The Polycrisis that is Residential Child Care today.
A crisis arises when one or more fast-moving trigger events combines with slow-moving stresses to push a system out of its established equilibrium and into a volatile and harmful state of disequilibrium.
The Care Review might be seen as destabilising the system generally. As it largely left Residential Child Care unaddressed it did not make another Residential Child Care possible.
The polycrisis concept is a valuable tool for understanding ongoing crises, generating actionable insights, and opening avenues for future thinking and activity.
Three causal pathways can be identified, common stresses, domino effects, and inter-systemic feedbacks, these connect in multiple co-occurring interrelated ways across systems to produce a synchronised crisis.
Following Donella Meadows and Diana Wright (Reference Meadows and Wright2008), a system is a collection of elements whose connections create some sort of whole with its own qualities.
Identifiable elements of the polycrisis are shown in the diagram below (there may be more…).
In the download document some key drivers and examples of the polycrisis in Residential Child Care are considered: environmental and ecological; political and social; economic and value.
These systems exhibit five key properties that help generate polycrises and are identified in the document.
These five properties create deep uncertainty that profoundly hinders effective management of outcomes.
Avoiding polycrisis requires the re-engagement of system stewardship, holding and containment, by the sector for the sector repairing its removal, in ways not imagined by the current Reset policy. Progress cannot be made until this re-engagement occurs
