We cannot take one single step towards to the return to institutionalised thinking or practice

Why is NCERCC so exercised regarding the Ofsted guidance Registering a multi-building children’s home?

One reason is that it all too easily could be a rolling back of decades of work.

In England, residential child care, in all its forms, has spent many decades removing itself from being institutional. This struggle to have residential options for young people as they are today has required, among many other things, determination, resilience, the application of theory to practice, learning from others. Residential Child Care has been committed to the relational. It runs through all of the Quality Standards.

There are unanswered questions deep in this guidance.

In what other care situations would such a proposal be accepted?

• Would an adoption be agreed if a parent was living across multiple families?
• Would a fostering registration be agreed if a parent was living across multiple families?

If these are not acceptable then why is that thinking acceptable for children’s homes?

We must remain committed to relationships.

NCERCC has long explained that institutionalised practice is that which starts from meeting the needs of the system rather than the needs of the children.

Non-institutionalised care involves ‘place’ and ‘face’, of feeling at home, of seeing another looking at you and seeing yourself there.

The key question: Is what happens here formed from and around the needs of the children?

It is vital that it is acknowledged that this guidance potentially facilitates a return for institutional thinking and practice to be resurrected in and in regard to residential child care. Awareness must be heightened at all times. It can happen incrementally and unseen.

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NCERCC We cannot take one single step towards to the return to institutionalised thinking or practice