Recent reforms in children’s social care in England, particularly the Families First Partnership Programme, promise a shift towards keeping children safely within their families. 

The language is compelling: early help, stronger family networks, and more integrated support. It signals a move away from crisis-driven intervention towards something more relational and preventative.  

Yet the system these reforms enter remains anchored in a much narrower understanding of family life. Practice continues to prioritise a model centred on the nuclear household, clearly bounded parental responsibility, and direct, continuous supervision. While this model fits many families, it is too often treated as the baseline against which all others are judged. Without questioning this expectation, reform risks becoming less a transformation than a careful recalibration of existing practice.

This is not simply a technical issue. The dominant model reflects a particular social and historical understanding of parenting in which care is located within a single household and organised through clearly defined roles. It assumes that family life is contained within a shared domestic space. 

However, research across migration studies, family sociology and critical social work shows that care frequently extends beyond these boundaries. It is frequently organised across households, generations and, at times, national borders, sustained through kinship ties, reciprocity and enduring relationships. These patterns are neither marginal nor new. They have long shaped how care is organised in many cultures, including within Britain’s multicultural communities. 

The difficulty lies in how such arrangements are recognised. Services are typically better equipped to identify care when it aligns with familiar and expected patterns of family life. When it does not, shared care may be read as inconsistency, and the involvement of wider family networks can be reframed as a source of concern rather than support. In this way, difference is not simply noted but actively filtered through existing expectations, with the risk that everyday practices of care are misinterpreted. What matters for children, however, is not whether family life conforms to a particular template, but whether the relationships surrounding them are stable, reliable and sustaining.

This becomes particularly visible in work with Roma families in the UK, many of whom have migrated from across Europe, where care is often organised through extended kinship networks shaped by strong obligations of reciprocity, mutual support and collective responsibility. Children may spend time across different households, supported by a wider circle of relatives and community members, with care shared in ways that are both relational and adaptive.

These arrangements are not only cultural. They also reflect practical responses to longstanding experiences of marginalisation, poverty and exclusion, where families rely on each other to provide stability, protection and continuity. Yet when viewed through a narrower lens of family life, these patterns can be difficult to interpret. As one practitioner reflected, it can be ‘difficult to establish who is who’ during a visit. This uncertainty is not simply a matter of complexity, but of how assessment frameworks expect family life to be organised.  

Movement between households may be understood as instability, and strong intra-family ties may raise concerns about control or risk. In some cases, everyday practices of shared care can even be misread through a safeguarding lens as indicators of exploitation or trafficking. These risks are real and must be taken seriously. However, they are often rooted in structural inequalities rather than the organisation of family life itself. The result is that forms of care which sustain children’s wellbeing are too easily overlooked, and support is too often experienced as misunderstanding.

What is at stake here is not simply how well services understand one particular group, but how family life itself is recognised in children’s social care. Roma families are one example, but they are not unique. Many families organise care through extended networks of relatives, friends and community. For example, through grandparents providing regular childcare, children moving between households, or informal arrangements of shared support. For some families, this is not simply a matter of preference but of necessity, enabling them to manage work, housing and financial pressures. In reality, raising children rarely happens within a single, self-contained household. It depends on a web of relationships that extend beyond it. 

Yet assessments still tend to prioritise who lives in the household, who holds parental responsibility, and who is seen to be directly supervising the child, rather than how care is actually shared. This goes beyond questions of cultural competence. It raises a more fundamental issue: whether current models of children’s social care reflect the conditions in which families live.

When services focus primarily on the nuclear household, they risk overlooking the relationships that sustain children and may inadvertently reinforce the very isolation that makes family life more fragile.  

If reforms such as Families First are to succeed, they must move beyond recognising difference and begin to work with the full range of relationships that already support children’s lives. This may mean working more deliberately with extended family networks, recognising shared care arrangements in assessment, and building relationships with those who support children beyond the immediate household. Ultimately, the challenge is not whether families fit the model, but whether practice is able to recognise and work with the realities of how care is organised.