There really ought to be some research on the residential care sector, by people who know what to look for – here’s why

All the state, national and local, has to do is wait for residential child care people with enormous knowledge and experience gathered over decades, to depart children’s social care.

It has happened. Maybe we thought it would be all right, we would recover. Maybe if the sector had been in a fixed state. But it has grown rapidly. Too rapidly? If you were planning an expansion you would not have gone at this speed. The regulations and standards have not been able to hold or to lead the situation, only to process it. We hear now there are applications to Ofsted to register a home too many to process.

Five years ago we had a shortfall of managers of 20%. We knew we needed more managers with tried and tested experience and knowledge of leadership. In the past five years there have been hundreds of new homes. Given the need for length of experience, and qualifications, the current leadership can only have come from what we had. The workforce is new, and as such is in need of holding professionally and emotionally.

There really ought to be some research, by people who know what to look for,  to report what has happened and the effects.

The research team will know thoroughly the works of Dorothy Whittaker (The Prevailing Cultures and Staff Dynamics of Children’s Homes), Leslie Hicks (BJSW Management, Leadership and Resources in Children’s Homes: What Influences Outcomes in Residential Child-Care Settings? Also available as Managing Children’s Homes: Developing Effective Leadership in Small Organisations – reviewed here Book review: Managing children’s homes: Developing effective leadership in small organisations.) and Adrian Ward (Leadership in Residential Child Care: A Relationship-Based Approach)

Looking at the residential child care today there is a prevailing monoculture of ‘mainstream’ compliance. For reasons explored see https://ncercc.co.uk/maybe-it-is-we-are-asking-too-few-questions-reconsidering-current-commentary-re-referrals-and-placements/

The literature of the pioneers of residential child care is packed with stories of their critique and creativity. They saw unmet need and opened homes to meet the needs. With current leaders and workforce having to ‘keep the show on the road’ this history will soon be lost, having to be rediscovered in later years.

We need compassion and empathy for the dedicated, talented, skilful, knowledgeable leaders who are working long hours. They are focussed on their homes, their staff and their children. The Minister needs to needs to praise them.

Their knowledge and experience is used everyday, but two things happen because of this caustic environment.

Firstly, what they know and how they do it is thinned and thinning by the attrition of the demands placed on these people.

Secondly, they don’t have the time to share it with their peers and colleagues. Residential child care is not only to be learned from a book. There once was time for role modelling, for learning by experience.

All that is solid melts into thin air. When is it too thin to be called present? And when is it absent, when names can no longer be recalled or when the practice no longer can be shown?

The definition of evidence today discounts experience.  It has become policy led evidence manufactured by people with no knowledge or experience of residential life, as a result they gather numbers but miss many more necessary. They make interpretations of the data that are unconnected to experience.

NCERCC has come across a concept to think through together,  Bellingcat’s Eliot Higgins on disordered discourse (which is not mere misinformation or disinformation, yet form a sort of information disorder). “When truth is no longer a shared foundation, power shifts to those who control the most compelling narrative — no matter how detached from reality it is.”

What we are seeing is what happens if the policy made on the basis of this evidence is incomprehensible to those delivering RCC. They carry on caring, until their hope is exhausted, then leave. They had held on but then go without passing across their lived experience. Slowly RCC is dwindling. It is happening without a fight.

It occurs as we write the reason RCC does not meet need is because it is not RCC as we have known it in previous decades. This is not golden time thinking of the past. It is a part of the phenomenon of ‘hollowing out’ of practices, not only in social care. It is described as doing the same as it ever did, and if all goes well it can work for a while, then cracks form, gaps and spaces inevitable with a form of false functioning.

We have forgotten how to do RCC. We no longer have what it takes. There are islands continuing but the land is sinking.

As one young manager said recently ‘I was told we knew nothing in the stone age, dark days, before the last 5 years. Now I find we knew lots more than we do today, our knowledge base has been deliberately narrowed using a strategy that would discount the rich learning and practice from those days. I am having to relearn but first have had to unlearn the superficiality that is promoted today. The knowledge I am discovering is founded on decades of knowledge and experience. It’s way more robust, effective and efficient, than the practice being championed today. I now see it is being thinned to fit with a slimming of vocational qualifications driven by cost not children”

The solution? In here and out there.

Residential child care was once seen as a ‘calling’. The children looked after were ‘all our children’ and people looked after them on behalf of ‘all of us’. It was the part of the welfare state delivering social security, these carefully chosen words demand close understanding as to the magnitude of their commitment. Those in need would find relief, another word with multiple resonances.

We need to create the people and the places and the policy.