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The Department for Education (DfE) has published a new policy strategy aimed at ensuring children who experience care can maintain and build enduring relationships that provide stability, belonging and support into adulthood.
The strategy, published on 4 September 2026, applies to England and is aimed at local authorities, practitioners and leaders working with care-experienced children and adults.
The policy paper sets out the importance of supportive, enduring relationships to outcomes for care-experienced people and outlines actions the DfE will take to make these relationships a greater priority across the care and leaving-care systems.
The government says children’s social care should support children to maintain connections with family members, friends and other trusted adults they already know when entering care, while also helping them to develop new relationships with trusted adults during their time in care.
The strategy identifies relationships as important to children’s sense of identity and their ability to approach adulthood with confidence. However, it acknowledges that too many children in care and care-experienced adults do not have high-quality relationships because they have not been sufficiently central to the operation of the care system.
The paper states that, despite the efforts of practitioners, the care system can too often “break rather than make” the relationships that are critical to children and young people.
The government says it intends enduring relationships to become a “golden thread” running through every child’s experience of care and into adulthood. The strategy sets out how the care and leaving-care systems will be changed to prioritise these relationships and calls on leaders and practitioners across children’s services to contribute to this approach.
The DfE says the ambition is for every child who experiences care to grow up with enduring, trusted relationships that provide stability and belonging into adulthood, enabling them to feel safe, loved and able to thrive.
The strategy is intended to provide a framework for local authorities and professionals to consider how relationships are identified, maintained and developed throughout a child’s experience of care, alongside the wider support provided to care-experienced children and adults.
To read the paper in full, click here.
