INTERNATIONAL CHILD AND YOUTH CARE NETWORK

22 AUGUST 2000
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John Gittens writes from the viewpoint of community homes and schools in Britain nearly a quarter of a century ago. We listen in on a refreshingly vigorous and articulate debate on an issue we are discussing today ...

“ ... but we must at least recognise that the sheer absence of adequate terminology gets in the way of clear thinking.” 

It would not be a bad beginning to settle what we mean by ‘residential’. Is fostering residential work? If a child is a day pupil in a community home school is he receiving residential treatment? Is a hospital ward residential? It is not merely academic to pursue these various shades of meaning; I think they put us on to a vital clue, not only to understanding but also to policy. The first implicit and, when you come to think of it, naive assumption is that it all depends on where you sleep. The second and more vital aspect concerns the degree of separation from what might otherwise have been your home. Boys are sent to public schools because, among other things, this is thought to engender a degree of independence and self-reliance. Other children may be separated because their home does not provide a healthy environment. Others are ’sent away’ partly as punishment and partly to benefit from ’strict control’. Such considerations bring out two aspects of the exercise – separation and change of surroundings. With deprived children the possible effects of separation are worrying, but if a child is prone to malaria you can’t leave him living in a swamp. 

There, surely, is the clue. We not only have to change or modify a child’s environment: we try to find a new or altered environment that will minister to his condition. Residential work is, in essence, part of a scheme of planned environmental control. If this concept is then related to Intermediate Treatment it leaps into contemporary life. 

But first we have to consider the full implications of Intermediate Treatment. Again we are bugged by nomenclature. Intermediate between what? Being punished and being let off? Living at home or being sent away? Retaining or losing parental rights? Costing very little or costing a great deal? Authoritarian or permissive? Or, to take a cynical view of some regional ’plans’ doing nothing or doing something? The word is so redolent of British compromise that it is a poor spur to action and this may be one reason why it has, one or two enterprising experiments apart, produced relatively little change. David Thorpe was one of the first to see its possibilities and has written persuasively about it. As he says, the whole idea was implicit in the 1963 Act⁵ and I think he would agree that its spelling out in the 1969 Act and in the White Paper⁶ that preceded it was one of the Act’s most important demonstrations of principles in action. It seeks to reduce the separation element mentioned above and to introduce graded environmental control as part of each individual treatment plan. This is a long way from pushing youngsters up mountains, into canoes, or into old people’s gardens – and hoping for the best. It demands a whole new technology of child care requiring imagination, versatility and craftsmanship together with sensitivity and concern for the needs of individual children. This is pre-eminently a job for practitioners and here I see a chance, indeed a challenge, to work ourselves out of a defensive corner into the vanguard of the attack. Because we know about environmental control and the delicate balances between social learning and routine, between support structures and authority, between group life and institutional death. We know that we have been impeded by isolation, misunderstanding, and that the chief wish of most of our pupils is to leave as quickly as possible. It isn’t that our ideas or experiences are wrong or irrelevant: it is rather that they have been obliged to exist inside a virtually impenetrable communication barrier, a barrier caused chiefly by the ambivalence mentioned earlier. 

The greatest immediate danger that I foresee is that decisions will be taken on political grounds rather than with the needs of children centrally in mind. The risk to the schools is that they will be pushed into the penal camp. The digging up of the battered old corpse of ‘security’ is a case in point. It is not so much that it is a misleading idea – after all, somebody may make it work – but that it polarises a service. The two crying needs in child care are for a realistic and thorough approach to preventive work and for a concentration on co-operative action. So long as the public and some practitioners can send a child ’away’ neither aim will be achieved and the impulse (and the money) to mount an attack will be weakened. 

“I wish to urge with all the force at my command that prevention is not only a possibility: it is the only possibility.”

The trouble about prevention is that few people see it as a serious possibility. I wish to urge with all the force at my command that it is not only a possibility: it is the only possibility. The alternative of an increasingly materialistic society throwing up its increasingly disillusioned misfits to increasingly sophisticated treatment agencies is too ludicrous to contemplate. Nor does a prevention policy need vastly more resources. We have plenty of resources. But they are separated by academic disciplines, by professional allegiance, by administrative structure, by ignorance of each other, by protective stances, by outmoded classifications of their clients, by inertia, by prejudice and by fear. 

I do not underrate the difficulties of collaboration among professionals, by voluntary agencies, or with the (largely unrecognised, but vast) resources in the community at large. It is not a matter of administrative re-organisation. We have had enough of that for the time being. Nor is it a matter of exhortation and hope. T. T. Johnson showed in his book, Professions and Power,⁷ that there is a series of dynamic concepts which must be understood before effective action is possible. 

This is where residential workers come in. They are in direct contact with the most plainly declared problems, not only of children but of the attitudes of society, the limitations of administration, and confusion of purpose. They are collectively possessed of considerable know-how which, because it is not articulate, is not communicated. They can allow politics to screw them down into a socially convenient coffin. They won’t be out of a job – the delinquents will see to that – but they will become an archaeological curiosity. Or they can inititiate a co-operative preventive strategy and that would indeed be starting something.