Everybody's Responsibility, Nobody's Job: Multi-Agency Working in Children's Residential Care

There is a particular kind of professional dysfunction that becomes possible precisely because a child has many people involved in their care. Each professional attends to their own piece of the picture — the allocated social worker manages the legal framework and the care plan, CAMHS holds the clinical formulation, the virtual school head tracks the educational progress, the YOT officer monitors the court requirements, the CAMHS worker provides the sessional input, the GP sees the physical health. Each of these functions matters. The problem is that a young person does not live in separate compartments. They live in one body, in one home, across one continuous set of days, and what happens in one domain of their life reaches into all the others. A young person who is destabilised by contact on Tuesday will not learn on Wednesday. A young person whose mental health deteriorates in October will begin to use substances by November. A young person whose education placement is breaking down will begin to miss appointments. The professional network that sees each of these things in isolation — responding to each crisis in its own lane — is not seeing the young person. It is seeing a set of presenting problems attached to a file. The residential home is often the only place where these threads converge, and that position carries a responsibility that it has not always been properly equipped to hold.

The cast of professionals involved with a typical young person in residential care is striking when written down. The allocated social worker and their manager. The Independent Reviewing Officer. The GP and the practice nurse. The dentist and the optician. The CAMHS clinician or community mental health worker, if one has been allocated at all. The virtual school head and the designated teacher at the school or alternative provision the young person attends. An education, health and care plan coordinator where one applies. The independent advocate, if one has been properly established. A youth offending team officer where there is relevant history. The police, in more cases than the sector would like. An occupational therapist or speech and language therapist where needs have been assessed. Contact workers where family contact is formally managed. The child's birth family, who retain significance even when they are not the legal carers. And then the residential home itself: the registered manager, the keyworker, the team of workers across shifts. Each of these people has a different organisational affiliation, a different professional language, a different referral and recording system, and a different sense of what their role is and where it ends. The young person navigating all of these is doing something that most adults would find difficult: maintaining coherent identity and therapeutic progress across a professional network that was not designed with coherence as its primary value.

The structural problems in multi-agency working around children in residential care are well documented and poorly resolved. Information silos are the most visible: a CAMHS clinician who has not read the residential home's most recent behaviour log; a social worker who was not informed about the school exclusion before the LAC review; a GP who does not know that the young person has been missing from care. GDPR has, in some parts of the sector, become a reason offered for not sharing information that it was never designed to withhold — the law permits and in some circumstances requires the sharing of information where a child's welfare is at stake, and professionals who cite data protection as a barrier to necessary disclosure are misreading the framework, not applying it. Beyond information, there are threshold gaps: one agency's urgent concern is another agency's borderline referral, and a young person can fall between those thresholds repeatedly without anyone being accountable for what the gap costs them. There is also an inter-professional hierarchy that shapes who listens to whom and whose assessment carries weight. Residential workers, as a professional group, are frequently not taken as seriously as health or education professionals when they report concerns — not because their concerns are wrong, but because the profession's status in the landscape of children's services has historically been lower than that of its counterparts. A keyworker who raises a concern about a young person's deteriorating mental health may find that the same concern, expressed by a clinical professional, would produce a different response. This is not a problem that individual homes can resolve, but naming it is the first step toward residential care professionals advocating more effectively for the young people they know best.

The residential home's structural position in a multi-agency network is unusually powerful in one respect and unusually undervalued in another. The home sees the young person more than any other professional — across mornings and evenings, across weekdays and weekends, across calm periods and crises, across the small moments that no professional meeting will ever know about. This means the home holds information about the young person's daily functioning, their relational patterns, their triggers and their strengths, that no other professional has access to in the same depth. It also means the home is in a position to notice change over time in a way that sessional or review-based professional contact cannot. A young person who presents as managing when they attend a CAMHS appointment but who has spent the preceding three evenings in acute distress is a young person whose professionals have an incomplete picture — and the only way to complete that picture is for the home to actively provide it. The homes that wait to be asked, that attend LAC reviews and answer the questions put to them without volunteering the fuller account, are homes that are underusing the most important thing they have to offer the network: their actual knowledge of this actual child. The homes that are most effective in multi-agency working are those whose registered managers understand that their professional role includes actively contributing the home's perspective to every relevant professional conversation, not only the ones the home has been formally invited to.

What good multi-agency working looks like from the residential home's side involves a set of practices that are unglamorous, persistently demanding, and enormously consequential. It involves building and maintaining working relationships with named professionals rather than treating agencies as anonymous systems to be navigated. The social worker for a young person in residential care changes, on average, multiple times during a placement — which means the home's relationship with the placing authority is not the same as the relationship with a particular worker, and the home that understands this invests in the relationship without depending on any individual within it. It involves ensuring that referrals are made promptly and clearly documented when the home identifies a need that falls outside its own competence — not managing a young person's deteriorating mental health within the home because the CAMHS waiting list is long, but making the referral, escalating where it is not progressed, and keeping a record of both. It involves preparing thoroughly for LAC reviews and professional meetings, so that the home's contribution reflects an accurate and nuanced picture of the young person's daily life rather than a reassuring summary that minimises difficulty in order to maintain the placing authority relationship. And it involves sharing information proactively when the young person's safety or welfare requires it — not waiting for the network to ask, but telling people what they need to know, in a format that can be understood and acted on.

The information-sharing dimension of multi-agency working deserves specific attention because it is where many homes are underconfident. The legal framework for information sharing around children in care is, taken together, relatively permissive — it permits and in some cases requires sharing where there is a welfare concern, even without the young person's consent, and the threshold for this is not limited to immediate risk of serious harm. Working Together to Safeguard Children provides detailed guidance on this that homes should be familiar with. The practical question for a residential home is not whether to share, but what to share, with whom, in what form, and with what safeguards around the young person's dignity and trust. A home that shares everything with everyone on a speculative basis is not achieving good multi-agency working any more than a home that shares nothing. The discipline is in identifying what is relevant to whom, communicating it clearly and proportionately, and doing so in a way that the young person is told about and, where possible, meaningfully consulted on. Young people in residential care who discover that professionals have been sharing information about them without their knowledge often feel, understandably, that the system is doing things to them rather than with them. This is avoidable. A home that explains to a young person what it needs to share, and why, and with whom, and that treats this as a normal part of the professional relationship, is doing something important for the young person's sense of agency in a professional network that can otherwise feel entirely opaque.

The concept of the "team around the child" has become sufficiently widespread in children's services to risk becoming a platitude — a phrase that appears in assessments and care plans without generating the sustained, specific, relational professional practice it was meant to describe. A genuine team around a child is not a collection of professionals who attend the same meetings. It is a set of people who have a working relationship with one another, who share a coherent understanding of the child's needs and what each of their roles is in meeting them, who communicate between formal reviews rather than only at them, and who are each sufficiently familiar with what the others are doing to recognise when something has fallen into a gap. Achieving this is harder than it sounds, particularly for a child in out-of-area placement whose professionals are spread across multiple local authority areas. The residential home that sees this as its problem to solve, rather than waiting for the placing authority to coordinate it, is the home that is most likely to produce the conditions in which a coherent, genuinely collaborative professional network can form around the child. That is a leadership position. It requires confidence, communication, and a clear sense of what the home knows and why that matters. But it is also, simply, what the young person needs — and the residential home that understands its own position in that picture is better placed to act on it.