We want a children’s homes sector where love is recognised as essential to quality, and every child has the opportunity to love, be loved and thrive.
My thinking about love in residential care did not begin with me.
A significant part of my learning began through Valerie Tulloch and Children's Home Quality.
Valerie encouraged me to think differently about what a children's home could feel like, and what children should be able to expect from the adults caring for them.
Through her teaching, challenge and support, I became increasingly comfortable with something our sector can still find difficult to talk about:
Children in residential care deserve to experience love.
What I describe as Love-Led Practice has grown from that learning, alongside my own experience of leading a children's home and working alongside children and adults.
What if one of the things children need most is also one of the things we find hardest to measure?
In residential care, we rightly pay attention to outcomes.
Education. Health. Safeguarding. Stability. Incidents. Risk. Progress.
They matter enormously.
But alongside them are questions that are much harder to capture:
Do I feel wanted here?
Does somebody notice me?
Will you still care about me when things go wrong?
Do I belong?
For me, Love-Led Practice begins with taking those questions seriously.
It is not about replacing safeguarding, professional boundaries, regulation or evidence-informed practice with love.
It is about asking whether all of those things can exist within relationships in which children genuinely experience themselves as known, valued, cared about and important to the adults around them.
So, what is Love-Led Practice?
Love-Led Practice is not primarily a programme, intervention or technique. It is a way of thinking about who we are to children.
It asks us to consider not only:
What did we do?
but:
What did the child experience from us?
A home can be safe, compliant and well organised while a child still experiences themselves as managed. Love-Led Practice asks whether children experience the adults around them as people who genuinely care about them. Not because they behaved well. Not because the shift was easy.
But because they matter.
Love can look remarkably ordinary
Often, love in residential care doesn't look dramatic, with grand gestures.
It can look like:
A post-it note left on a lunchbox.
Remembering the name of the friend they told you about.
An adult checking in from their own holiday.
Saying “I love you” when it is genuine and appropriate within the relationship.
Holding a boundary without withdrawing warmth.
Repairing the relationship when we get something wrong.
None of these things is particularly complicated. Many would barely register within traditional measures of outcomes. But accumulated over months and years, these ordinary experiences can communicate something powerful:
You matter here.
Love is not the absence of boundaries
Love-Led Practice does not mean children always getting what they want. It does not mean abandoning safeguarding, professional responsibility or difficult conversations.
Sometimes loving a child means saying no. Sometimes it means making a decision they profoundly dislike because our responsibility is to keep them safe.
The question is what happens to the relationship while we do it.
Can I hold this boundary without making you feel rejected?
Can you be furious with me and still know that I care about you?
Can we disagree and still find our way back to each other?
But is love really professional?
“Children in residential child care should be loved…”
- Department for Education, Guide to the Children's Homes Regulations
It is easy to talk about love as though it sits uncomfortably alongside regulation.
It doesn't.
The statutory guidance underpinning children's homes in England begins by saying children in residential care should be loved, happy, healthy, safe from harm and able to develop, thrive and fulfil their potential.
The Quality Standards then describe what some of that looks like: nurture, positive relationships, mutual respect and trust, listening to children's wishes and feelings, and care shaped around the individual child.
Love-Led Practice isn't asking us to move away from the regulatory framework.
It asks what that framework should feel like when experienced by a child.
This thinking continues…
Love-Led Practice connects closely with the ideas I explore in Being the Adult They Need: Who We Are for Children in Distress.
The book is less about techniques for managing children's behaviour, and more about the adults around them: what children need from us when relationships become difficult, how our own responses shape those relationships, and what it really means to practise relationally.
We already measure whether children's homes are safe, effective and achieving outcomes.
What might change if we became equally curious about whether children experience themselves as loved?