Residential care for the young is an elusive object of study. Provided in the past by establishments as diverse as workhouses, orphanages, and reformatories, it has no clear definition marking its boundaries with foster care or boarding education; at the same time it variously aims to shelter, classify, control, and reform and it has no agreed theory or body of values. The need for residential care, and the difficulties of providing it, vary with time and place; the issues it raises are quite different in Romania than they are in California, or were in Victorian England.

Given this diversity, any discussion of residential care needs to outline the context within which it was written. In the case of this chapter the context is provided by current British social policy. Although the focus is on residential care provided to young people by Children’s Services in England for social reasons, the conclusions drawn are applicable to the rest of the United Kingdom. The issues raised by this provision have similarities in other parts of the developed world, in virtually all of which the use of residential care is declining.^{(1, 2)} This chapter is written against the background of this decline. Its aims are as follows:

In 1979, official statistics for England (the figures for Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland are published separately) showed
that there were approximately 95 000 children in substitute care (mainly foster care and residential care). By 2006 this figure had dropped to 60 300. While for much of this time numbers in foster care were fairly constant, the numbers in residential care fell from 35000 to 6600.⁽³⁾ The great bulk of residential care is directly provided by local authority social services departments (more recently Children’s Services), although provision by the private sector is increasing.

These figures give, in some respects, a misleading impression of the numerical importance of homes. The turnover in them is quite rapid—roughly 60 per cent leave a home within 2 months of arrival and just under half the placements result from movements within the care system rather than the breakdown of community care. On average homes still see around three times the number of residents in a year than they accommodate at any one time.⁽⁴⁾ A recent study found that residential care accounted for about 28 per cent of the time that children aged 12 or over spent in the care system.⁽⁵⁾

The basic characteristics of the local authority homes are well known. They are ‘open’ in the sense that the residents are expected to go out to school or work and are not restricted at other times. They are typically small, 50 per cent of them have five or fewer places and the average capacity is around six.⁽⁶⁾ The buildings are not markedly institutional, although identifiable to the practised eye, are usually located near to where the residents are likely to live, and aim to take local young people. Staff are non-resident. Many care staff do not possess a recognized appropriate qualification and although government targets in the form of National Minimum Standards⁽⁷⁾ aim to rectify this situation, progress towards these remains relatively slow. Homes have more staff than residents and research has shown substantial variation in the number of care hours delivered for each resident young person each week (between 37 and 254 h).⁽⁶⁾

Children enter the care system in Britain to be ‘looked after’ because of a temporary emergency (for instance hospital admission of the carer) or because of abuse, extremely problematic behaviour on the child’s part, or a breakdown of family relationships. The main characteristics that distinguish residents from other users of substitute care are as follows:

One study⁽⁴⁾ carried out as part of a major tranche of research on residential child care in England showed that residents had relatively high levels of school exclusion, truancy, delinquency, violence towards adults and children, running away, risk-taking sexual behaviour, self-harm, and suicide attempts. Around two-thirds of residents entered ‘care’ for the first time as teenagers, generally because family relationships had broken down, and a further one-fifth entered because of abuse. They were unwilling to be fostered or seen as too disturbed for this. The great majority had previous placements in foster care, residential care, or with relatives.

The role of the homes was to return some as soon as possible to their families, attempt to improve the behaviour of others, or prepare them for independent living, and to keep a minority (around one-fifth) for the foreseeable future. Although there was some specialization, most homes attempted to fulfil all these roles and took all types of resident.

Residential care lacks the moral basis that it formerly had; the disciplines and virtues required for successful group life are no longer seen as imperatives. The Children Act 1989 ensured that, except in rare circumstances, young people could no longer be ‘looked after’ simply on the grounds of delinquency when their own welfare and those of others are not at risk.

Theoretical uncertainty accompanies these moral shifts. The best-known texts on residential care are now around 25 years old and are dubiously relevant to the current situation where staff no longer live on the premises, and where there have been major changes in staffing, turnover of residents, clientele, and the size and purpose of homes. In any event, there was never a consensus about which theory should underpin treatment or training. Clear evidence for the efficacy of any approach has been lacking, whereas the evidence for the harmful effects of bad residential care has been clear—and frequently repeated on social work courses. Young people reach residential care as the culmination of a process that marks, and possibly even exacerbates, their social exclusion. Typically, they are disturbed, poorly supported by their families, and lack educational qualifications, a combination which makes it difficult for them to compete subsequently in the job market or to lead happy lives. Descriptions of residential care do not suggest that it mounts the determined attack on these problems that might have some chance of success.