"Therapeutic Living with Other People’s Children: An oral history
of residential therapeutic child care, c.1930 - c.1980"
An integrated oral history, archive, Internet-based, and
person-to-person approach to gathering, preserving and sharing a neglected
aspect of the nation's industrial, cultural and social heritage.
This is a project which is to be led and guided by former children,
young people and staff from residential therapeutic environments. It will
involve them, together with family and friends, as interviewees, as
interviewers, and to help carry the project forward generally.
1. The Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre is the
only archive facility in
2. The Archive and Study Centre, founded in 1989, is seeking a Heritage
Lottery Fund (HLF) Heritage Grant, to carry out a major oral history-centred
project relating to life and work in therapeutic residential environments for
traumatised, deprived, and delinquent children and young people between about
1930 and 1980. It will involve a web-site in which audio, visual and
documentary materials are brought together to tell the story of residential
therapeutic child care generally through this period, with more detailed
concentration on six residential communities for children and young people, the
archives of which are held in the Archive and Study Centre. New archive
material will be sought, and one of the aims of the project will be to create a
model for online presentation which can be replicated for other therapeutic
environments.
3. The project will concentrate its attention on the period from the
early 1940s, when the national evacuation scheme led to the creation of a new
generation of experimental therapeutic hostels for difficult-to-billet children
across Britain, to the early 1980s, by which time most of the early pioneering
figures had either died or retired and many of the pioneering institutions had
closed or changed nature and direction. Those institutions which retained their
pioneering roots and ethos had either begun or were about to begin a rapid
adaptation to meet the radical demands and challenges of new social, economic,
and cultural conditions, which included new and rapidly changing legislation
and regulation, and the changing public perception of childhood, vulnerable
children, and the residential approach to working with them.
4. Although largely unacknowledged, many of these changes were a
consequence of the contribution which therapeutic residential environments made
during this formative forty year period in the history of the nation\'s
relationship and response to vulnerable, disturbed and delinquent children.
During this period workers for children in therapeutic community environments
forged a new body of professional knowledge and understanding, established new
organisations, shaped and informed new legislation, and fundamentally helped to
change the nation's approach to child care practice and training. Much that is
common sense and even part of legislation today was trialled and proven in
residential therapeutic environments then; and much that was common sense at
the time was shown to be inadequate for the task in hand, and in some cases
actively damaging.
5. This is an immensely influential and fundamentally important area of
the nation's heritage, but it mirrors, in relation to the national heritage,
the marginalisation and social exclusion often suffered by the children and
young people themselves. It is characterised by the invisibility, by the
inaccessibility, and by the destruction and loss of records, of memory, and of
objects of memory relating to the children and the places and people who looked
after them, as well as of the wider work itself. It has, in a sense, fallen out
of the national heritage.
6. This absence, loss and destruction of memory and heritage is
reflected in the lives and memories of many of those children and young people
themselves, who, as adults - and however creative and productive their lives
may have become - retain a part of themselves which does not belong to the
mainstream community around them, or have a safe and valued place in the wider
heritage. In the absence of memory by, about, and for them, their personal
histories remain hidden, or protected, or simply unspoken, unknown and unarticulated;
but in any event detached from the mainstream history and heritage of the
community.
7. It goes beyond this, however, and here the project can play a
particular role. For many former children and young people the loss,
invisibility, and inaccessibility of records about them, of people who remember
them, and of significant places in which they lived, translates into a
corresponding lack of personal foundation and certainty about themselves and
who they are. In the absence of being remembered, and enjoying an ongoing
dialogue with familiar objects, places and people from key stages in childhood,
they have a lack, to some degree and at some level, of a coherent and connected
understanding of their own place within the scheme of things, or even a firm understanding
and knowledge that they have such a place. Once again, through lack of
certainty and belief in their own personal heritage and its value, and the
ability or opportunity to experience, articulate and share it, they are
effectively excluded and estranged from full and confident membership in the
heritage of the nation as a whole; and whatever they may have given back in
their lives, it remains difficult for them to feel entirely as if they belong,
and as if the riches of the nation's heritage truly belong to them as they do
to others.
8. As currently conceived, the core project will cover eighteen months,
and involve a part-time project director, a full-time oral historian, a full
time archivist, part-time secretarial/administrative help, with the support of
current Planned Environment Therapy Trust staff, as well as volunteers.
9. Alongside new and innovative use of Internet
resources, we will be seeking other creative and effective ways to share more
widely the heritage which the project gathers. A mobile theatre piece based on
the memories and archives will be taken to current therapeutic environments,
schools and other accessible performance venues. Visits to current therapeutic
environments of former children – men and women with a long experience of life
beyond the therapeutic environment – will bring a sense of future and
connection to staff and children. A