A Scottish Association

Mark Smith

When I taught on the Masters in Residential Child Care at The University of Strathclyde in Glasgow the students and myself would periodically talk about setting up some sort of forum where those interested in residential child care could take forward discussion and debate about issues affecting residential child care in Scotland. I know that these periodic stirrings have continued since my fellow CYC-Online columnist Laura Steckley has taken over as Course Director of the Masters. Until this point, though, little has come out of such conversations. Then, towards the end of last year, I think it was one of Laura’s current students floated the idea of a Scottish Residential Child Care Workers Association on the discussion boards of CYC-Net. His post elicited a few replies and gave Laura and myself a bit of a push to do something about it this time. So with some financial support from the Scottish Institute for Residential Child Care (SIRCC) we set a date and booked a venue for the inaugural meeting of the nascent Association. Details of the event were circulated in a wider SIRCC mailing and posted on CYC-Net. Beyond that Laura and I had no idea what kind of response we might expect.

We had booked a venue in Perth, a reasonably central point in Scotland. Almost 50 people turned up from all over Scotland, from a range of different agencies and services. There was no agenda “ only some pretty general questions about what any proposed Association might do and how we might take forward any ideas to emerge from the day. Very quickly, we realised that we had struck a chord. Residential care workers have for years been effectively disenfranchised, lacking a “voice”, unable to name their worlds. There was a strong sense that those who made decisions about residential child care rarely understood our world.

The absence of a strong voice for residential child care and those who work in it makes it difficult for residential child care workers to be the strong advocates that they need to be for the children and youth in their care. It was evident last week that residential workers are of a mind to find a voice or perhaps a range of different voices. They have been silenced for so long that the debates that have needed to take place have not happened. There will be different views and disagreements as we begin to engage with the kind of issues that need to be engaged with. But behind any disagreements there is a shared sense that everyone in that room was able to say and do so with some pride and conviction “I am (or in my case was!) a resi worker.”

Who knows where the discussions that began last week will take us. We identified initial aims to raise the profile of residential child care in Scotland and to advocate on its behalf; to network with other like minded associations; to campaign; to influence policy; to develop a community of practice, where practitioners can share and develop practice that is grounded in direct experience; to establish local forums for discussing particular issues/themes; to run national conferences and events and to take forward an agenda that recognises that workers can only care for children if they themselves feel cared for and supported. This latter point is of particular significance in worlds that can be experienced as pretty unsafe places, where staff fear allegations being made against them but even more so, they fear the organisational and regulatory responses to such allegations.

One of the aims we set was to network with other like-minded associations. On that count I e-mailed a colleague in England to let him know about the association only to be told that he had set up something along similar lines in England. There is a mood around among residential workers that is beginning to realise that the “modernisation” and “improvement” of residential child care (and the public sector more generally) promised by armies of managers and regulators has been a confidence trick. If residential child care is to experience genuine improvement then this will only come about when those who have a few backshifts under their belt and who care enough about the field to ply their trade there, reclaim the agenda. I can’t help but think that I was part of something exiting last week. This genie is not going to be easily put back in its bottle.