The England Department for Education regulations require that all young people in care must have a ‘permanence plan’. A group care placement is generally used as a ‘last resort’ after usually more than one family placement (adoptive or foster) has not worked out, and is usually seen as a short term measure. Although in the guidance residential care is not included in the list of permanence options, it is recognised that for some young people it can offer ‘security and a sense of belonging’. This paper summarises a case study of a voluntary sector agency providing longer term care in six small children’s homes, and provides outcome data on 65 former residents, aged between 18 and 30.
There is considerable current interest in the ability of group care to contribute to healing the harm suffered by young people subjected to trauma and maltreatment in the family home, often compounded by multiple or poor quality placements in care. The emphasis is often on the model of therapy provided and the ‘therapeutic regime’ for young residents with different needs and behavioural challenges (Whittaker et al, 2015). For several years too, the EUSARF conference has heard papers on providing young people in care with a ‘sense of permanence’. This paper brings these two themes together by describing and evaluating the ways in which one agency has sought to provide ‘a sense of permanence’, stability and ongoing ‘family’ membership (both during and after their stays in the homes) to young people aged mostly between 10 and 15 when they moved in and around 18 when they moved on.
Looking at the different aims of residential care proposed by Ainsworth and Thoburn (2015), ‘care and upbringing’ would fit better with these combined aims than ‘residential treatment’. However, whilst any therapy needed to address the particular issues confronted by residents is sought from community services, it is the day to day parenting provided to each young person which responds to the different ways in which each carries the scars of earlier experience.
Descriptive data are presented from records and questionnaires completed by care workers and by the agency's moving on service. Drawing on information about income, employment, accommodation, physical and mental health, social support, partner relations, new families, and criminality, and using an approach to assessing wellbeing adapted from Stein et al (2012), ‘researcher rating’ measures of outcomes for the 50 young people about whom there was adequate information.
This mainly quantitative data is enriched by a qualitative analysis of the experiences of a sub- sample of 20 young people and of their residential carers and ‘moving on’ support workers. The paper focuses on what the young people and their carers had to say about how a sense of belonging and family membership was provided both during their stay and after they moved on. These stories are linked to increased resilience, achieved through the combination of close relationships and constructive activities which supported better outcomes than would be expected, given their histories.
We conclude that this case study demonstrates that, for those young people for whom this is the appropriate placement option, and especially when funding is available to support continuing ‘family membership’ after transitioning to adulthood, residential care can provide a sense of permanence and family membership to young people. We argue that the therapeutic impact of being ‘part of a (different sort of) family’ should not be overlooked when considering models of residential therapy.
As such, it addresses two conference themes: Therapeutic Residential Child Care, and Transitions to Adulthood from Care.
Residential child care , Transition to adulthood from care
