The Worker Who Has Been There: What It Means to Employ Care-Experienced Staff in a Children's Home

The children's residential care sector has, for most of its history, been staffed almost entirely by people who have not been through it. This was not designed as a policy. It was the default — the same unreflective assumption embedded in most professional services that those who provide care and those who receive it are distinct categories of person. What is beginning to shift is the recognition, driven partly by evidence from peer support models in mental health and addiction services and partly by the consistent testimony of care-experienced people themselves, that the sector has been undervaluing an asset it has access to and routinely overlooked. The asset is lived experience. And the argument for it is not that care-experienced workers are more empathetic — empathy is learnable, and plenty of people with no care background exercise it well — but that there is a specific kind of knowing that comes from having been inside the system, and that knowing has value in relationships with young people who are currently inside it. The DfE's children's home workforce review, which reported in 2026, made explicit what sector leaders and young people have been saying for longer: that a workforce which has no significant proportion of care-experienced members is a workforce with a structural gap. The question now is not whether this is true but what it actually means to act on it.

What care-experienced workers bring to a residential home is not a set of additional therapeutic competencies. It is something harder to categorise but not hard to recognise. It includes credibility — the quality of presence that a young person in care registers, often almost immediately, when they understand that the person across from them has been in a placement, has been to a LAC review, has experienced what it is to be talked about rather than listened to. Young people in residential care are surrounded by professionals who care about them sincerely and competently but who do not know — from the inside, from having lived it — what their daily reality feels like. The care-experienced worker knows. Not identically, because every care experience is individual, but recognisably. When a young person tests a staff member with the quiet, practised scepticism that care-experienced young people develop early — the sideways look, the waiting to see what this adult will do — they are more likely to believe the answer from someone who has been tested in the same way. Research on peer support in mental health recovery, addiction services, and youth justice consistently shows that peer-supported relationships accelerate engagement and increase trust among populations with histories of institutional damage. There is no reason to think the dynamic works differently here. The testimony of young people who have had a care-experienced worker as a keyworker is consistent on this point: there is something about the relationship that is different in kind, not just in degree. Not because the worker is better, but because they are a different kind of witness.

The risk of getting this wrong is not theoretical. Employing someone with care experience and treating their lived experience as a resource without adequately investing in them as a worker is a form of extraction — and the sector has to be honest about how easily it happens. A care-experienced person who enters residential work carrying unresolved aspects of their own care history, who is placed in a demanding keyworker relationship with a young person whose experience mirrors their own, and who receives generic supervision rather than supervision attentive to what the role is surfacing for them, is a worker in a potentially unsafe position. The very thing that makes them valuable — proximity to the experience of being cared for — is also the thing that makes them vulnerable to vicarious retraumatisation, to unplanned disclosure in moments of high emotion, to finding the boundaries between their past and the young person's present becoming harder to hold than they expected. This is not an argument against employing care-experienced people. It is an argument that doing so creates specific responsibilities that cannot be met by a standard induction and the same supervision model offered to every other member of staff. The ethical position is clear: if a home recruits on the basis of what someone's life has given them, it owes that person the conditions under which what they have is an asset and not a wound being reopened. Homes that have not thought seriously about what those conditions require are homes that are not yet ready to employ care-experienced workers well, however good their intentions.

What doing this well requires begins with recruitment and does not end there. The process for care-experienced candidates needs to be honest about what the role involves and attentive — not intrusive, but attentive — to where a candidate is in relation to their own care history. This is not a gatekeeping exercise. Care experience at any stage of processing is not a disqualification, and the conversation about it should happen openly rather than being avoided in the name of inclusion. Once in post, care-experienced workers need supervision that creates specific space to explore what the role is surfacing — space that treats the worker's own experience as material to think with, not as a problem to manage or a liability to minimise. They need senior colleagues who have thought seriously about this and can hold the tension between what someone brings from their history and what the role requires of them now. They need career pathways that do not keep them in entry-level positions indefinitely — pathways that lead, over time, to senior practice roles, to management, to positions in which their experience informs leadership rather than simply providing relational warmth on the floor. A home that employs care-experienced workers and never promotes them is a home that has not fully understood what it is doing. And they need a workplace culture in which their care background is neither constantly foregrounded — reduced to the one thing that defines them — nor quietly hidden, as if it were something to be embarrassed about. Care experience is a professional asset. The home that genuinely internalises this will treat it as one.

The broader question is what it would mean for residential care if care-experienced people were present not as a rarity in entry-level roles but across the workforce — in senior practitioner positions, in registered manager roles, in the offices that inspect homes and the bodies that commission placements. The cultural shift this would represent is not cosmetic. A sector in which a significant proportion of the people making decisions about children in care have themselves been children in care is a sector with a fundamentally different relationship to the population it serves — more honest, more accountable, less likely to make comfortable professional assumptions about what being in a children's home is actually like. The professionalisation debate — about qualifications, protected titles, degree-level entry requirements — risks reproducing an exclusionary model of professionalism that has historically kept care-experienced people out: the assumption that the route into the workforce is through formal education, and that the knowledge validated by credential is the only knowledge that counts. What the evidence from peer support models and what care-experienced workers themselves consistently say is that lived knowledge is a different kind of knowledge, not an inferior one. The challenge for the sector is to build a professionalism that holds both — that values the degree and the experience of having lived inside the system — and creates career pathways that welcome people from both routes into leadership. Whether the 2026 workforce review has the ambition to recommend exactly that remains to be seen. Whether individual homes are prepared to lead on it does not have to wait for the report.