Review: Residential Child Care - Between Home and Family

This book aims to fill a void in public information and imagination. Written for a Scottish readership, it requires we know about the differences in English policy and provision. Not always structural, often a subtle difference, but real nonetheless. This difference can be useful in allowing us to reflect on our peculiar English situation regarding residential child care.

There is a siren statement that deserves being brought to all policymakers’ attention: “There is the great danger that society sleepwalks into a situation in which the residential sector declines to such an extent that it is not viable and the possibility of making a positive choice of group care for a child is unavailable.”

The Scottish experience is of working in a supportive system that sees a children’s home as a positive option in its strategy for looked-after children. The percentage living in children’s homes is much larger than in England, reflecting the European situation. Even so, thinking from first principles to create a truly needs-led service for children is clearly still challenging, but patently more so in England.

Scotland has an understanding that you get positive children’s homes in positive children’s services. Good outcomes are celebrated in a collegiate way, yet poorer outcomes are not ascribed to the immediate placement before leaving care, as in England, where 25 per cent of young people leave care from children’s homes.

Early on we read of what makes a place a “home away from home”. The discussion in England is characterised very differently as “a long way from home”. Place is a social construct, affecting to what degree we allow meaning and belonging to be seen as active. It affects how we think about what makes for good policy and practice for that setting.

There are some insights here as to how it affects interior design or the differences in evaluation of three-bed foster or children’s homes. Here the conundrum is widened; small is not always beautiful, rural in Scotland can mean higher property costs – the opposite of the English story. Size and location are seen as constructs too, as is the myth of external providers being higher cost than in-house for the same level of need.

If you are new to looked-after children’s care or looking for policy directions you will learn how a well-ordered system could be structured. For the more experienced, this book gives many opportunities for reflection on the present and future for English children’s homes. We are left asking whether the current government reform agenda is thorough or yet another tweak.

Reviewed by Jonathan Stanley, principal partner, National Centre for Excellence in Residential Child Care