Implications – applied learning from Foucault to the Children’s Social Care Reset
This is the first of two linked documents.
Introducing Foucault
Paul-Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, and social theorist. Foucault’s theories primarily address the relationships between power, knowledge, and liberty, and he analysed how they are used as a form of social control through multiple institutions. His theoretical work has significantly influenced the understanding of social work. There are a few references in residential child care texts[1]. He acknowledged the potential positive impact whilst also warning of the risks associated with what he terms professional surveillance and restrictions in the facilitating environment for vulnerable groups.
He used the idea of the panopticon as a metaphor for modern surveillance and the mechanisms of control that permeate society.
One of his ideas relevant to the Children’s Social Care Reset – the panopticon
The panopticon was a prison design proposed by the 18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham whereby a central observation tower surrounded by cells allows a single observer to monitor all present without them knowing whether they are being watched. This uncertainty induces self-discipline through the internalising of the gaze of authority with individuals regulating behaviour as if they are constantly being observed. The panopticon demonstrates how power can be exercised subtly and efficiently, without the need for overt force.
Foucault and the Children’s Social Care Reset
The introduction of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 and the accompanying Delivering the Children’s Social Care Reset implementation plan potentially sparks a combative dynamic between the state and private care providers. From a Foucauldian perspective, private providers are not merely passive subjects of the new “panoptic tower”; they are active capitalistic entities trying to survive, resist, or exploit the tightening digital and financial gaze.
A complex, multi-tiered response from the private care sector is to be anticipated.
[1] Frost N, Mills S, Stein M 1999 Understanding Residential Child Care, Ashgate and Smith M 2009 Rethinking Residential Child Care: Positive Perspectives Policy Press
- Potential pushback Against Financial Visibility. (The Financial Panopticon)
The Competition and Market’s Authority 2022 market study highlighted that local authorities face high and variable prices for placements and recommended greater transparency. The CMA’s recommendations informed the Reset, but the DfE has not, as yet, turned this specific transparency recommendation into a statutory publication requirement. Currently there is transparency of all local authority contracts above a threshold, and this includes children’s placement. It is important to emphasise no child’s name is made known. The Reset does propose better market oversight, improved data flows, and has the potential for future transparency measures such as a Provider Oversight Scheme that would require large provider groups to make known underlying cost data, enforce price transparency, and issue fines if standards are not met.
The Provider Response
Large corporate providers and investment funds are actively resisting financial exposure. They argue that forcing “cost transparency” ignores the highly specialised, bespoke nature of high-acuity residential care.
There is potential for providers to adopt a stance that state-mandated price caps will make high-risk placements financially unviable and exit the market for children with multiple co-occurring interacting needs (such as those under Deprivation of Liberty orders) requiring intensive/expensive care.
- Corporate Restructuring to Evade Panopticon Surveillance
Foucault noted that when surveillance tightens, subjects often adapt by finding new, unseen spaces.
The Provider Response
In response to Ofsted, or another agency, being granted new powers to investigate and fine, entire corporate parent groups could become smaller, legally distinct, portfolios insulated from such surveillance directed to large entities.
3. The Practice and Postcode Shift
Facing the criticism of invest in homes in areas where property is cheaper some providers could repackage their services, maybe in other areas, as “specialist therapeutic hubs” whereby fees were paid separately for distinct services reducing the fees to below the new regulatory gaze.
- Legal and Compliance
In a panopticon, the observed often survive by perfectly mimicking the behaviour demanded by the observed, a process Foucault called normalisation. Currently we are in a stage of first actions by government and local authorities. We have not yet entered a stage of reaction. In this stage there is potential for private providers to adapt by turning compliance into a highly bureaucratised shield. The regional care co-operatives are seen already as developing an increasingly bureaucratised administration methodology, an expression of power from a Foucauldian view.
The Provider Response
As seen in other developments providers develop specialised teams to ensure compliance to ensure their paperwork flawlessly matches the state’s new national outcomes frameworks. This has already been described in previous years by local authorities as providers weaponising the metrics rather than as a protective measure. It is often remarked upon that the inspection framework demands documenting micro-interactions to prove compliance with the consequence of of the actual human time spent caring for the child decreasing overwhelmed by the perceived necessity of logging data. The Reset did not seek to reduce this bureaucratisation.
- The spectre of capital flight.
With Wales enforcing a complete transition to not-for-profit children’s care by 2027, and England potentially moving toward heavily capped profits there is spectre of capital flight.
The Provider Response
Local councils currently lack the “in-house” bed capacity to absorb these children, they do not have the ‘right’ homes, private providers could seek to use leverage to influence the government to soften the implementation of its profit-shaping policies. Or large providers could establish a not-for-profit entity and run the entirety of a local authority’s homes.
- The Foucauldian Upshot
In a Foucauldian frame the Reset represents an attempt to re-nationalise disciplinary power. It does so in multiple ways, establishing regional buying vehicles (and by funding local authority homes), increasing family-based care, and shifting the panoptic gaze directly into the community via early family interventions. The Reset, responding to the threat of what are described as continued high extractive fees for children’s social care in the context of diminishing total budgets, sees local authorities not begging the private sector to stay, but acting to build a parallel, state-controlled ecosystem designed to absorb the children when private providers exit.
