Care Day is held every February, led by the charity Become, and it is billed as the world’s biggest celebration of children and young people with care experience.
The word celebration is doing deliberate work there. A great deal of what is written about children in care is about risk, outcomes and what went wrong. Care Day is one of the few fixed points in the year that starts from what care-experienced young people are, rather than what has happened to them.
Young people in our homes have told us, in different ways, that they expect to be seen as a problem to be managed. Breaking that expectation is slow work and it mostly happens in ordinary moments rather than on a named day.
But a day that says, publicly, that being in care is not something to be quiet about is worth having. We will confirm the 2027 date with Become nearer the time.