Overdue: A critique of Stable Homes: Built on Love

NCERCC is applying itself to a reconsideration of government strategy.

Here is an opening piece – more in-depth analysis to follow

Gillian Dalley’s framework in Ideologies of Caring: Rethinking Community and Collectivism provides a profound critique of the Department for Education (DfE) strategy Stable Homes: Built on Love by showing its reliance on a romanticised, individualistic ideology of the family

Dalley argues that such “community care” policies often shift the state’s structural responsibilities onto private households, masking the exploitation of unpaid carers and preserving structural inequality.

Applied to the DfE strategy, her ideas challenge the policy’s central pillars—specifically its focus on “family help” and kinship networks—by framing them as a privatisation of social care that substitutes collective state support with individualised emotional duty.

1. The Fallacy of the “Ideal Family”

The DfE strategy prioritises keeping children within their birth families or wider kinship networks to limit the state’s reliance on residential and foster care. Dalley warns that such models rely on a highly flawed assumption of the “ideal family”.

• The Critique: By assuming that extended families or kinship networks are naturally safe, stable, and ready to absorb crisis, the policy overlooks the severe economic and domestic strains these networks already face. Dalley argues that treating the family as the default care provider romanticises the private sphere, ignoring how poverty and overcrowding actively undermine a family’s capacity to care.

2. Gendered Exploitation and Kinship Care

A major pillar of the DfE policy is the expansion of kinship care, utilising the extended family networks to support at-risk children.

• The Critique: Dalley’s feminist analysis reveals that “family-first” care is rarely gender-neutral. In practice, shifting care from public institutions to wider family networks disproportionately exploits the unpaid, affective labour of women. Dalley contends that the state actively relies on these gendered expectations to withdraw institutional resources, expecting female relatives to absorb the physical, mental, and financial burdens of child-rearing without adequate professional salary or employment protections.

3. Possessive Individualism vs. Collective Care

The strategy heavily leans on the rhetoric of “love,” relationships, and localised networks to resolve a systemic crisis. It is widely sated that the government is underfunding this strategy.

• The Critique: Dalley views this shift as an extension of “possessive individualism,” where social welfare is framed as a private, familial obligation rather than a public, collective duty. By naming the strategy Stable Homes, Built on Love, the DfE depoliticises child welfare. It implies that structural problems—such as a lack of high-quality state-funded care homes or social worker shortages—can be resolved through relational fixes and emotional compliance. Dalley argues instead for collective care, where the protection and nurturing of vulnerable children is treated as an equal, well-funded responsibility of society as a whole.