Care and Treatment in a planned environment
Key text – learning from our history for today’s situations
There is very little we have not considered previously
The following is drawn from a Key Texts written by Robert Shaw for the Therapeutic Care Journal. The Key Texts are classics from the past which helped to shape today’s services. They are a “digested read”.
NCERCC are making this available as the issue is one of current discussion and a pdf of the source document could not be found.
Advisory Council in Child Care (1970) Care and treatment in a planned environment: a report on the community home project London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office 0 11 340214 7
NCERCC decided to bring a brief discussion of the document to the fore then follow with the summary of the document.
Discussion ( based on original)
The ideas in this report were the foundation to new responses to deprivation and delinquency. The 78 pages presents a blueprint for a planned, holistic, respectful and accepting environment in which both wider developmental needs and specific difficulties are dealt with sensitively by teams of staff who use of a wide range of interventions from noisy games to quiet reading, domestic activities to outings, schooling to keeping pets and who maintain the children’s links with their families and the community.
It needs to be considered alongside Spare the child (Wills, 1971), a dramatic account of the difficulties involved in changing entrenched attitudes.
The most striking similarity to today is the emphasis on respecting children and making relationships with them which assure them of a sense of worth. The emphasis on participation has a long tradition in residential child care (waymarker names are included in the text)
There is a stress on parenting in the form outlined by the Winnicott and Britton. There is recognition of the significance of personal space and buildings and of on-site education.
In many ways it goes much further than anything currently available today in seeing residential settings as both embedded in and potential resources for the community, a theme taken up fifteen years later in a very different world by Berridge (1985). Also a theme with potential in the Reset?
The large size is very different to today.
There is a breadth of vision that needs to be mirrored by the Reset.
