The origins and effects of the organised abandonment by government of residential child care

A first offering from the newly formed NCERCC Sociology of Residential Child Care team.

The concept of organised abandonment, as articulated by Claire Neaves et al (2025), provides a powerful lens for understanding the structural shifts within English residential child care over the last five years. Drawing on the theories of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Neaves et al (Full article: Organised abandonment in education) define organised abandonment as the intentional disinvestment in specific communities by state and capitalist interests.

This process renders marginalised groups vulnerable to precarity while opening up public services to corporate extraction.

When applied to the 2022 Independent Review of Children’s Social Care (the Care Review) and the subsequent government reform strategy, Stable homes, Built on Love, (which established the Families First for Children pathfinders), this framework reveals how the state systematically pulls back from direct care provision while circumscribing the lives of care-experienced youth.

Neaves et al foreground the relational production of structural inequality. Disadvantage is not endemic to particular communities, rather, it is the outcome of disinvestment in some groups and the attendant accumulation of advantage in others; both connected by the same political economic system.

“(T)he idea of organised abandonment foregrounds intentionality: the bleak picture … in England … has been actively made – organised – through economic and political systems; it is not the outcome of chance or bad luck”.

Organised abandonment, it is argued in Neaves et al, is where we should put our energy and focus.

As Gilmore observes “that organised part sharpens our awareness of how abandonment results from plans as well as abdications of responsibility. […] So, it’s not merely a withdrawal… but it’s a plan. (The focus on) “organised” helps us analyse why things happen” (Gilmore 2022). Gilmore argues, organised abandonment involves making ‘the resources necessary for social reproduction hard to come by: land, water, food, health, care, education, wages, and joy’

The phenomenon operates through the two core dimensions identified by Neaves et al.

1. “Abandoning Places”: Material Disinvestment and Capitalist Extraction

Neaves et al. argue that organised abandonment functions first by “abandoning places”, eroding the material, social, and economic infrastructures of children’s lives.

In residential child care, this has manifested as a deliberate retreat of local authority-run care homes, leaving a vacuum filled by private equity and corporate providers.

Such disinvestment renders particular groups vulnerable to precarity and harm (the class and race of the children being affected are important to foreground and as such requires an intersectional lens), creating conditions for further extraction and control.

• Profit enters as the state retreats: Instead of funding public infrastructure, state money is extracted as profit by private providers.
• Displacement and Precarity: The “abandonment” of localised public care facilities forces local authorities to purchase outsourced placements. This results in children being displaced from their home communities (in one region only 25% of its children are placed in the region), straining familial and other support networks, interrupting schooling, and engendering a notable placement instability; all a direct consequence of treating care as a market commodity rather than a social right and requiring needs-led planned provision.

2. “Abandoning Futures”: Policy Rhetoric and Foreclosed Alternatives

The second dimension of Neaves’ framework is “abandoning futures,” which involves circumscribing aspirations and foreclosing structural alternatives for young people. The Care Review and the Family First policy framework actively do this by shifting accountability away from state institutions.

• Shifting the Burden to Underfunded Networks: The Families First model champions early intervention and family-led solutions (such as kinship care). While keeping children within family networks may be for some children positive (but this is not universal), even sector family-based care bodies have noted that the policy framework falls drastically short of the required funding. By celebrating “family reliance” without providing matching economic safety nets, or appropriate social and psychological support (Family Hubs are not being resourced to meet the full range of needs, nor does the expanded mental health resourcing schools, nor integrated mental health services) the state effectively is asking families to manage systemic crises on their own.

• The Cliff-Edge of Unregulated Care: The policy architecture narrows the horizons of care-experienced youth by failing to guarantee long-term, high-quality residential pathways. Children over 16 have increasingly been funnelled into “supported accommodation”, which lacks the same rigorous oversight as traditional children’s homes. This creates a state-sanctioned tier of precarity, foreclosing stable, nurtured transitions into adulthood and limiting which support the future educational and economic possibilities of older teenagers in care.

Ultimately, Neaves et al’s framework shows that the crises highlighted in the Care Review are not accidental failures of the system. 

Instead, policies like Family First and Stable Homes, Built on Love institutionalise a form of managed state retreat.

The language of “family” and “love” masks the ongoing material abandonment of residential public infrastructure, while leaving the highly profitable, privatised care market intact, whilst increasing the precarity of families carrying responsibilities under-supported and under-funded in the caring for children who might otherwise be receiving care in a social, emotional, and psychological focussed environment

Going forwards – a reparative sociology of residential child care

NCERCC sees the potential for the idea of organised abandonment to build on existing critical analyses within an emerging sociology of residential child care, focusing our attention on why systems of social injustice are made and sustained in the English care system.

The response is a reparative sociology of residential child care engaging in the evidence with an imagination that is politically and analytically needs-led generative.

The role and task of the sociology of residential child care is to hold open spaces, through practice and research; “to dream in ways not predetermined by the norms of institutions or the arrangements of capital that (are proving to be) harmful.”