Fairness Learning Theory is LBTC’s foundational approach to understanding why inequities persist in child welfare systems, and what is required to create fairer outcomes for children and families.
The theory is grounded in extensive practice across statutory safeguarding, non-statutory provision, and wider systems shaping children’s lives. It starts from a simple but challenging insight: fairness efforts often fail not because of poor intent or insufficient effort, but because systems are not learning in ways that enable change.
Child welfare systems generate significant learning activity, through reviews, audits, training, and improvement programmes. However, this learning is frequently compliance-driven and defensive, focusing on procedural correction rather than insight into how inequity is produced. As a result, disparities persist even as activity increases.
Fairness Learning Theory reframes fairness as a system learning challenge. Fairness is not an add-on value or technical intervention, but an emergent property of how systems recognise problems, legitimise knowledge, and adapt decision-making structures. Where inequity is misrecognised as individual failure or exceptional circumstance, it cannot be addressed at source.
The theory identifies a set of conditions that enable systems to learn towards fairness, including:
- recognition of inequity as systemic and patterned,
- valuing lived experience as system intelligence,
- leadership practices that support reflection and challenge,
- feedback loops linking learning to governance and strategy,
- and the capacity to adapt structures, not just practices.
Where these conditions are present, systems are better able to move from intention to impact. Where they are absent, fairness work fragments and relies on individual champions.
Fairness Learning Theory underpins all LBTC’s work. It provides the foundation for our frameworks, tools, and partnerships, supporting leaders to make fairness a core capability of how systems learn, decide, and act.