Children’s social care in the UK has long faced crises of abuse, increasing demand, and declining quality, prompting urgent calls for reform. Caring Communities: Rethinking Children’s Social Care, 1800–present is a seven-year project that seeks to transform our understanding of care by exploring its long history through oral histories, archival research, and creative methods. The project prioritises the voices of Care-Experienced individuals, families, and care workers to ensure more inclusive and meaningful research. Working with partners, the team aims to reshape historical perspectives on care to inform better policies and practices for the future.

The Need For Reform

Recent inquiries into children’s social care across the UK have called for a radically different mindset alongside significant investment to ‘reset’ the care system and ensure it effectively meets children’s needs. One of the key challenges is the enduring lack of attention to, and understanding of, the perspectives of children and families regarding welfare needs and experiences over time.

Meaningful transformations to current care systems cannot happen without an understanding of the complex contexts in which children’s care has developed over modern history. Understanding how children, past and present, have experienced care is essential for driving reform.

Caring Communities: A New Approach to Social Care Research

The new seven-year project, Caring Communities: Rethinking Children’s Social Care, 1800-present, uses oral history alongside archival work and creative and participatory research methods to explore the long history of children’s social care in Britain. Spanning from 1800 to the present day, the project critically explores the nature, function, and value of care – while envisaging what it could become.

Across the first four years, we’re aiming to record the memories of people with knowledge and experience of the care system. While oral history is sometimes framed as a radical and inclusionary research method, particularly when dealing with histories of marginalised or stigmatised groups, the interviews can be fraught with questions of authorship and power.

The current focus of the project is developing the right policies and practices to embed collaboration and shared authorship from the outset and throughout. In this way, the team will ensure that Care-Experienced individuals are offered both a platform and the support needed to make a meaningful and significant contribution to research about the history of care and Care Experience.

Following the development of these policies, we will embark on our first phase of oral history interviews, which will focus on interviewing Care-Experienced people, their relatives, and care workers. This research, which prioritises the memories and perspectives of those with direct care experience, will deepen our understanding of care over time. A second, later phase of the project will explore how we can best enable children and young people to articulate their views and experiences about their care background.

Broadening Research Methods

While oral history interviews will help us capture certain perspectives and voices, we also recognise the need to broaden our range of methods to ensure that other individuals have the opportunity to share their experiences via different means and formats. The project will therefore develop a creative and participatory research programme, providing alternative ways for individuals to share their experiences of care.

Collaboration

We will also be working with our project partners (Barnardo’s, Coram, The Children’s Society, and Who Cares? Scotland) to explore how historical understandings about the world of care might best inform new ideas and understandings about care practices in the past, present and future.

The Research Team

The project team is led by UKRI Future Leaders Fellow Dr Claudia Soares. Claudia is a Modern British and Imperial Historian whose research interests include histories of care, family and childhood, the emotions, migration, and material culture, environment and landscape. Her first book A Home from Home? Children and Social Care in Victorian and Edwardian Britain was published with OUP 2023.

Joining her are:

• Dr. Jim Hinks, whose work spans a range of interlinked themes, including histories of gender, class, families, crime, and deviance. Prior to joining Newcastle, Dr Hinks worked for the Scottish Government as a Response Officer to the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry. He has previously held teaching and research posts at the Universities of East Anglia, Edinburgh and Oxford.
• Dr. Jade Shepherd, a historian specialising in the histories of medicine, crime and family. Before joining the project, Dr Shepherd was Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Lincoln (2016-2024).
• Dr. Kate Wilson, who joined the project in October 2024. Kate will lead on the oral history strand of the project, and specialises in 20^th century histories of care, class and culture. Prior to joining the team, she held posts at the Universities of Manchester, Glasgow and Stirling, and held an AHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Scottish Oral History Centre, University of Strathclyde, where she remains a Research Affiliate.