Finally Named: What Working Together 2026 Actually Asks of Children's Homes

Working Together to Safeguard Children has always been statutory guidance, and children's homes have always operated within its legal framework. But for much of the document's history, its emotional centre was somewhere else: in the family home where a child was at risk, in the multi-agency meeting around a child not yet removed from harm, in the case conference where professionals argued about thresholds. Children in residential care appeared in the guidance the way they appear in many policy documents — mentioned, technically included, but not quite the people the document was imagined for. Residential homes sat in a parallel regulatory world, defined principally by the Children's Homes Regulations, the Quality Standards, and the Ofsted inspection framework, all of which are specific to them and have no equivalent for a child living at home. That separation had a logic to it. It also had a cost. The 2026 update to Working Together changes this in ways that matter more than a revision of statutory guidance usually does.

The most significant shift for residential homes is the explicit inclusion of looked-after children within Multi-Agency Safeguarding Arrangements. This may sound procedural, because it is partly procedural — it formalises something that should always have been the case. But the practical consequence is that local safeguarding partners can no longer treat a child in a children's home as safeguarded simply by virtue of being placed there. The fact of a placement is not the same as an active safeguarding relationship, and the 2026 guidance makes this distinction explicit. Looked-after children must now be unambiguously within the scope of MASA activity: their data must be visible in the patterns that partners analyse, their outcomes must appear in annual reports, and the risks they face must be treated as exactly the kind of risks that multi-agency coordination is designed to address. For residential homes, this does not change what the Ofsted framework requires of them. But it changes the frame within which they sit — not a specialist regulatory environment operating alongside mainstream safeguarding, but embedded within it. The practical implication is that homes should expect more, not less, engagement from local safeguarding partners, and should understand that engagement as the proper function of the new framework rather than as scrutiny.

The 2026 guidance also contains a new paragraph addressing safeguarding risks within residential settings specifically. It is worth reading carefully, because it names something the sector has not always been comfortable naming: that a residential home is not only the place where a young person is protected from harm, but also a place where harm can occur — through peer-on-peer harm, through the exploitation of young people by adults who target residential settings, or through failures in the care provided. The guidance does not suggest that residential care is intrinsically dangerous. It acknowledges what experienced practitioners already know: that any setting where vulnerable young people live together, supervised by adults in shifts, requires active and rigorous internal safeguarding attention, not just external oversight. What the new paragraph does is give residential homes formal standing to hold both things at once — to understand their safeguarding function as two-directional. Outward-facing safeguarding, which attends to risks in the community and in young people's wider networks, is well established in residential practice. The inward-facing version — the reflective cultural question of whether our home itself is a safe place, and how we would know if it were not — is the harder discipline, and the one that this paragraph is pressing homes to take seriously.

One of the most practically significant changes in the 2026 guidance is the strengthened expectation that care planning and child protection planning are connected rather than parallel. Many practitioners will recognise the landscape this is responding to: a young person who entered the looked-after system under a care order, whose child protection history sits in one document and whose care plan sits in another, whose allocated social worker and residential key worker hold different pieces of the picture, and whose statutory review proceeds as if the protection history were a closed chapter. The guidance makes it harder to sustain that separation. Care plans must now address protection risks explicitly and actively, and the multi-agency arrangements around a looked-after child must treat the care plan as a living safeguarding document rather than an administrative record of placement decisions. For residential homes, this translates into a concrete expectation: that they understand the protection context of every young person placed with them not as historical narrative in the referral paperwork but as something that actively shapes the daily environment they are providing, the risks they are monitoring, and the judgements they are making about what a particular young person needs on a particular day.

The 2026 update also introduces strengthened expectations around racism and disproportionality that will reach residential homes through their safeguarding relationships. MASA partners must now actively analyse data for patterns of racist practice and disproportionate decision-making, and produce evidence of what they have done in response. For residential homes, this connects to something important and sometimes uncomfortable about how the young people placed with them came to be there. The evidence of racial disproportionality in the care system — of which children are removed from which families, at what thresholds, with what level of family support provided beforehand — is substantial and has been accumulating for years. The expectation that safeguarding arrangements actively interrogate this, rather than noting it and continuing, is what the 2026 guidance is pressing for. A home that holds a genuinely anti-discriminatory culture, that reflects on whether its responses to young people's behaviour carry unexamined bias, that takes seriously what its own data might reveal about differential treatment, is not merely meeting a new regulatory standard. It is doing work that Working Together 2026 has finally named as part of the safeguarding task — not a diversity exercise to run alongside child protection, but inseparable from it.