With millions of children worldwide living in alternative care settings, this article applies the learning from implementation science to advance the sector’s thinking around what needs to be in place to ensure consistently high-quality residential care. Building on the quality indicators identified by Farmer et al. (2017), an international review of the residential care literature (Porter et al., 2020) and focusing on smaller residential care settings, the article discusses how the eight implementation drivers within active implementation (Fixsen et al., 2005; 2019) can encourage a more nuanced, multi-dimensional understanding of what is needed to enable quality in residential child care. Greater attention to value-based recruitment of staff; the coaching of staff; the collection, analysis and use of meaningful data; and feedback loops from the practice level to engaged and adaptive leadership all emerge as areas for further attention.
The article concludes by asserting that implementation science can constructively challenge the planning and delivery of residential care and, importantly, do so in a manner that recognises the different contexts, settings and environments in which residential care is provided to children and young people internationally.
