a special request rather than as part of the ordinary rhythm of the house: where prayer time requires negotiation, where Ramadan is treated as an inconvenience to the rota, where halal food is available in principle and genuinely difficult to source in practice. These are not peripheral concerns. Hair, food, faith, and language are the daily practices through which identity is maintained or gradually worn away. A young person who has lost continuity with family, with community, and with the neighbourhoods they grew up in cannot afford to lose these things as well. They are what remains. What a residential home treats as incidental, the young person experiences as the scaffolding of who they are.

There is a version of well-intentioned practice that actively makes this worse, and it deserves to be named. The residential worker who says, sincerely, that they do not see colour — that they see only a child, that race is not something they attend to because all children are the same to them — is not describing a neutral or advanced position. They are describing an approach that makes it impossible to see what a young person from a racialised minority background actually experiences, and therefore impossible to respond to it. Colour-blindness of this kind is not impartiality. It is a refusal to see. For a Black young person who is navigating racism in school, who experiences racial microaggressions from peers or adults outside the home, who carries questions about racial identity that are entirely normal for a young person in their position — being placed with a worker who genuinely cannot see or speak about race means being placed with someone who cannot accompany them through a significant part of their actual life. The inability to have direct, honest conversations about race — to name it, to acknowledge what it means, to understand why it might be relevant to a young person's experience of the world — is a professional limitation in residential care just as it would be in any other field. Homes that build cultures in which race is too uncomfortable or too politically charged to discuss are not protecting young people from anything. They are leaving them alone with something important.

Religion and faith deserve more attention in residential practice than they routinely receive. For many young people from South Asian, East African, Middle Eastern, and other backgrounds, religious observance is not a private preference that can be set aside during placement — it is a structuring principle of daily life, a connection to family and community, and a source of identity that has particular importance when other anchors have been removed. A young Muslim young person who cannot observe Jumu'ah, who finds Ramadan treated as logistically inconvenient, who has nobody in the home who understands the significance of what they are observing and why, is being asked to put down something central to who they are. The same applies to young people from other faith backgrounds — Sikh, Hindu, Jewish, Christian in traditions where observance is active and community-based — for whom the social and communal dimensions of faith practice cannot be replicated inside a residential home but can at least be actively supported rather than quietly discouraged. The practical requirements here are often modest: transport to a place of worship, dietary provision that does not require constant negotiation, some basic familiarity on the part of the staff team with what the young person's faith involves. What they require, above all, is a team that treats a young person's religious practice as a legitimate and important dimension of their life, not as a complication.

What good practice looks like in this area is specific enough to be worth describing. It involves, at the most basic level, asking good questions early: what does this young person's cultural background mean for how they live, what they eat, how they mark time, who their community is, what their hair needs, what their faith involves? It involves seeking consultation where a home's own knowledge is limited — from community organisations, from professionals who share the young person's background, from the young person themselves, who is almost always the most reliable source of information about what they need even if they should not be required to carry the responsibility for securing it alone. It involves making cultural connection an active part of keywork rather than an optional extra — conversations about identity, about what a young person is proud of, about what they want to carry forward from their heritage, about the complexity of living between cultures, which is the reality for many young people from minority backgrounds who are also navigating education, peer relationships, and the ordinary turbulence of adolescence. And it involves being honest when a placement cannot adequately meet a young person's cultural needs — not as a reason to delay placement, since the alternatives are often worse, but as a reason to work hard and transparently at filling the gaps, and to be accountable for doing so.

There is also a structural dimension that individual homes cannot resolve alone but that they are entitled to name. The residential care workforce in England is disproportionately white relative to the population of children it serves. This is not the result of any single decision. It reflects patterns of recruitment, geography, pay, and professional culture that have accumulated over time. The implications for young people from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds who live in predominantly white homes are real and are not adequately addressed by diversity training, however well delivered. A staff team that is culturally homogeneous will have limits in what it can provide to young people whose cultural experience differs significantly from its own, and those limits should be honestly acknowledged rather than glossed over with the language of inclusion. What this means for recruitment is a genuine and sustained commitment to diversifying the workforce — not as a performance of values but because it changes what a home can actually offer. It means leadership that is visibly drawn from across the communities whose children the sector serves. It means a sector that can eventually provide, as a normal feature of placement rather than a rare luxury, young people from minority backgrounds with adults in their daily lives who truly understand, without translation, what it is to be them.