WHO GETS TO BE THE EXPERT?

I want to begin with a question: who are the experts in this room? And when I say this room, I don’t mean only the people gathered here today. I mean the rooms in local government, regional and central government; the rooms where commissions are convened, audits are conducted, evidence is examined, and legal frameworks are written or revised. I mean the rooms where policies are shaped, resources are allocated, and decisions are made that alter the lives of children and families—often for years, sometimes for generations.
Who is recognised as an expert in those rooms? Whose knowledge is trusted, whose evidence is taken seriously, and whose understanding is allowed to influence the decisions being made? And, perhaps most importantly, who holds the power to decide what counts as expertise in the first place?

Is it academia and the academics who have spent years researching, analysing and interpreting the system? Is it the policymakers responsible for developing legislation, the social workers, psychologists, adoption specialists and people running children’s services? Or could it also be the people who grew up inside the system: the subjects of the research, the care orders and the reforms intended to improve their lives?
All of these groups bring different kinds of expertise. Some is acquired through study, professional practice and research. Another kind is acquired because something happened to a baby, a child, a teenager, a young adult, a mother, a wife or a father—and that experience became part of them.
Many have then spent the remainder of their lives living with its consequences.
Childcare professionals may have expertise about us. Those of us with lived experience have expertise from being us: from living in and through the systems and institutions that others study, manage and reform. These forms of expertise should not compete, but neither should they sit in a hierarchy in which academic or professional qualifications automatically carry greater authority than the knowledge gained by living through the system.

So what qualifies me to stand here and speak? My expertise has not been gained through academic study or employment in the care system. It comes from my lived experience as a transracial adoptee. I am one of the 106 Hong Kong foundlings who came to Britain via the Hong Kong Project, a government-sanctioned initiative that brought children from Hong Kong to be adopted by British families during the 1950s and early 1960s.
I speak as someone who has lived through, and continues to live with, the consequences of decisions made by institutions well over half a century ago. Those consequences have not simply faded with time; in some ways, they have become more apparent as I have grown older.
Transracial adoption means losing not only your family, but also access to language, culture, ancestry, community and the roots that help a person understand who they are: as an individual, and also as part of a people, a place and a history. I do not claim to represent every care-experienced person or every transracial adoptee. I cannot tell you what all adoptees think or feel. I can tell you what I know, what I have experienced, what I have lived through and what I continue to live with. I can share what I have learned from a lifetime of decisions made about me when I was too young to have any say in them. Those are my credentials as an expert.

I WAS THAT CHILD

There is something peculiar about discussions of childcare and adoption: the child often becomes an abstraction—a case, a placement, an outcome, a number in a dataset, a file, a success or a failure. The child becomes the person about whom adults make decisions.
I was once that child.

Several institutions were involved in the decisions that changed the course of my life, including International Social Service, the UK government, the Governor of Hong Kong and the National Children’s Home, now known as Action for Children. The Hong Kong Project emerged from a particular historical and political context on the back of mass migration, displacement due to the second World War. Then the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949 and the later upheaval and famine associated with the Great Leap Forward drove many people to flee mainland China for Hong Kong. The colony’s rapidly growing population placed severe pressure on housing and social services. Many children, predominantly girls, were abandoned or relinquished, and local institutions struggled to meet demand. British adoption organisations and prospective adoptive parents saw an opportunity to offer homes to children, and the scheme was presented as a humanitarian response to a profound crisis.
That context matters. It does not mean every adoption had the same circumstances, nor does it erase the care and commitment many adoptive parents offered. But it reminds us that decisions about individual children were also shaped by geopolitics, social attitudes, institutional priorities and the values of their time.

I arrived in Britain with very little information about my circumstances in Hong Kong. The story I was given was that my mother had abandoned me because she did not want me, and that I was fortunate to have been chosen for adoption. The prevailing approach to many transracial adoptions was to treat the child’s previous life as something that could be left behind and to begin again from scratch. People decided what constituted a family, where I belonged, what I needed and which parts of my brief existence mattered. In my case, almost nothing from that earlier life was treated as something I needed to retain.

My adoptive parents never sat me down and explained where I had come from. In fact, they never formally told me that I was adopted. It was the elephant in the room in pre-multicultural Britain. I can laugh about it now, but how long did anyone imagine I would fail to notice the obvious physical difference between myself, the family and the wider society in which I grew up?
Adoptive parents in the scheme were advised to ignore the child’s past. That advice tells us something about the assumptions operating at the time.

Something happens to every child in our care system, yet our institutions still struggle to accommodate the fact that the child grows up. A placement may end, a file may close, a social worker may move on, legislation may change and the institution that made a decision may be reorganised, renamed or abolished. The person, however, continues to live with what was decided. When does the childcare system’s responsibility for the consequences of its decisions end? At eighteen? When an adoption order is signed? When a child leaves care or a department closes the file? But when a decision made about a five-year-old can continue to shape a person at twenty-five, forty-five, sixty-five or seventy-five. What happens when the system has finished with the child, but the consequences have not finished with the adult?

THE FILE CLOSES. THE LIFE DOES NOT.

We have become good at measuring certain kinds of outcomes, but how do we measure belonging, cultural dislocation or the absence of a language? How do we measure looking into a mirror and understanding—or not understanding—the face looking back? How do we measure not knowing where we come from, especially when the information that might answer our questions is held by somebody else? What is the long-term measure for a decision made in childhood that is still being negotiated half a century later?
For me, a turning point came when I finally gained access to my International Social Service file, at the age of fifty. Throughout childhood and my teenage years, I had been told repeatedly, very little was known about me beyond, I had been abandoned because my mother had not wanted me. The truth however, was more complicated. I had expected to receive a wafer-thin file; instead, I was given a file that was roughly six inches thick. That information should have been made available to me on my eighteenth birthday. But nobody had told me that. The details of how I was found and how I was dressed also challenged the narrative I had been given. Had I been given this knowledge at the time then my first visit to Hong Kong may have taken a different path than it did. I may have made the journey back to the Fanling Babies Home before it had been demolished, before the records had been destroyed in a fire. Once again decision made by adults had affected and influenced my adult life and my ability to make informed choices.
Therefore should we not always be thinking about a child’s life beyond the point at which a case is closed? A person does not disappear simply because the system stops counting them.

WHAT WAS TAKEN WITH THE CHILD?

Displacement is not simply geographical. When we move a child, what else do we move, and what do we leave behind? A child may gain safety, food, education, opportunity, a home, a family and love, yet lose some of the things that help make a person whole: language, culture, community, history, kinship, the physical affirmation of people who look like them, and the stories through which they might have understood themselves. They may even lose the vocabulary needed to describe what has happened to them.

For transracial and transnational adoptees, displacement can mean removal not only from people, but from culture, language, geography and racial belonging. It has taken me more than fifty-five years to begin reconciling myself with who I am. I have often felt caught between two great cultures and empires: too English to be Chinese and too Chinese to be English. I have experienced discrimination and rejection because I do not speak Cantonese, Mandarin or Hakka and was raised in a Western home. And because I am not white, I have also experienced, racism, prejudice, hatred and abuse in Britain, the country to which I was transracially adopted into, because my skin is not white and my features make me obviously foreigner, therefore I do not belong.

This is where we must become comfortable with something uncomfortable: two apparently contradictory things can be true at once. Was the child rescued, or was the child harmed? The answer may be both. A child can be loved and experience loss; be safe and experience dislocation; gain opportunity through a placement while losing something irreplaceable. An adoptive parent can love a child and still be unable to understand everything that child has lost.

Gratitude and grief can coexist. Love does not cancel loss, opportunity does not erase trauma, and acknowledging loss does not automatically invalidate love. Institutions often prefer clear outcomes: successful or unsuccessful, stable or unstable. Human beings are more complicated than the boxes we create for them.

THE MYTH OF THE BLANK CANVAS

Another idea that needs interrogating is the child as a blank canvas: the child who can simply begin again; the adopted child who becomes entirely part of a new family because the legal process says so; the transracially or transnationally adopted child whose previous culture can be replaced by another. It is as though there was nothing there before, as though one identity can simply be painted over by another.

But a child is not a blank canvas. Even a very young child has already had an existence. There may have been attachment, sound, smell, language, touch, separation, fear, love—or several of these at once. The belief in the blank canvas becomes particularly troubling when it intersects with race, empire and transracial adoption, because it can conceal an assumption that what the child is being given must be superior to what has been lost. Had it not been for the British Empire and me being female I might never have found myself in Britain. Original the plan for the Hong Kong foundlings was to find families in the US, but as we were all girls we were not wanted. The preference amongst Asian American families was for boys. I could just as easily have found myself being sent to Australia or Canada countries still being shaped and governed if from afar by Britain’s imperial history. But as Hong Kong was still a crown colony it was decided families would be found for us in the UK. I had no say in the decision; I was far too young. And if I ever find relatives with whom I can build a relationship, I will not be able to speak to them in the languages that would have once connected us. English is my first language. I have tried repeatedly to learn Cantonese, but I have succeeded only in failing. The language and voice through which I might have reached my own family was removed from me and is now lost to me.

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

These ideas did not appear from nowhere. To understand the contemporary childcare system, we need to look backwards—not because today’s practitioners are personally responsible for the Victorian workhouse, the British Empire, missionary movements or nineteenth-century moral codes, but because institutions inherit ideas, professions inherit language, governments inherit structures and societies inherit assumptions. Sometimes we continue practising an idea long after we have forgotten where it came from.

British attitudes towards children and families have been shaped by distinctions between the deserving and undeserving poor, legitimate and illegitimate children, respectable and supposedly unfit parents, and by ideas about poverty, class, disability, race, Christian charity, salvation and moral improvement. From the Poor Laws of 1601 and the workhouses of the nineteenth century to foundling institutions, missionary schools, child-migration schemes and adoption legislation, adults and institutions repeatedly claimed the authority to decide what constituted a better life for somebody else’s child. Poverty could be treated as a moral failing; unmarried mothers could be judged as fallen; and children from non-Christian societies could be described as “heathen” souls in need of saving.

Christian charity provided shelter, education and protection, but it could also become entangled with the imperial conviction that British religion, culture and family life were superior. Poor children could be apprenticed or sent into domestic service; children in colonial settings could be separated from family and culture in the name of education or assimilation. In England and Wales, informal adoption existed before the Adoption of Children Act 1926 established a statutory framework. In later decades, many unmarried mothers experienced profound pressure to relinquish their babies. These practices were not identical, but they raise a difficult question about the authority adults claimed over children’s lives.

A child could be rescued, reformed, transferred, renamed or assimilated while having little power to determine what happened to them. We no longer openly describe children as property to be exchanged, yet histories of slavery, informal child transfer and adoption remind us how deeply assumptions of adult ownership have run. Have we entirely abandoned that underlying idea, or have we sometimes replaced the language of possession with the language of protection, placement and the child’s best interests? The test is whether those words genuinely recognise a child as a person with rights, relationships, identity and agency—or whether adults still retain almost all the power to decide what that child’s life should become.

SAVING THE CHILD: MISSION, RACE AND THE “BETTER LIFE”

We also need to examine the language of rescue, particularly where Christianity, empire and race intersect. Christian child-rescue movements in nineteenth-century Britain sought to save poor children from lives portrayed as morally dangerous. In parts of the British Empire, missionary organisations sought to save children described as “heathen” through Christian conversion and education shaped by European ideals of civilisation. These were not identical experiences, and missionary institutions were not all alike. Some offered shelter, education and care; others also participated in systems that separated children from family, language, culture and community.

The shared danger lay in the assumption that adults knew what a child’s life ought to become, and that a supposedly better future could justify intervening in the child’s existing world. Poverty could become evidence of parental failure, unmarried motherhood could be judged through the language of moral respectability, and cultural or religious difference could be treated as something to correct. The promise of a better life could mean education and protection, but it could also mean separation from identity and belonging. The child might be clothed differently, given a new name, taught another language or religion, and placed inside another family, with the expectation that they would become part of the world into which they had been transplanted.

But there was something that could not simply be taught out of the child: their face, their skin and their racial difference. The ideology might say, “You are one of us now,” while society says, “No, you are not.” That is one of the contradictions of transracial adoption. A family may believe race does not matter, but the child must live in a world in which it does. Love inside the home cannot prevent racism outside it. And a child removed from the people, language and culture that might have helped them understand that racism can be profoundly alone when it arrives.

I was about five when I realised that colour and facial features mattered. Looking different from the majority left me vulnerable to abuse, hatred and, at times, brutal and disproportionate treatment and punishment from teachers and other adults, including some members of my adoptive family.

This does not mean adoptive parents cannot love their children, that every missionary was malevolent, or that Christianity itself is the problem. It means we must distinguish faith from what people do with faith when it becomes entangled with power. Christianity has been a source of extraordinary compassion; it has also been used within structures of empire, assimilation and racial hierarchy. Those histories coexist. In some Christian movements, adoption itself became a religious calling: adopting an orphan could be understood as an earthly expression of being adopted into the family of God. For some, this came from profound generosity. But it raises another question: when does a child become part of somebody else’s spiritual narrative? When does rescue become proof of the rescuer’s goodness, faith or virtue? Where, within that story, is the child’s own voice? A child should never have to justify an adult’s theology or become grateful evidence that somebody else’s faith has worked. Nor should an adult adoptee be required to maintain a story of salvation simply because others need that story to remain true.

The language has changed. We no longer speak respectably of the “heathen child” or openly celebrate the civilising mission of empire. We speak instead of opportunity, permanence, family, rescue, better outcomes, love and the best interests of the child. These terms are not equivalent, but we must listen to what lies beneath. What assumptions about rescue, gratitude, improvement, transformation, belonging and possession remain? A system can change its vocabulary without necessarily changing all its values.

THE NUMBERS—AND THE LIVES BEHIND THEM

The latest Department for Education figures show that 81,770 children were looked after by local authorities in England on 31 March 2025. During that year, 34,450 children ceased to be looked after and 3,040 were adopted. These are not simply totals; each number represents a childhood shaped by decisions made in the child’s name. Yet leaving care is not the same as leaving its consequences behind. Among care leavers aged nineteen to twenty-one whose activity information was known, 7% were in higher education. A further 29% were recorded as not in education, employment or training for reasons other than illness, disability, pregnancy or parenting; 9% were recorded as NEET because of illness or disability, and 4% because of pregnancy or parenting.

These figures tell us something about outcomes, but very little about the lives behind them. They cannot tell us whether a young person feels they belong, whether they have lost cultural or linguistic connections, or whether decisions made in childhood continue to shape their identity decades later. We count the children who enter care, those who leave and those who are adopted. How well do we measure the lives they must live afterwards—and our responsibility for them?

WHEN THE SYSTEM FAILS TO PROTECT

No discussion of the UK childcare system would be complete without confronting its failures. The inquiry into Victoria Climbié’s death exposed a gross failure by the agencies responsible for protecting her and produced 108 recommendations for change. Four years later, Peter Connelly, known as Baby P, died after repeated contact with services. In 2020, Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson were murdered; the national review that followed again raised serious concerns about how agencies worked together and responded to warning signs. That same year, Child Q, a Black schoolgirl, was strip-searched at school without an appropriate adult present.

The safeguarding review found that a safeguarding-first approach had been absent and that racism and adultification bias were likely factors. These children’s experiences were different, but they leave us with an unbearable question: how many reviews, recommendations and promises of reform does it take before we can say the system has learned? We have safeguarding procedures, legislation and inquiries. But having a system designed to protect children is not the same as ensuring that every child is seen, heard and protected by it.

THE OTHER DANGER: WHEN INTERVENTION ITSELF BECOMES HARM

There is another side to this story. The system can fail children by not intervening, or by intervening too late; it can also cause harm through unlawful, disproportionate or poorly reasoned
intervention that fails to involve families properly. In Re H (2014), Leicester City Council accepted that its actions had breached the parents’ human rights; the court heard how they lost a year of full-time care of their baby before she returned home. In Williams v London Borough of Hackney (2018), the Supreme Court examined the limits of councils’ powers to accommodate children and clarified the importance of parental consent under section 20 of the Children Act 1989. In JW (2023), the High Court stressed that permanent placement outside the family must be a last resort, with realistic family options rigorously analysed and parents properly involved.

These cases expose the dilemma at the heart of child protection: intervention is not automatically protection, and good intentions do not excuse unlawful action. In a society shaped by changing family structures and a deeper understanding of rights, identity and belonging, we must ask whether our childcare system is fit for the realities of twenty-first-century life—and whether it knows how to protect a child without causing avoidable harm to that child and the people who love them.

WHO OWNS THE ADULT ADOPTEE?

There is another strange phenomenon: the adopted child becomes an adult, but other people continue to treat them as though they are still a child in somebody else’s adoption story. Adult adoptees speak out, and sometimes people—even other adoptees—would rather they did not.

What happens when an adult says that the story others told themselves was not quite the story they lived? What happens when someone described as a successful adoption talks about loss, when someone who was loved talks about trauma, or when a transracial adoptee talks about racism? What happens when we question gratitude or ask for our information, histories, records, names, cultures and agency?
From the moment I began to understand that I was different, I wanted to ask questions. But questions were met with admonishment and, at times, physical punishment. Throughout much of my childhood and early teens, thoughts about my adoption or birth mother that challenged the story my adoptive parents had given me were dismissed, contradicted or turned against me. I was led to believe that my birth mother had coldly abandoned me because I was unwanted. To imagine that she might have had no choice, or that relatives somewhere might have wanted me, was treated as foolish self-deception. Questioning the family narrative was taken as ingratitude, as though asking questions made me undeserving of the adoption I was expected to appreciate.

I was the child whose life adults had the power to explain, yet I was denied the freedom to question their explanation. I learned that belonging came at a price: silence, compliance and the protection of a story that was not mine to tell. There is a powerful cultural story surrounding adoption: the chosen child, the wanted child, the rescued child, the new family, the happy ending. But the adoptee does not cease to exist when that story reaches its conclusion. We grow up, and sometimes we become inconvenient narrators of our own lives. That does not make us ungrateful. It makes us adults.

THE PERFECT FAMILY AND THE INCONVENIENT ADULT

There is an understandable desire to protect the idea of adoption as the creation of a family. But if protecting that idea requires the adoptee to remain silent about its complexities and nuances, whose interests are actually being protected? Particularly in transracial adoption, we need to question the assumption that love alone resolves difference. Love matters, of course, but it alone
is not able teach a child how to survive racism or automatically provide cultural knowledge, recreate a lost language or supply ancestry that has been erased. Nor can love make society colour-blind simply because a family wishes race did not matter.

LIVED EXPERIENCE IS NOT AN ANECDOTE

This brings me back to expertise. Too often, lived experience enters institutional conversations as testimony. We are invited to tell our stories, placed on panels and consulted; we provide the moving opening contribution, and then the serious business begins. Researchers speak, professionals speak and policymakers decide. I want us to question that model. Consultation is not power. Being allowed to tell you what happened to us is not the same as being allowed to help determine what happens to the next generation of care-experienced children. To ensure that what comes next is better than what went before.

Lived experience should not merely illustrate somebody else’s research. It can generate knowledge, identify questions academia has failed to ask, expose consequences that short-term evaluation cannot see and challenge assumptions that often become invisible to people working inside an institution. It can also challenge the definition of a successful outcome. You may have expertise about us; we have expertise from being us. The question is not which expertise should win, but why these forms of knowledge are not sitting at the same table with equal and meaningful power.

THE PEOPLE WHO AREN’T AT THE TABLE

To those who make policy, I ask: who was in the room? Who helped formulate the question, determined what success would look like, had the authority to say no or had a vote—and who was invited afterwards to be consulted? To academics: who determines what counts as knowledge?
When lived experience contradicts the prevailing theory, which do we interrogate first? Who owns the research, who benefits from it, and how many people whose lives become research subjects ever acquire the power to set the research agenda?
To practitioners: when professional assessment and lived experience disagree, which is instinctively given greater authority? And to those of us with lived experience: how often have we been asked to tell our stories, and how often have we been asked to help design the system?
There is an enormous difference.

A SYSTEM CANNOT CARE WITHOUT THE MEANS TO CARE

We can reimagine the childcare system, redesign its structures and write better policies, procedures and protocols. But who is going to deliver them if the people on the frontline do not have the time, resources, support or capacity to do the job properly? The latest figures for

England, published in March 2026, recorded 6,000 vacancies for child and family social workers, a vacancy rate of 14%. During the year, approximately 4,600 social workers left their posts, representing a turnover rate of 12%. And 74% of vacancies were covered by agency workers. Across child and family social work, the average caseload was 15.2 cases per social worker holding cases, although that figure does not measure the complexity of each case and is not limited to children in care. These figures have improved, but they do not remove the challenge. We cannot demand better outcomes while expecting overstretched professionals to deliver more with less. Goodwill is not infrastructure. Commitment is not capacity. If we want safer, more consistent and more humane care, we must invest in the workforce, manageable caseloads, effective supervision, training, stable teams and the practical resources practitioners need to do their jobs. Reform cannot simply mean asking frontline workers to try harder within a system that has not given them the means to succeed. We must fund the foundations before we demand the transformation. Because if we want our professionals to help children thrive, we must first give those professionals the conditions in which they can do their best work.

EIGHTEEN

And then there are the children for whom the state has acted as parent. We need to talk about the number eighteen. In England, a care order usually ends when a young person reaches adulthood, but the law does not simply abandon care leavers. Local authorities have continuing duties, including personal-adviser support and help with accommodation, education and training, potentially up to the age of twenty-five. The difficulty is that a legal entitlement and a lived reality are not the same thing.

In 2025, only 7% of care leavers aged nineteen to twenty-one with known activity information were in higher education, while substantial proportions were recorded as not in education, employment or training for a range of reasons. Staying Put can allow a young person to remain with former foster carers, but not everyone has that option or wants it. Eighteen is a birthday, not a developmental transformation. Nobody wakes on the morning of their eighteenth birthday suddenly equipped with all the emotional, financial and practical resources needed for independent adulthood.

Many young adults raised in families remain dependent on those families for years. They come home, ask for money, need somewhere to stay, make mistakes and try again. So what does it mean for the state to act as parent? Does its responsibility resemble parenthood only while the child is legally a child, or does corporate parenting carry obligations into adulthood? Why do we risk treating a birthday as a finish line when, for many young people, it marks the beginning of a period when dependable support matters more than ever?

WHAT WOULD CHANGE LOOK LIKE?

I am not suggesting there is a single solution, and I certainly do not possess one. My experience is not everybody’s experience, and my story must not become another model imposed upon someone else. That would simply repeat the problem.
But perhaps we can begin with principles.
What if we stopped designing systems for people and started designing them with people?
What if care-experienced adults helped shape policy before it was written, rather than being consulted after the framework had already been decided? What if adult adoptees had meaningful influence over adoption policy, and cultural continuity were treated as a need rather than an optional enrichment?
What if language and identity mattered? What if we measured the lifelong consequences of childhood intervention? What if the state retained an ethical responsibility for decisions whose effects persist into adulthood? What if lived-experience expertise were remunerated and respected alongside other forms of professional expertise? This is not about replacing professional knowledge. It is about expanding what we mean by knowledge and ensuring that decisions are informed by the people who live with their consequences.

EVOLUTION RATHER THAN REPAIR

Perhaps what we need is not another attempt to repair individual pieces of the system, but a serious examination of the values beneath it. If the foundations remain unchanged, reform can produce a newer version of the same structure. A system can change its vocabulary without changing its values. Change therefore requires us to ask not only what we should do differently, but what we believe about children.

Are children objects of intervention, recipients of care and cases to be managed? Or are they people with identities, histories and rights, whose adulthood is already being shaped by the decisions we make today? What do we believe about families, poverty, race, class, disability, culture and belonging? Who is entitled to decide what constitutes a good life for somebody else’s child? Until we interrogate those beliefs, structural change can only go so far.

THE CHILD GROWS UP

I want to return to the child I mentioned at the beginning. For me, this has been the longest and most painful part of being who I am: a child taken in by the Mother Country, yet growing up to feel rejected by many within it. I spent much of my early childhood vigorously scrubbing my skin in the vain hope that I could make myself white. Think about that for a moment: a child trying to wash away the very thing that made her different, believing that if she could change her skin, perhaps she might finally belong.
The adults made their decisions. The paperwork was completed. The child was moved. The years passed. The file closed. But the child grew up. I grew up, and I have spent a lifetime trying to understand things that could not possibly have been understood by the child about whom those decisions were made.

Some people with experiences like mine build extraordinary lives; some struggle. Some search, and some do not want to. Some find answers and others find more questions. Some recover language or culture; some cannot. Some feel enormous affection for their adoptive families; some do not. Many hold contradictory feelings at the same time. Some only find closure by taking their own lives. There is no single adoptee experience and no single care experience. That is precisely why we need many lived-experience voices, not only those whose stories comfortably confirm what society already prefers to believe.

PLAYING ON: THE ARTS AS A TOOL FOR CHANGE


What if theatre and the arts were not treated as optional extras in education and the care system, but as essential tools for understanding, communication and change? At the start of Care

Leavers’ Month 2026, PlayingON’s Flock: In Formation asks how culture can reshape support for care-experienced young people. Written by Lin Coghlan although it grew out of years of co-created work with young people with lived experience and was shaped in consultation with many care leavers, it places them not simply in the audience, but at the table, helping shape the conversation. Its principle is powerful: work alongside young people’s potential rather than simply manage their needs.

Theatre, music, literature and the wider arts can do something that reports, policies and procedures alone cannot. They can give people ways to express what may be difficult to articulate, explore experiences from different perspectives, challenge assumptions and imagine alternatives. They can engage care-experienced children and young adults, but also the practitioners, social workers, foster carers, managers and policymakers navigating the system.

The arts can become a meeting place where lived experience and professional expertise encounter one another—not as opposing authorities, but as opportunities to learn.

Art can educate and entertain at the same time. It can provoke discomfort, generate empathy and make visible what statistics cannot fully convey. In an age when the arts are sometimes dismissed as expendable, we should remember that civilisations are remembered not simply for their rulers, but also for their culture: their artists, philosophers, writers, music and theatre. Studying the arts does not mean everyone must become an artist, any more than studying physics or mathematics means everyone must become a scientist. These disciplines feed one another.

They cultivate curiosity, imagination, critical thought and the capacity to question what we have inherited. Without those qualities, how can we invent better ways of working or build a system fit for the next generation?

The arts should not sit at the margins of care. They can help us understand the people within it, question the structures around them and imagine what care could become.

THE PROVOCATION

I do not want to leave you with an answer. (that would be far too easy) I want to leave you with questions. When you return to your university, department, local authority, charity, agency, research institution, government office or practice, look around the table. Who is missing? And ask something harder: who is present but still has no power?

When somebody with lived experience challenges something you believe to be true, resist the temptation to ask first for their qualifications. Ask instead: what do they know that I cannot know?

There are things you can learn by studying us, things you can learn by working with us and things you can learn by listening to us. There are also things that can only be known by having lived them. You may have expertise about us. We have expertise from being us. And so my final provocation is this: if those of us who have lived for a lifetime with the consequences of the childcare system are still not considered sufficiently expert to help determine its future, what, exactly, would qualify us?