The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 commits, again, to putting children at the centre of decisions made about their lives. It’s the right commitment. It’s also one the sector has made before.
The Children Act 1989 established the principle. Every framework since has reinforced it. And yet, in 2026, the gap between what children think and feel and what ends up in their records still remains a persistent challenges in social care practice.
The question worth asking isn’t whether we value children’s voice. Most practitioners do, genuinely. The question is why it still gets lost – and what it would actually take to change that.
Why the gap persists
The barriers are practical as much as cultural. Social workers are stretched. Reviews are time-pressured. Children, especially those who’ve had difficult experiences with adults and institutions, don’t always feel safe enough to speak honestly in a formal setting – if they engage at all.
Then there’s the structural problem. A child’s view is often mediated. It passes through a carer, a teacher, a worker, before it reaches the file. By the time it’s recorded, it’s been filtered, summarised, reframed. What remains is a professional’s interpretation of a child’s experience – not the child’s own account of it.
For children with communication needs, the barriers are steeper still. Standard approaches to capturing voice weren’t designed with them in mind.
None of this reflects bad intent. It reflects a system that hasn’t yet built participation into the infrastructure of everyday practice.
What the Reset is asking for
The Children’s Social Care Reset is attempting something positive. Family Help services, multi-agency child protection teams, extended support for care leavers – these structural changes are designed to shift the system toward earlier, more joined-up, more responsive practice.
But structural change on its own doesn’t close the participation gap. What it does is create the conditions – and the expectation – that services work differently. Earlier intervention only means something if practitioners are actually hearing from children earlier. Multi-agency working only improves outcomes if the picture of a child’s life that professionals share reflects the child’s own perspective, not just the system’s view of them.
That’s a participation challenge as much as an operational one.
What embedding voice actually looks like
The services making real progress on this tend to have a few things in common. Participation isn’t something that happens at a review – it’s woven into the contact between a child and their worker throughout the life of a case. Children have accessible, low-pressure ways to communicate that don’t depend on a formal meeting or a face-to-face conversation. And when children do share something, it visibly connects to what happens next. They see that it matters.
That last part is underrated. Children who’ve had their views ignored before aren’t going to keep sharing them. Trust is built through follow-through, not just through asking.
Technology can support this – and Mind Of My Own is designed specifically to help children communicate directly with their workers, in their own words, between formal contact points. But tools only work if they’re embedded in practice and backed by leadership commitment. A licence isn’t a participation strategy.
The Reset gives us the mandate. The harder work is implementation.
The reforms ahead are an opportunity to finally close the gap between the system’s stated commitment to children’s voice and what actually happens in practice. That means investing in the conditions that make participation real – time, training, accessible tools, and a culture where what children say genuinely shapes what happens next.
Children involved in social care are experts on their own lives. The system’s job is to create the space for them to be heard – and then to act on it.