In October 2025, CELCIS hosted the first in a new series of learning conversations exploring developments in residential child care across Scotland. This webinar built on over twenty years of CELCIS working alongside the residential child care workforce – listening, learning, and collaborating to strengthen a connected community of care. Over this time, engagement through events and through the Scottish Journal of Residential Child Care brought together the voices of those with care experience, practitioners, leaders, policymakers, partners, students, and academics.

Drawing on what practitioners had shared in recent engagement forums, and on insights from Journal articles, authors, and themes, CELCIS is creating new learning opportunities to share practice, support professional development, and build environments that enable meaningful change.

Our first learning conversation Change in Residential Child Care in Scotland took place online on Tuesday 28 October. Speakers from Glasgow City Council, the Care Inspectorate, Aberlour Children’s Charity Sycamore Services, and CELCIS explored how residential child care was changing across Scotland. Attendees heard:

How nurture principles were being introduced into Glasgow’s children’s homes

How the Care Inspectorate was reshaping its inspection approach to place The Promise at the centre

How Aberlour Children’s Charity Sycamore Residential Service was supporting staff teams to grow their skills and confidence through reflective practice

Drawing on content previously published in the Scottish Journal of Residential Child Care, these stories highlighted how new models of care, regulatory change, and whole-system approaches were shaping practice, strengthening professional learning, and making a real difference for children, young people, and the adults who support them.

This article reports a 45% increase in the number of children in England waiting for adoption since 2022, while the number of approved adopters has fallen by around 42%.

This article describes how the Ukrainian government is advancing a draft law on housing policy (Draft Law No. 12377), which guarantees that orphans and children deprived of parental care will receive temporary or social housing within one month of

This Human Rights Watch (HRW) article reports that France is committing serious, systematic violations of the rights of unaccompanied migrant children, citing a UN body’s findings that flawed age‑assessment processes leave many children misclassif

This article from CELCIS explores the Scottish Government’s consultation on creating a universal definition of “care experience”, advocating for language and policy that reflect diverse cultural contexts—including those of people from the Global S

On October 23, 2025, the Transforming Children’s Care Collaborative hosted a webinar exploring Kafaalah—a long-standing childcare practice in Muslim communities that has been observed for more than 1,400 years.

This report presents findings from an evaluation by Changing the Way We Care (CTWWC) that used a realist approach to examine how care reform progressed in Guatemala, India, Kenya, and Moldova across five key system components. It identifies advocacy, government ownership, collaboration, and capacity-building as major drivers of change and offers recommendations for governments and partners to embed family care in national systems, strengthen coordination and workforce capacity, and sustain reforms through evidence, shared learning, and long-term commitment.

This study, based on vignette-based focus group discussions with social workers in Norway and Sweden, examines how they balance children’s cultural, ethnic, religious, and linguistic continuity with other needs when matching migrant-background children with foster families, revealing a complex process shaped by the child’s and parents’ wishes, foster carers’ capacities, and organizational constraints. While social workers value cultural continuity, they often prioritize more urgent care needs—especially amid a significant shortage of foster families—creating a risk that children’s rights and needs related to their cultural background may not be fully met.

This news article discusses how high-level representatives – including ministers, senior decision-makers, professionals, and children – from across the European Union and the wider Europe and Central Asia region met on October 13, 2025 in Buchares

This online expert training will provide a regional overview of the regional framework surrounding transition to adulthood in Europe, as well as recent changes. Experts will share their experience with supporting children as they transition to adulthood, and how guardians are a key safeguard in this critical phase.