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20 MARCH 2009
NO 1415
Community Homes with Education
Having briefly looked at the CHEs, it may be worth glancing at the children sent to them. These children present a whole variety of problems, both in terms of depth and extent. Notable amongst these problems, and indeed the main traditional reason why they have been sent to CHEs, is that they engage in delinquency or other types of socially disruptive behaviour which makes their continued stay in society 'undesirable'. They are a nuisance and because they are a nuisance, rather than because of any great notions of care, they must 'go away'. Philip Priestley's book1 contains an admirable summary of the history of the development of legislation for disordered and delinquent children and its grounding in this sort of reasoning. So, by the time the children come to CHEs, they have already been subjected to a series of other interventions which have, by definition, failed. If they had not failed, the children would not have been in CHEs. If a child is put on an 'Intermediate Treatment' scheme, a Supervision Order, intensive casework, some form of family-group home attachment, or some sort of peripatetic scheme and that according to whatever (vague) criteria is used fails, then the child is likely to end up in a CHE. In that sense CHEs are a receptacle for the rejected youth of our society. When children cannot be put anywhere else, they are sent to CHEs. I know there are some occasions when children are sent to CHEs as a first choice. But the research available suggests that there is an ascending graph of the number of interventions before children are sent to CHEs and the number is going up all the time. So that by the time the children get to CHEs they have been subjected to so many different types of trials that they have become almost immune to any further interventions. There are many reasons for this but the reasons change neither the fact nor its damaging consequences to the children and the society which has to contain them.
It is frequently forgotten by the critics of the CHEs, that the CHEs do not ask for the children they get. Someone somewhere thinks a CHE is the most suitable place for a child. Therefore, when the CHEs are criticised, it is only fair to extend the criticism to the whole process by which the children end up in them. This process is extremely muddleheaded and largely crisis-orientated. Little is done for, to and about the children until the child's failure and its 'cost' implications are no longer acceptable. This is quite a different basis from the one that seeks to maximise the benefits to the child. Thus the failure of the CHEs reflects on the whole system of dealing with problem youngsters.
If CHEs are looked at against this sort of background – the nature of the CHEs themselves and of children that are sent to them – it appears that the question 'what use are the CHEs?' cannot evoke any answer other than 'very little'. But that would not be conclusive because it is based on what has been, rather than what can be. I think we ought to accept it as probable that the CHEs will in the future become even more receptacles for the most disordered, troubled and troublesome of our children than so far. They have two remarkable characteristics which are unmatched elsewhere. Firstly, they have a colossal tolerance of misbehaviour. This should not be under-estimated, for it is precisely this misbehaviour which gets the children through the various hoops to the CHEs. And there is nowhere else in society a body of people who are as prepared as the CHE staff are to remain tolerant of very disordered behaviour. Such behaviour is their starting point; they take it for granted they are going to deal with some not very pleasant, not very lovable youngsters and they consume a lot of smoke which has previously tended to choke other people.
Secondly and crucially, they have extraordinary handling skills. They are capable of coping with a lot of aggravated situations which, unless carefully handled, can have, and have had in the past, disastrous consequences for the child and others. This is not to suggest that they do not mishandle situations, but to state that they are still the single largest reservoir of high level non-punitive handling competence. In the growing problems of staffing the whole apparatus of professional care in our society, we would be extraordinarily short-sighted not to recognise this, to foster it and to draw upon it to train others. I was delighted to hear Mr. Utting say that one of the major explicit goals of his department2 has become the finding of ways to capitalise on the skills that exist in one field to benefit others.
MASUD HOGHUGHI
Hoghughi, M. (1985). What
use are Community Home Schools? In Evans, D. (Ed.) The Best of the
Gazette. Surbiton, Surrey. Social Care Association. pp. 63-65.
NOTES
1. Philip Priestley, Denise Fears and Roger Fuller. Justice for Juveniles: The 1969 Children and Young Persons Act – A case for reform? London. Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1977.
2. Social Work Services, Department of Health and Social Security.
