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goodenoughcaring.com is an arena for the discussion of  issues of interest to parents, foster parents, residential child care workers, counsellors, youth support workers, social workers, teachers, mentors, social pedagogues,  educateurs  and to young people who are, and adults who have been, in care. If you are interested in, or involved in the care,upbringing and education of  children and young people or in the nurturing of children and young people who are unable to live with their own families  goodenoughcaring.com  is a site for you. The website welcomes  thoughtful views - personal, practical or theoretical -  about the care of children and young people.  If you want to comment about  child care or about goodenoughcaring.com  then  e mail   charlessharpe@dsl. pipex.com

The goodenoughcaring.com site is archived at the >British Library.

The goodenoughcaring journal is an online publication which invites anyone wishing to publish papers and articles about  parenting, nurture, child care work and related fields or those wishing to write about their child care experiences to submit as e mail attachments  papers or articles for publication to the editors at charlessharpe@dsl. pipex.com.  The members of the editorial group are Cynthia >Cross, Evelyn Daniel, Siobain Degregorio, Jeremy Millar, Jane Kenny, Ariola Vishnja, Mark Smith, John Stein and Charles Sharpe. The current issue was published online on 15th June, 2012 and  the next issue will be published on December 15th,  2012.

The Journal index can be found at http ://www. goodenoughcaring.com/ JournalIndex.htm

News and Opinion

From Maria to Munro Safeguarding Children : Procedures, Regulation or Nurturing Relationships?

A Child Care History Network Conference

On July 25th, 2013, the Child Care History Network is holding a conference at the Planned Environment Therapy Trust at Toddington near Cheltenham. The theme of the conference From Maria to Munro Safeguarding Children : Procedures, Regulation or Nurturing Relationships? is intended to provide a springboard for some fundamental thinking about child protection. For the last forty years child protection and safeguarding have dominated social work with children and their families. The conference will look at how this thinking has developed and ask whether it is time to move on to a different way of viewing ways of meeting children's needs.

How do we best protect children? Is safeguarding still the top priority? Should we place a greater emphasis on nurture? What else should we be doing? As with all CCHN events, delegates shall not only be considering historical developments but also looking at how we can apply what we have learnt from history.

Among the speakers who will be presenting to the conference are : Sir Roger Singleton, Chair of the Independent Safeguarding Authority and Mark Smith, Senior Lecturer at the School of Social Work at the University of Edinburgh and Ray Jones, Professor of Social Work at the Faculty of Health, Social Care and Education, run jointly by Kingston University and St George's, University of London.

As well as the presentations, the day will provide opportunities for delegates to participate and share thinking on the theme.

To register for the conference and for full programme details go to CCHN website

CCHN has provided us with the following rationale for the conference :

Safeguarding Children : : achievement or rhetoric ?

Safeguarding children is officially defined as

The process of protecting children from abuse or neglect, preventing impairment of their health and development, and ensuring they are growing up in circumstances consistent with the provision of safe and effective care that enables children to have optimum life chances and enter adulthood successfully. Ofsted (2005)

The claim made for the concept of "safeguarding children" is that it is comprehensive and goes beyond what its proponents describe as "basic child protection." The new view is that "safeguarding children" deals with a wider spectrum of issues than what we have come to know as child protection. Safeguarding children, it is suggested, provides effective child protection where the latter is only a part of wider work to safeguard and promote the welfare of children. Safeguarding children also demands that all agencies and individuals should aim to be proactive in safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children so that the need to protect children from harm is reduced. (Department of Education, 2013).

In our conference we will trace the narrative of the history of what has come to be known as "safeguarding children" and we will also hope to examine the claim that "safeguarding children" really does represent a paradigm shift from what was termed "child protection" to the extent that it will help all children and make all children safer.

From the Maria Colwell Report of 1974 through to the Munro Review of Child Protection in 2011 there is a sense in which "child protection" has grown into a huge empire in the social work school of professional thought. Certainly it has engendered a continuous production line of different policies, and procedures. This process is still alive and working among us without, it seems, ever creating a situation with which we can rest more easily. More importantly there are still many children who live in poverty, who suffer neglect, who fail to flourish, who do not enjoy good health and there are still children who are the victims of emotional, physical and sexual abuse.

It has been suggested that the problem with child protection is that in a way it has become an institution with some of the flaws characteristic of big institutions. It was born out of professional failure and the tragic death of a child and it sustains itself in the aftermath of further tragedies by producing literature and teaching that speaks of "imperatives" which in turn cultivates a blame culture when things go wrong. It is a system which says, after the event. "Why didn't we do a risk assessment?" rather than saying a priori, "Now have we made sure our children have what they need to see them happily through today?"

There are those who would argue that the formal safeguarding risk assessment procedures we have in place to safeguard children are too impersonal and inorganic. Too often they disregard the views of children and parents alike. They would suggest that it might be better to approach "child protection" in a fundamentally different way by providing unhappy children with the kind of natural nurturing relationships they need with adults: relationships uncluttered by the requirements of regulation and procedure. This of course might necessitate not only the provision of means to train people to develop their already naturally held nurturing capabilities in order to extend these to the care of other people's children. For this scenario to flourish there may be a need to cultivate a more nurturing social climate within our wider community if children are to be safeguarded.

On the surface safeguarding children appears to be straightforward: something that should just happen yet it evokes contentious and complex issues as well as many ideas about how these would be best approached. Our hope is the conference will stimulate you to pursue, discuss and debate these ideas as well as the many others that will arise during the day.

"From Winnicott to the Naughty Step" on BBC Radio 4 on Saturday, May 4th, 2013 at 8pm

On Saturday May 4th the broadcaster and researcher, Anne Karpf, talks about her research on Donald Winnicott's broadcasts on the BBC. Her research was funded by the Winnicott Trust. The programme will include original archival material from the broadcasts and will include interviews with Winnicott scholars and others who have been influenced by him. The programme will be available on BBC iplayer at BBC iplayer for a short period after the broadcast.

More to ponder : some observations about home life and schooling from a Scottish dominie.

"I believe that in state schools it's all wrong. It's based on fear. The mere fact that children who should be moving all the time are sitting on their arses for about six hours a day is all against human nature. It's against child nature."

A.S.Neill

Alexander Sutherland Neill (1883-1973) was a Scottish progressive educator, author and the founder of Summerhill School. Established in 1921, Summerhill School was first situated in Lyme Regis in Dorset, England and was later moved in 1927 to its present site at Leiston in Suffolk. The school continues to follow and develop his educational philosophy. In the 1960s Neill's ideas about education were influential throughout the world and they remain so among those who believe children learn best when in the main they are supported to make their own discoveries rather than being compelled to follow a prescribed and narrow curriculum based more on the needs of the state and less on the needs of a child.

"Dominie" is a Scots word for a male school teacher. In their time both Neill and his father were dominies. Neill was born in the town of Forfar and lived there before his family moved to Kingsmuir, a nearby village when his father was appointed to the post of head teacher at the local school.

Link : A. S. Neill Summerhill film

Digital life story work

We have been informed of a new BAAF Publications book by Simon Hammond and Neil J Cooper, Digital life story work : Using technology to help young people make sense of their experiences which is a practical guide aiming to bring the benefit of life story work - most often undertaken with younger children - to young people and adolescents. With the use of free software, smartphones and camcorders the authors demonstrate how digital technology can support and become an integral instrument of life story work. It is the authors' intention to show how new digital technology can be used to further the therapeutic process of helping young persons build a relationship with a caring adult while reflecting on their lives.

About the authors

Dr Simon P Hammond has contributed a number of articles to the goodenoughcaring Journal and he is a lecturer in Psychology at the University of East Anglia. Simon developed the idea of integrating the use of digital technology with life story work while he was a residential child care worker in Sheffield.

Dr Neil J Cooper is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of East Anglia.

For more information about Digital life story work view the BAAF catalogue at BAAF

Archive of the Year Award for the Planned Environment Therapy Trust

On Saturday, February 23rd at the "Who Do You Think You Are? Live" exhibition in London ('the biggest family history event in the world'), the BBC broadcaster, historian, and Editor-in-Chief of 'Your Family History' magazine Dr. Nick Barratt presented the Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre with the prestigious Your Family History national "Archive of the Year" award. Past winners have included the Surrey County Council History Centre, and Kent County Council's Medway Archives and Local Studies Centre.

In presenting the award, Dr. Barratt quoted from one of the nominations: "Not only do they collect and curate a range of small yet important archival material and collections, including oral histories, but they also provide a space for people to share memories and experiences relating to environment therapy - so continue to undertake therapeutic work today. All this is done on a small budget, showing that you don¹t need millions of pounds to make a difference to people's lives."

Receiving the award for the Archive and Study Centre were archivist Craig Fees and team members Gemma Geldart and Chris Long, who were core team members of the award winning "Other Peoples' Children" project. PETT was so impressed with the work of the team and with the very real difference it made to people's lives that when the funding for the project came to an end, the Trust asked them to stay on, and to continue to develop their work with former children, staff and families from residential therapeutic communities, many of which are now closed.

The team at Trust see this award as an endorsement of the work it has been able to do, especially with the help of a Heritage Lottery Fund grant during its "Therapeutic Living With Other Peoples' Children: An oral history of residential therapeutic child care" project in 2010-2011. As well as students and young people, the team at PETT has been able to work closely with a number of people who were children in care, their families, and friends; and to discover and demonstrate how remarkably 'therapeutic' archives can be in practice.

There is also a link to the Trust website in our Useful Links section at the foot of this page.

Residential child care in practice.

The Policy Press has written to us announcing the publication of Residential child care in practice Making a difference by Mark Smith, Leon Fulcher and Peter Doran. The book is about residential child care practice beginning from the standpoint that residential child care involves both children and adults sharing a common life space in which the quality of the relationships between the people involved is key. It is a very practical book which aims at being of interest and value to a worldwide range of practitioners and managers as well as to students at different academic levels. It draws on the ideas and traditions of a variety of theoretical and practical fields of thought including child and youth care and social pedagogy.

The authors of the book, all experienced practitioners and academics, are : Mark Smith, a regular contributor to the goodenoughcaring Journal, who worked for 20 years in residential homes and schools before becoming a university teacher and is now Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Edinburgh ; Dr Leon Fulcher, another contributor to the goodenoughcaring Journal, has for over 40 years practiced in, and taught, residential child care across the world and is now the Chair of the the International Child Care and Youth Care Network; Peter Doran, who recently retired as the Chief Executive Officer of a residential school in Scotland, having spent his career in residential child care and who, since his retirement, has undertaken work for The Scottish Government on the education of children with complex needs.

The book will be reviewed in the next issue of the goodenoughcaring Journal. For more information about Residential child care in practice Making a difference go to The Policy Press

Austerity and the Tragic Triumph of Academic Ideology over Reflected Experience

Charles Sharpe writes :

I noticed recently that a welcome contributor of articles to the goodenoughcaring Journal felt moved to write an apology in the preamble to an essay he had written about residential child care for an academic journal. His regret was that his essay was based solely on observations and reflections from his own long experience. Fortunately the journal's editor knew an excellent piece of writing when he read it and published the piece. No sooner was I beginning to wonder why the author's regret had been necessary when the answer came in a different kind of apology received by the goodenoughcaring Journal from another generous contributor. He wrote, "In the age of austerity measures, rising tuition fees and falling university applications, I'm currently trying to get as many peer-reviewed publications as possible in as many 'high impact' journals as possible. Seemingly in this era of the Research Exercise Framework (REF)*, the 'impact' of academic work is measured by how many citations the work receives in other academic journals as opposed to how many people actually read it. For this reason I've been unable to contribute an article to the Journal lately and hope that you understand my reasons and accept my apologies."

Another contributor writes, "I am a 'pure social scientist' by background but the whole thrust of my teaching and research over the years has, until very recently, always been focused on the life experiences of young people growing up in care. I now find that I am directed to study the inner mechanisms of the human mind in a purely psychological way, and to forget about what happens to these processes when they work upon the real lives of children. There seems to be no place any more for qualitative research."

Of course academic research and writing importantly inform the field of interest which goodenoughcaring is concerned with and we prize the significant number of excellent academic pieces which have been published in our Journal. However academic writing is only a part of our story and the care of children and young people has been equally enriched by the writing, speaking and performing of those who have been in care, of those who have been practitioners, as well as all the poets, songwriters, composers, performers, novelists, playwrights and others who have helped us gain further insight of the human predicament.

* http//www.ref.ac.uk

Comments

Cynthia Cross comments : I so agree with you. I look at some of these research papers and say to myself 'so what' or you have not thought about some factor which would change it all. We are always trying to avoid the complexity of things with disastrous results. Also we are keeping out of further education the very people who could really help the next batch of workers to do the job!

Michael Davidson writes : we should recognise that the scholar/researcher/scientist has a valid role and that it is different from the practitioner's but it is regrettable that their important relationship breaks down very often because they do not speak the same language.

Jeremy Millar comments : I sympathise hugely with those academic colleagues who are being badgered and 'bullied' to chalk up citation 'hits'. Coming from practice relatively recently without being 'socialised' into the academic culture I have found it interesting that there is an apparent lack of critical thinking surrounding this whole evidenced based approach. It appears that some buy into the academic status and dutifully churn stuff out. I tend to refer to this, as research into the bleeding obvious. Others contribute genuinely new takes on the workings of our field and within that do critique many of the policies, generally ideologically rather than evidence driven, that conspire to thwart, divert and distract us from addressing the self evident truths regarding children and families that come to the attention of the state's mechanisms of oppression. It seems to me, in my regressive idealistic youthful state, that academics need to take a lead in highlighting the paradox that determines that as global corporate interests supported by ideological political opportunism create ever more 'complex problems' for them to 'solve' using the 'neutral research evidence base', they are in fact furthering the abject conditions of poor and vulnerable people when the evidence base exists, and has for many years, to actually take steps to end social injustice.

Thankfully the REF fascists don't loom as large at the school of social studies at the Robert Gordon University and we have our in-house social scientist to offset the burden.

John Stein writes : thought on having one's work cited. I remember how thrilled I was when I found someone had cited my book in her work. Then I looked up where she had cited it. It was in a paragraph in which virtually every sentence had at least one citation, and often two or more. The sentence for which my work was cited contained two other references, if memory serves me right. Thing is, I don't remember ever expressing that thought, or even having had that thought. It looked to me as if she had not read my book, but rather only cited it, along with many other books and articles, in a lengthy bibliography to impress people with how well read and informed she was. But perhaps it was just an error.

Thoughts on quantitative research : I have learned much from quantitative research. Writing my book on residential treatment in the early 1990's, I spent months in university libraries reviewing years worth of every journal they had on psychology, sociology, social work, and anything else that might be relevant. Sadly, I found surprisingly few articles that were relevant to what I wanted to write. Because of the need to quantify and measure and control variables, articles were so case-specific or situation-specific as to have limited applicability to practice. Then, I figured out the reason for my frustration. In the residential setting, it is extremely difficult to control all other variables while you study just one. For example, shortly before taking a new position in a small group home, I had read an article about the positive effects on elementary school children from replacing standard fluorescent light bulbs with natural or daylight fluorescent bulbs. My new boss allowed me to make the change shortly after my arrival. It was expensive. I would have loved to do a study to document whether there were, indeed, any positive changes, but that would have been counterproductive for the program. First, I would have had to leave things as they were in the home for sufficient time to collect baseline data. Unfortunately, changes were needed immediately. We had to hire two new staff. Staff scheduling had to be changed because of low staff morale. The punitive point system needed to be changed. Older boys who served as a role models were ready to be discharged back to their own homes. New boys who needed placement would pose challenges for the milieu. Behaviour improved dramatically during my first few months, but there was no way to attribute improvement to any one specific change. Qualitative research might have been more meaningful, but no one had the time.The priority was treating children, not publishing research.

Thoughts on evidence-based practice : who can argue with evidence-based practice? Well, for one thing, evidence-based studies are often either so case- or situation-specific as to have limited relevance to other cases or situations. That is, they don't readily generalize to other people or other settings. It is much more effective, in my opinion, to use one's knowledge about child development, developmental psychology, sociology, social psychology, group dynamics behavioural psychology, to be creative and flexible in developing programs and interventions to meet the needs of real, unique people in real and unique settings. Too often, I have seen an over-reliance on evidence-based practice serve to limit practice rather than to inform and expand practice.

While I recognize the importance of quantitative studies in developing one's knowledge and understanding, including my own, in my opinion, essays and articles based on observation, reflection, and experience can do more to inform practice than quantitative studies.

Take the money and run : big organisations and child care ethics

Jeremy Millar writes :

I begin to wonder if for the sake of financial expedience we compartmentalise our core ethics as child care workers and as child care providers when we allow the care of vulnerable children to be in the hands of large companies and organisations whose track record on human rights has been condemned by institutions like Amnesty International. I draw readers attention to the following links about G4S running children's homes and Barnardos running detention facilities for young asylum seekers.

GS4

Barnardos

I think these instances of questionable care provision for children - and sadly I believe there will be others - deserve wider coverage and debate. As a teacher in this field it seems to me the ethical message being forced upon me is to invite the students to "Take the money and run."

Love and Education : Something for us all and Michael Gove to think about ?

The Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freire suggested,

'It is impossible to teach without the courage to love, without the courage to try a thousand times before giving up ...We must dare, in the full sense of the word, to speak of love without the fear of being called ridiculous, mawkish, or unscientific, if not antiscientific.'

Ref : Freire, P.(2005) Teachers as Cultural Workers, Cambridge Massachusetts: Westview Press, 2005, page 5.

Issue 12 of the goodenoughcaring Journal is here!

In this new issue Tracey Jarvis gives an account of her experience of being a key worker in a residential child care setting; in her article Access All Areas - a developmental perspective Janet Rich stresses the importance of assuring that care leavers have ready access to support resources; Cynthia Cross provides us with an the opportunity to consider the balance between the personal and professional in the care of children and young people; Noel Howard offers us a review of The Boy at the Gate, the memoirs of Danny Ellis ; a poem from Michael Mallows ,The Casual Cruelty of Positive Intent considers the consequences of moral imperatives and verbal chastisement ; John Whitwell provides his reflections on the Cotswold Community following its closure ; John Stein presents a tale about the influence peers have through childhood and adulthood; Mark Smith shares his thoughts about what lies behind the contagion of moral panic that follows in the aftermath of the exposure of child abuse; Tuhinul Islam writes about the key findings of his doctoral research >which looks at the experience of young people leaving residential child care in Bangladesh; Mary Winters furnishes us with an essay which discusses her concerns about the issues relating to child care placements, ethnicity and cultural background.

Earlier opinion and observation pieces published on this page may be found at  http:// goodenoughcaring. blogspot.com

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