Understanding Residential Child Care

Nick Frost, Sue Mills

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138370241
• eBook ISBN: 9780429765988
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Small Business
• Index: Business

First published in 1999, the overall aim of the book is to provide a comprehensive critical guide to the theory and practice of residential care. This is achieved by analysing the history and development of residential child care, examining the current legislative framework and analysing research. The volume has been written against the background of a crisis of confidence in residential child care. The system is often seen as facing perpetual problems of abuse, lack of control and crime. This book seeks to both understand and respond to this challenging situation.

Understanding Residential Child Care commences by providing historical and theoretical perspectives. Having provided this analysis the authors move on to examine the empowerment of young people, the framework provided by the Children Act, the role of the manager, the importance of supporting and supervising staff, abuse in care and the experience of leaving care.

The book concludes with a chapter suggesting a way forward for residential child care. The core concept explored and applied throughout the book is that of empowerment. It is suggested that this concept can act as an organising framework for re-casting residential child care in a positive manner, so that a quality environment can be provided which can effectively protect and promote the best interests of the child.

1 A history of residential child care

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Introduction

In this chapter we wish to provide an historical analysis of residential child care in England and Wales. This is important not only to give us a perspective on the contemporary state of residential child care but also because residential child care very much bears the marks of its history - indeed it can be argued that the history of residential child care has been a dialogue with the past and, more specifically, with its Poor Law roots. This history will be analysed in five periods: pre-1597,1597 until 1834,1834 until 1908,1908 until 1939 and post-1939.

For each period key themes will be identified which we argue form the central developments during’that period. The issue of power and empowerment is central here. How was power exercised through the formation of the first institutions? What was the impact of this exercise of power on those who were resident? What does this history suggest about shifts in the exercise of power and about contemporary possibilities?

Origins: before 1597

Key themes:

• The development of specialist provision for children developing from undifferentiated reactions to the poor and the vagrant;
• The development of a range of residential provision including hospitals, workhouses and boarding-out provision operated both by the State and private individuals;
• The central place of work training for young people, which was perceived as a solution to pauperism.

We begin with an examination of the place of child welfare in the pre-Reformation period. Jean Heywood has suggested that there existed a network of support for the orphaned and illegitimate child - being cared for within communities or by a network of charitable provision: ‘Yet while he was nobody’s child, he was also the child of the people, and some community obligation was implied towards him’ (Heywood 1978: 1). The child was integrated into the community and the focus of life was around the village and the settlement rather than around the family and household: ‘In the fact that life was centred round the community rather than the family there lay the possibility of opportunity and protection for the unwanted child’ (Heywood 1978: 8).

As the pace of social change began to quicken and social disruption followed the State began to take a more active role both in relation to attempting to regulate the labour market and to provide for those not in work.

The history of state welfare has long been concerned with regulating the perceived threat posed by the poor and dispossessed. Fear of this group led to the Statute of Labourers 1351, in an attempt to control the wages of labourers (Fraser 1973: 28). This Statute was later strengthened by the Poor Law Act of 1388, which sought to limit labour mobility and the threat of the vagrant. Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth century children and young people were seen simply as part of this general concern with the poor and the threat of disorder. Thus even the Poor Law of 1531 had made no specific mention of children and young people. By 1536, however, we begin to see the emergence of specific provision for children and young people - the authorities were enabled to apprentice vagrant children, aged between 5 and 14, so that they would be able to learn a trade. This was an educative model which was designed to train and crucially rescue children from a future of vagrancy. Those aged 12 to 16 who refused such training, or who returned to begging, could be physically punished - thus providing a coercive back-up for the educative ideal. Parish officers who did not implement these provisions could themselves be put in the stocks for two days (Pinchbeck and Hewitt 1969: 95). The Act also introduced the idea of children being put out, or ‘boarded out’, with wet nurses. Additionally parishes were empowered by the Act to collect money for the relief of paupers - perhaps the first recognition of some state responsibility for the poor.

Meanwhile, as a result of the economic dislocation of the period, social unrest grew and eventually provided the conditions for the passage of the Poor Law Act of 1547. The Act allowed for the children of established vagrants to be taken into the apprenticeship of any citizen who presented before a constable, two neighbours and a Justice; an apprenticeship could last until the age of 20 for a young woman, and 24 for a young man. This again reinforces one of the main aims of sixteenth-century intervention - the emphasis on work and the development of skills to save children and young people from pauperism. If the young person attempted to run away they could be put in chains and used effectively as a slave. The promotion of parish apprenticeship remained a central thread of the legislation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the idea was undermined in practice and by the variations which existed in local practice. The Act of 1547 proved to be unworkable and was reformed in 1549 to include the provision that vagrant parents could lose their parental rights - a theme of child welfare which was to survive until the passage of the Children Act 1989. Whilst the apprenticeship provisions continued, the 1549 Act also repealed the provisions which allowed for children to be used as slave labour. Interestingly some concept of the welfare of the child was introduced, so that complaints by two honest neighbours that the treatment of an apprenticed child was ‘unreasonable in ordering and bringing up the child’ could result in the apprenticeship being discharged and the child being placed with a new master.

During this period we also see the emergence of charitable residential provision aimed specifically at children. The City of London concluded an agreement in 1552 to operate four hospitals to administer to the needs of the destitute poor and beggars. Two hospitals were designed for the aged and sick, Christ’s Hospital was for children and the notorious Bridewell for reforming the vagrant and idle.

Here we see the emerging emphasis on child welfare. The key aim of the newly formed institution was to care for and to educate the vagrant child, with the aim of ensuring that they were educated and later able to pursue a trade. During 1552 almost a thousand children were so accommodated and cared for. It is important to note at this stage that the later idea of ‘less eligibility’ was not in play. The administrators of the new hospitals went to some lengths to ensure that the hospitals were adequately furnished and equipped. However, the Christ’s Hospital for children was soon overstretched, although it had been originally designed to cope with all the destitute children of the capital. Pinchbeck and Hewitt (1969) suggest that this pressure may have been the result of a 1557 equivalent of the Child Support Act, enforcing support from putative fathers. They suggest that this led to an increase in children being abandoned, some of whom ended up in Christ’s Hospital. Whatever the causes, as a result of the pressure on places the hospital reformed its policy so that only children born within wedlock were admitted, except in the most extreme cases.

Another problem was that given the quality and quantity of provision in London there was a danger that London could act as a magnet for the poor and dispossessed, as litüe provision existed in the rest of the country.

Partly as a result of state and philanthropic initiatives, the needs of children and young people were increasingly recognised as being specific and specialised. The Poor Law Act of 1572 introduced the first distinction between younger children and youth. Young people over 14 involved in unlicensed begging could be imprisoned until the next session and subjected to the same punishment as adults. The exception to this was if someone could be found to apprentice them. In contrast, children under 14 were to be dealt with, presumably by what was regarded as the more liberal technique, by being whipped or placed in the stocks if found to be involved in unlicensed begging. Thus by the end of the sixteenth century we see the emergence of specialist residential provision for children and young people both in the state and philanthropic sector.

What we have seen is the inherent tension between ‘care’ and ‘control’ - an expressed wish to improve the condition of pauperised children and young people, which exists side by side with punishment, control and containment. This tension lies at the heart of residential provision for children and young people.

Consolidation -1597-1833

Key themes:

• A shift in attitudes towards the poor child which set the scene for ‘less eligibility’ and the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act;
• The development of a system of provision for children which varied considerably across the country;
• The development of residentially based workhouse provision operating alongside apprenticeship and boarding out for children and young people.

The landmark which signifies the commencement of our second period is the passage of the Act for the Relief of the Poor in 1597, a piece of legislation which was largely re-enacted in 1601, and became the basis of provision until the passage of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834.

Again the primary concern of this legislation was with vagrancy. The preamble to the 1597 Statute puts the point succinctly:

of late years more than in time past there have been sundry towns, parishes and houses of husbandry destroyed and become desolate, whereof a great number of poor people are become wanderers, idle and loose, which is the cause of infinite inconvenience. [Bruce 1968: 36]

The 1597 Act appointed overseers of the poor, whose role was the ‘setting to work of the children of all such whose parents shall not be thought able to keep and maintain their children’, to provide materials to ‘set the poor to work on’, and to provide ‘the necessary relief of the lame, impotent, old, blind and such other being poor and not able to work’ (Bruce 1968:32). Additionally the Act provided for the ‘putting out of such Children to be Apprentices, to be gathered out of the same Parish, according to the Ability of the same Parish’ (quoted in Heywood 1978:10n). The primary responsibility for children, however, was clearly perceived as remaining with the family: the means test had its roots in these provisions, namely that ‘the parents or children of every poor and impotent person, being of sufficient ability, shall at their own charge relieve and maintain every such poor person.’

The 1597 Act made a distinction between three classes of pauper:

• the impotent to be placed in abiding places, later known as poorhouses
• the able-bodied unemployed, later to be placed in workhouses
• and the recalcitrant idle who were to be sent to houses of correction.

In theory this classification was crucial to the Poor Law, but in practice it was more practical for the Poor Law authorities locally to place all three groups together in the unified workhouse. The workhouse established by this Act can be seen as the first attempt by the state to provide residential accommodation for children and young people. As we have seen this initiative is closely linked with some dominant ideas and ideologies: the fear and the threat of the dispossessed poor; a particular attempt to regulate the mobility of these groups; the close association between economic status and the loss of what we would now call civil rights, including ‘parental rights’, and the attempt of the state to intervene to resolve the social problems which were presented. The fact that the expenses of operating the 1601 Act came from the rates meant that, at least to some extent ‘in principle the State accepted the responsibility for securing the proper treatment and training of children by those into whose care the law had entrusted them’ (Pinchbeck and Hewitt 1969: 98).

The 1601 Act was unable however to provide a comprehensive solution to the scale of social disruption of the period. As Clegg states, ‘flight out of feudal relations could only be flight into urban centres or into vagrancy. There was nowhere else to go’ (1989: 244). Thus in 1609 another major theme of child welfare emerges - the idea of migration to the colonies. Pinchbeck and Hewitt report that the Privy Council suggested that the Corporation of London should raise money to send the poor to Virginia. Whilst nothing seems to have happened immediately, the idea re-emerged in 1617, and in 1619 one hundred children were sent to Virginia. The children were to be set to work as apprentices until the age of 21, after which they would be rented some land on which to work. The exercise was repeated, on slightly reformed conditions, in 1620 and on many occasions subsequently. A further solution was enacted in the Act of 1703 - an Act which allowed for boys aged 10 or more who were beggars or whose parents were a charge on the parish to be apprenticed into the navy. This practice seems to have continued throughout much of the eighteenth century. A further Act of 1717 allowed for young people aged 15-18 to be transported to North America for up to eight years. As we shall see later such practices relating to migration existed until the 1960s. In attempting to understand the appeal of the migration policy we must try to understand the ideas which influenced the policy. Primary amongst these was that children can be reformed by the countryside and fresh air, that indigenous poverty can be ‘solved’ by such solutions, and that children had a better chance of success if separated from the environment, and the people, including their parents, who had contributed to their ‘downfall’. Further, the children and young people were seen as a supply of labour, thus serving the needs of the ‘mother’ country.

Meanwhile during this period we also saw the growth and the consolidation of the movement to provide specific targeted workhouse provision for children and young people. The period leading up to the passage of the infamous Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 witnessed the widespread development of workhouses, outdoor relief schemes and the boarding out of children. This was a complex system which was largely dependent on the initiatives and whims of local officers and activists and, therefore, defies straightforward analysis. Fraser has argued that, at the end of the eighteenth century, ‘No contemporary then (and no historian since) was conversant with the whole nationally varying system’ (1973: 32).

The later half of the seventeenth century saw the growth of a number of workhouse systems, some of a generic nature and others designed specifically for children. Cities such as London and Bristol developed workhouse systems designed for children, sometimes based on a partnership between the parish and local philanthropists. These patchy and sporadic developments were encouraged by the Poor Law Relief Act of 1722 which gave parishes permissive powers to provide workhouses and to apply the workhouse test - that is, those who refused to stay in the workhouse would not be entitled to outdoor relief.

This State provision went hand-in-hand with private provision. Neither the State sector nor what we would now call the voluntary sector had a monopoly of provision. In 1741 Thomas Coram established his Foundling Hospital, in London’s Conduit Fields, often identified as the first residential children’s establishment. Coram was determined to eradicate the problem of abandoned babies in the streets of London, a result of the deprivation of the period and of punitive attitudes toward children born out of wedlock. The hospital itself seems to have been humanely run and many children were fostered out to the countryside. As Fildes has established:

At first, the hospital employed only two wet nurses, and in the first three months 90 foundlings were taken in at a rate of 30 a month. These were assigned to dry or wet nurses, with over two-thirds being fed by hand. The relative mortality was 19% in the case of the wet nursed, and 53% of those dry nursed. (1988:160)

This led to the development of approved, supervised and country-based wet nurses.

Meanwhile in the crowded workhouses there was also a high death rate. In 1757 Hanway began to visit all the London workhouses to record the death rates in each establishment (apparently hoping to encourage competition to improve these figures - a modern idea indeed). Hanway’s work helped to contribute to the passage of the 1767 Act which required workhouses to record all relevant information as part of the attempt to improve standards. In particular, Hanway was keen to stimulate boarding out - thus introducing the now familiar rivalry between foster and residential care. Parishes were obliged to send all children under 6 to be fostered in the countryside, within two weeks after being born or entering the workhouse. This included a payment system to foster mothers, which encouraged them to keep the child well and healthy, and a system of visiting which foreshadowed the role of the contemporary social worker.

Similar developments were happening in the state sector again reflecting the interplay between the two sectors. In 1774 in Sheffield the Guardians began to develop cottage homes for children - smaller units which attempted to reduce the impact of large institutions on children. However, it remained the case that most children were housed in the general workhouses, where they faced the problems of institutionalisation and mixing with a wide range of the destitute and dispossessed.

Those children who were apprenticed also faced many difficulties during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. They were often forced to endure the degradation and exploit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 A history of residential child care
• 2 Theoretical approaches to residential child care
• 3 Empowering children and young people
• 4 The Children Act 1989 and residential child care
• 5 The management task in residential child care
• 6 Supporting and supervising staff
• 7 The abuses and uses of residential child care
• 8 Leaving residential care
• 9 A future for residential child care?
• Bibliography
• Index