The two areas we recruit across are now covered by Regional Care Cooperatives.
The South East has been building one as Home and Future, a not-for-profit funded by local authorities across the region. In July, funding from the Department for Education to set up a pan-London cooperative, bringing together all 33 councils in London under a single approach to how care is planned and commissioned.
Regional Care Cooperatives (RCCs) have been built to support regional capacity, sufficiency, commissioning and market stability. The model for RCCs was set out in the UK Government's 2023 Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy.
A lot of what the reform is trying to fix comes down to distance. The Children's Commissioner has reported that in the most extreme cases, some authorities spend around a million pounds a year on a single child's placement, often a long way from where that child is from. A child moved out of their area loses their school and the adults they had started to trust. Cooperatives are meant to change that by giving local authorities more weight to plan provision together and to build more of it closer to home.
For children's homes, the thing that changes is where the care happens.
The direction of travel is toward care delivered in local areas, run or commissioned by local authorities and the not-for-profit sector rather than bought in from distant providers at high cost. For residential work, that means homes rooted in the communities children come from, staffed by people who live nearby. Family-based care will take more of the load, and that is deliberate. But some children's needs mean a family home is not the right setting, and those children still need skilled residential staff. The aim is for that home to be a local one.
For anyone thinking about a role in a children's home, this matters in a practical way. If you want to work in children's homes and stay in your area, the reform is pushing in your favour rather than against it. More local provision, run or commissioned by local authorities, means more local roles, backed by the stability and package that local authority employment brings.
London's RCC is now moving into its mobilisation phase, with boroughs and partners shaping how it will run over the coming months. Home and Future is further along in the South East. For the workforce across both regions, the shape of the next few years is becoming clearer, and it is a local one.
You can see the children's homes roles currently open across London and the South East below.