Snowball, Children in Care, the Adults They Become, and the Cost of a System with Selective Hearing
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Decades later, I met Snowball again. He was no longer a frightened boy but a successful man who had built a life he could be proud of. His resilience was unmistakable. Yet his achievements did not erase the past. They revealed only how much he had carried alone.
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The new film Snowball, created by Mad4Films, tells his story with honesty and courage. It honours the Your Life Your Story community and the life of our brother and former director of YLYS, Yusuf McCormack, now passed. ​Watching it, I recognised the boy I had once known and the system he survived. The film is more than a personal account. It is a mirror held up to children’s social care, both then and now. What it shows is uncomfortable because it exposes a truth we can no longer avoid. Snowball’s experience was not an isolated failure. It was part of a pattern that endures every time a child’s truth is treated as inconvenience.
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Snowball’s childhood is not a relic of the 1970s or 1980s. It is a pattern that continues.
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The Your Life Your Story community brings together adults across five generations who spent time in care as children and the caregivers who supported them. Their accounts from both sides of the care journey reveal the same patterns. Disclosures answered with moves rather than safety. Staff who wanted to help left powerless to act. Trauma misunderstood as behaviour. Services that never connected. These patterns have endured for far too long.
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This brings me to what matters most.
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Care is a shared journey. It is shared by the children who live it, the caregivers who walk beside them, and the adults they become who carry the long-term consequences, good and bad, of how they were cared for. Any attempt to reform the system that ignores this shared experience will fail. The recent Care Review, which was promoted as independent although it was far from it, deepened divisions between caregivers, care experienced adults, families, and professionals. Those divisions caused harm. Real improvement will only begin when every voice is valued, not set against another.
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If Snowball teaches us anything, it is this. We must build a system shaped by the voices of the people who live within it. Children, and the caregivers who stand with them, must shape the journey.
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Snowball deserved that.
The children I cared for deserved that.
Today’s children in care deserve it too.
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​By Amanda Knowles MBE
I first knew Snowball when I was a young residential social worker, a title that is no longer permitted. I was new to the job and new to the world of children’s homes, believing that commitment and compassion would be enough. I had no idea of the burden children were carrying or how profoundly unprepared the system was to face that reality. Nor had I understood how it decided whose voices mattered and whose did not.
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Snowball arrived with a story no child should ever have to tell. He had survived being left for dead by his own mother. The moment the state intervened should have marked the beginning of safety and healing. Instead, it became the start of his second fight for life.
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He was thirteen when I met him. My husband was working in a working boys’ hostel at the time, and Snowball had just been moved there after speaking out about the cruelty of the housemother in charge of his previous children’s home. His disclosure should have led to protection. Instead, the system treated him as the problem.
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The move did nothing to protect him or the other children in the home. It served only to protect the system. Removing him was easier than holding the adult who harmed them to account.
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Soon after Snowball was relocated, I was transferred to the home he had been removed from to cover staffing shortages. What I found there confirmed everything he had said. It was clear, yet no one had been willing to listen. The response had been to silence staff, remove the child, and later close the home.
At that time, honesty carried a cost. In many ways it still does. Those who spoke out, whether child or adult, risked being treated as the problem. Truth was inconvenient, and the consequences almost always fell on the person who raised it.
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Staff often knew far more than they could prove. A few tried to speak up and were quickly shut down. Many remained silent because the climate made it unsafe to say what they knew. Silence was not always collusion. Some paid a very high price for their integrity.