This short study provides an insight into the nature of children’s residential homes, the characteristics and circumstances of the young people who live in them and on the short-term outcomes for these young people. It builds on our recent research for the Department for Education (DfE) Raising the Bar? An Evaluation of the Social Pedagogy Pilot Programme in Children’s Residential Homes (Berridge et al., 2011). This focused specifically on the introduction of social pedagogues into residential settings in England, gathering data from 30 children’s homes in order to compare homes which employed social pedagogues with others which did not. In the course of this study we gathered a great deal of general information about the nature and functioning of residential children’s in England today. In the current study we have drawn a purposive sub-sample of 16 homes from the sample in the earlier study, collected new data on these homes and re-analysed data gathered in the earlier research, as outlined in the section on Methodology below.