The Secure Start® Podcast
In the same way that a secure base is the springboard for the growth of the child, knowledge of past endeavours and lessons learnt are the springboard for growth in current and future endeavours.
If we do not revisit the lessons of the past we are doomed to relearning them over and over again, with the result that we may never really achieve a greater potential.
In keeping with the idea we are encouraged to be the person we wished we knew when we were starting out, it is my vision for the podcast that it is a place where those who work in child protection and out-of-home care can access what is/was already known, spring-boarding them to even greater insights.
The Secure Start® Podcast
#22 Reimagining Children's Homes: From Last Resort to Purposeful Healing, with Kevin Gallagher
What does it really mean to provide therapeutic residential care to traumatised young people? Dr Kevin Gallagher draws from three decades of experience to challenge our assumptions about children's homes and how we use them.
Kevin's journey from banking to social work, driven by his own experiences of exclusion and inequality, mirrors the evolution of UK residential care itself. His candid reflections reveal how sophisticated practice develops through mentorship, theoretical understanding, and lived experience.
At the heart of this conversation lies a provocative question: why do we wait until children have experienced multiple foster placement breakdowns before considering residential care? These repeated rejections only compound trauma. Kevin makes a compelling case for using residential settings earlier and more purposefully, not as forever homes but as intentional healing environments where young people can feel "loved, welcomed, protected, and encouraged to flourish" during their stay.
The discussion navigates the tension between authentic connection and professional boundaries. As Kevin explains, staff must be "open and affected and bothered enough to have real connections" while maintaining sufficient detachment to think objectively. This balance, supported by supervision and reflection, transforms intuitive caring into sophisticated practice.
Financial considerations inevitably shape our systems, but Kevin distinguishes between "high cost" interventions (requiring significant resources) and those that are truly "expensive" (delivering poor value). His insights into how economic pressures have reshaped UK care provision over decades offer valuable perspective on similar challenges worldwide.
Whether you're a practitioner, student, policymaker or foster carer, this conversation challenges you to reconsider what residential care can and should be. The goal isn't merely containment but transformation—creating environments where traumatised young people can heal, develop, and prepare for their next chapters. As Kevin reminds us: "If it's not therapeutic, what is it?"
Kevin's Bio:
Kevin is a qualified social worker, organisational consultant, manager and has just completed his PhD.
He has worked in residential care and education for almost 30 years (with Amberleigh since 2015), from front line practitioner, through management roles and into leadership in a diverse range of organisational structures, both public and private.
Kevins passion is for therapeutic residential care and education, promoting the use of quality improvement standards.
He is an Advisory Group member and Therapeutic Care Specialist at the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
Kevin has been a trustee of The Consortium for Therapeutic Communities for over a decade, supporting and developing therapeutic practice across the UK, in particular, supporting local authorities to commission specialist provision.
Additionally, Kevin assists providers in strengthening models and practice.
Kevin is a very public campaigner for better understanding and use of residential care through a focus on practice evidence.
Disclaimer:
Information reported by guests of this podcast is assumed to be accurate as stated. Podcast owner Colby Pearce is not responsible for any error of facts presented by podcast guests. In addition, unless otherwise specified, opinions expressed by guests of this podcast may not reflect those of the podcast owner, Colby Pearce.
Welcome to the Secure Start podcast.
Kevin:When the second family placement has failed? Where is the conversation that says maybe we should be trying something different rather than carrying on trying another three or four or five? You know you'd like to think that residential care would be used earlier and more purposefully to do the work in order to allow young people to move into family type settings successfully. Therapeutic care as opposed to any other descriptor, it needs to be purposeful, it needs to be deliberate. These are not forever homes. It's not forever, but whilst they're with us, it is their home.
Kevin:We need to be clear on what are we doing. Why are we doing it? How are we keeping it responsive? How is it responding to changing needs? This idea about them not being forever homes there's nothing in my mind. There is nothing cold and feeling about that which would be the kind of criticism, and quite the opposite. It's a much more responsible approach to say how can we make sure that these young people feel loved and welcomed and protected and encouraged and enabled to flourish and given all the opportunities they can within the parameters of the time we've got?
Colby:Welcome to the Secure Start podcast. I'm Colby Pearce, and joining me for this episode is a highly experienced practitioner and leader in the UK residential care community. Before I introduce my guest, I'd just like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands that I come to you from, the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains, and acknowledge the continuing connection the living Kaurna people feel to land, waters, culture and community. I'd also like to pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging. My guest this episode is Dr Kevin Gallagher.
Colby:Kevin is a qualified social worker, organisational consultant manager and has just completed his PhD. He has worked in residential care and education for almost 30 years the past 10 years with Amberley Care, from frontline practitioner through management roles and into leadership in a diverse range of organisational structures, both public and private. Kevin's passion is for therapeutic residential care and education, promoting the use of quality improvement standards. He is an advisory group member and therapeutic care specialist at the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Kevin has been a trustee of the Consortium for Therapeutic Communities for over a decade, supporting and developing therapeutic practice across the UK, in particular, supporting local authorities to commission specialist provisions. Additionally, kevin assists providers in strengthening models and practice. He is very public as a campaigner for better understanding and use of residential care through a focus on practice evidence. Welcome, kevin.
Kevin:Hi, colby, it's great to spend some time with you and thank you for that very generous introduction. I feel like I need to, you know, add some personal bits to it. I'm a Gemini, I don't like football, I'm no good at DIY, and we're picking up a new puppy tomorrow.
Colby:Oh really, I'm no good at DIY and we're picking up a new puppy tomorrow.
Kevin:So I think that just it kind of rounds off a long list of work-related activities. But it's great to be with you and I'm delighted to have been invited. Thank you.
Colby:Well, and thank you for agreeing to come on. I'm not sure when which month covers Gemini. Yeah, we're a little bit different. I don't mind the football and building things. In fact, I've spent much of today doing renovation work here at my house, but we obviously both have an affection for dogs. There you go. What sort of puppy are you getting?
Kevin:tomorrow. So we're getting an Irish Terrier puppy tomorrow. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So that last dog of 16 years sadly passed away about a year ago. So we've got the summer holidays out of the way, so that we're now ready to have a new addition to our home, and actually we'll be registered as a therapy dog as well, so I can bring him into work with the children yeah, I look, I'm a I'm a massive dog person.
Colby:I love dogs, my mine. Last month was two years since our maltese cross poodle passed um and uh. I'd like to tell the story about the, the variation in in uh, the dogs that rebecca and I, about the variation in the dogs that Rebecca and I have had in the course of our marriage. So our first dog early in our marriage was an Alaskan Malamute, and so a very big dog, very big, very strong, shedded a lot. And then we went from there to a Maltese Cross Poodle, or a Moodle as they call them here, and they both used to sleep in our bed. He was small enough to sleep on his daddy's chest, a bit like the Bubbies did when they were small. So, yeah, dogs really enrich our lives. I wish I could get another one, but my sons feel my pain, and so one of them's already. He moved out earlier this year into his own house and very closely after that, bought himself a golden retriever puppy.
Kevin:Dogs have always been part of my life and actually even at work we have dogs and animals of various descriptions in our two settings. I might talk a little bit about later. But I think that kind of the impact of having dogs around or having animals around and needing to care for them, as well as the kind of the distraction and shared experience that you can have with staff, I mean, yeah, I think it's. It enriches our lives to have animals around.
Colby:And I think there is definitely an evidence base that is emerging around the role that pets slash animals play for the benefits around mental health and wellbeing and the developmental benefits for children and young people as they're growing up having pets to care for. So, yeah, that's great. Was there anything else that you wanted to add to the bio that I read before, or just the personal addition was sufficient.
Kevin:No, it's an honour to be invited and I think when you kind of read it out, when you're in and doing the work, and then the years go by and you learn and your role changes and now I find myself 30 years in being invited to have conversations like this, which is a real privilege. So it's always useful to be able to reflect on the journey and the different roles and how it's evolved and how that informs how I practice and you know the views I have around child care, how we run the services, how we campaign. So I think it's a yeah, it's a useful starting point in terms of the conversation this morning.
Colby:Yeah, yeah, and of course the privilege is also mine as well, having you on, so tell us about how you got involved in residential care.
Kevin:I mean, I think, like a lot of people in helping professions, there's a degree of wounded healer in in the background. I sort of fell into it in my in my mid-20s. I kind of left school at 16 with qualifications. There wasn't a, there wasn't an encouragement in my house to kind of work, um, and struggling with my identity as a gay man. I hadn't come out at that point and I found myself with a house and a girlfriend and a job and responsibilities and living a life that really wasn't um, authentic um, and there was a kind of a hidden side and the tension and the pressure of managing that culminated in me coming out and having some quite a lot of difficulties during my late teens and early 20s, you know, become a little bit extremely strange for my family for a while. A bit of running with the pack, mixing with some of the wrong crowd, too much partying, um, you know those those sorts of issues, and I was kind of finding myself um and I wasn't happy during that period. Uh, and then, um, as I began to settle into myself a little bit more, um, I actually went back to night school as it was then, and did my sociology and psychology a levels, um as a stepping stone towards social work. I think the my experiences of being a gay man and coming out and growing up during the the 80s I was born in 69, so um, the kind of the environment, um in the, in the culture at the time around, homosexuality was still um very negative um, and even my first experiences of coming out on on the gay scene there were a handful of quite clandestine venues that you would go to and a real melting pot of people in there in terms of ages and interests and so on and so forth. It's not like it is today and I think I was very aware of inequality, unfairness, feeling excluded. Some of these thoughts were not properly worked through because I was living them and experiencing them as a young man and that definitely informed a motivation to want to help others. I'd always found that I was fairly gregarious, quite confident in, at least on the surface, quite confident in social situations, and when I left school I ended up working in banking and sales, so a very kind of talking, interacting type profession, and I think that and then this combination of social values and wanting to help people I didn't recognize it at the time, but some of that was also my own healing that. That took me towards social work training.
Kevin:So I did my social work training in the late 90s and that was the beginning of a sort of a turning point in my personal life. I can kind of come out of a difficult period and then now had more of a purpose of where I was going. I'd come out, my family had had some time to adjust to that. The fact that I was now training and on a career path was, you know, was helpful in rebuilding my relationship with my family and so it moved on from there. And then usually at the time when I did my social work training it was a diploma in social work. It's now a degree in the UK, so it was a two year diploma with quite extensive placements as part of the learning.
Kevin:And I did my second year placement, partly attached to um uh, an adult um, mental health hospital, um and partly with a leaving care team, um, working with young people transitioning, and that was the beginning of my hook into working with young people. So when I qualified, everybody else on my course there were about 20 odd of us. Most of them were doing children and family social work or adult social work and wanting to go and work in statutory teams, but I went to work in residential care straight away in the local authority. So even that was quite unusual at the time. So I found myself in a small local authority children's home in the West Midlands in a very kind of urban setting, working with quite diverse, challenging young people. If I look back on it now, there was no deliberate use of residential care. You know this was a unit, as the language would have been called then, and we were working with whichever young people the senior management in social services were sending through to us.
Kevin:And it happened that we were working with a very complicated young person who displayed sexualised behaviours as part of his kind of profile and we were engaging with an independent sector organization that were actually coming out to do some assessment to see whether he would be a suitable match for their service. And I was involved in that and although, as it turned out, that wasn't the right route for that young person, I made a connection with that service that ultimately then turned into a job offer at a later point. But I found myself fairly quickly as the only qualified member of staff in a mixed staff group and within a few months of being there the registered manager had an accident that injured his back and put him out of work for several months. And as the only qualified member of staff I was asked to step up and hold the team, even though I was newly qualified and really wet behind the ears. So I found myself learning on the job very quickly and that was my springboard then into the, the independent sector and moving into a management role after about two years in the local authority and it moved from there. So I started as a residential social worker um managing a really tiny service initially, then moving into a six bed service for under 12s all boys and that was my first taste of working with therapists. That service used to buy in its therapeutic services from another established provider and, yeah, that was where I cut my teeth. I was in that organization for five years as that organization grew. So I started as a manager of one home, um, and then after about a year I moved into a middle management role and then was overseeing the opening of more homes and that's when I really, you know, got my my feet into personnel management and staff training and understanding some of the policies and, um, you know the regulatory frameworks in more detail, and it basically moved on, moved on from there, um. So so, yeah, it's definitely rooted in personal experience. There was definitely a motivation to want to help others.
Kevin:When I look back now at my knowledge back then was wafer thin, really wafer thin? I mean a lot of the judgments were quite crude and naive. I mean I remember a phase I mean this would have been, you know, way back at the very end of the 90s, and my thinking was very much about good parenting. It was quite sort of middle class, sharp, elbowed parent type, thinking about manners and looking after our environment and making sure there were bedtime stories and that the house was well maintained and there was abundant food on the table, and so I didn't have any of the underpinning theory to go with that. It was just based on this kind of strong sense of good parenting to try and make up for what had been missed. Um, you know, reflecting back on it now, it feels very crude, it feels very, very naive, and I certainly remember at one point, you know, three or four years in um, I was very much on my white charger, trying to rescue everybody and trying to lead from the front, and that was definitely my achilles heel.
Kevin:I remember one, one period where you know the degree of trauma again, I'll use the language that I understand now things were uncontained. Um, I wasn't recognizing the need to contain the staff, to contain the children. I was trying to do all of that myself and you couldn't fill your own cup quick enough to be able to feed everybody else. So, yeah, there were definite moments where I think I was very fortunate. In the first kind of four or five roles that I had, I had really solid, experienced practitioners as my immediate line manager or mentor, and so those four or five people really. They kind of gave me confidence and support to kind of do what I was good at, but they also kind of challenged and signposted me on the areas where I needed to grow and develop and that, yeah, that put me in really good stead.
Colby:People seem to find their way into this area. That kind of need to find their way into this area.
Kevin:It's strange work really, isn't it? I mean, when I talk to people about over the years and I've talked to kind of friends or people that you meet who are outside this work, and people will often say, oh well, it must be so rewarding, or well, I couldn't do what you do. And it is a strange, it is a very strange situation. I mean even thinking specifically about the idea of a children's home. Specifically about the idea of a children's home. You know it's a place of work for the staff who are coming in, but then it's a relational and very kind of familial and domestic set-up, but then the young people who are there are not really there by choice. It's a very odd situation to be in by design.
Kevin:And then, in terms of the nature of that kind of relational work, um, you know, I often talk about to staff as well, about you. You need to be open and affected and bothered enough, um, to actually have real connections. You know that you've got. You've got. You've got to feel and want and want to know and want to be with these young people. But, by the same token, you also have to be slightly detached and aloof enough if aloof is the right word, detached enough to be able to think and and see things objectively and be able to apply yourself deliberately, and I suppose that's the the point.
Kevin:I was the thing I was talking about earlier. I suppose that's the point of distinction. When I was earlier in my career I I wouldn't have been able to describe it like that because I was driving very much just from the kind of internal um wants and motivations and the kind of internal my own internal working model of how I thought the world works, um, but now I'm able to kind of harness the good part of that but also balance that with something that's a bit more structured and a bit more evidence-based and informed. You know that the thinking has a much more concrete underpinning now rather than it just being from the just from the heart. You know, you need that.
Colby:I mean, I think the word that comes to mind is sophistication Like the approach has become more sophisticated as you've had opportunity to reflect on the role that you've been performing and delivering over the years. I did think. I must say I did think when you were talking about your initial approach and it being a family by from what I heard, a conventional family trying to provide a conventional family environment, and feel I think, you know, I think that there's nothing terrible about that. In fact, if we can do that for our young people and provide them with some of those conventional family experiences or relational experiences, I think they're the foundations.
Colby:They're good foundations to build on.
Kevin:Yeah, I suppose at the time I would say it's yes, and, and at the time I didn't have the, and I think that's the thing that I've learned. And I think that bit about heart and head and, you know, being authentic and being connected but not but able to um, stay contained and not be overwhelmed and flooded, I think there's also a parallel when we think about um staff teams because, again, you know, residential settings are an unusual environment with multiple relationships, um, they're familial and domestic, but then they're not, in terms of the shape of them, that difference in age and gender and personality type that you have within staff teams. You know, there are some that will be much more thinkers and want the theory and the evidence base and the knowledge and use that as their way in to kind of inform their practice. And then there are others who just seem to be innately able to connect but might equally then struggle with report writing and paperwork. And so this thing about moulding a team and being able to recognise that you need all of those different talents, sometimes they're contained within individual people, um, sometimes they're absolutely contained within different people within the team. Um, and I think, again, that's another thing that over the years I, you know, I've been able to have a much deeper understanding of in terms of how you support and shape and develop a team. It's definitely become more. You know my thoughts around that become more strengthened as I've got more and more into therapeutic communities. I mean my therapeutic community interest. That absolutely came by accident.
Kevin:20 years ago I took on a director role for an organisation that had 27 small, very small children's homes spread across North Wales and Shropshire with a couple of small schools that they were servicing, and it had been through some operational difficulties. There was some really great practice happening in pockets and there were some areas where things were chaotic and not good. Um and I can't take the credit a predecessor in the role had come across these therapeutic service standards and had literally just got them and started an initial email conversation and it had never gone anywhere. So these were sort of almost in the inbox when I arrived and I was looking for some kind of framework to help bring these 27 homes together, some kind of common language or set of principles so that I could start to share what was working well with services that were perhaps struggling and kind of, you know, coordinate it really.
Kevin:And the therapeutic community standards were what I discovered and it was like a light bulb moment. I mean, they were to me, they were an off the shelf-to systemic framework that gave a language that we could use consistently. That then, as you got into the detail, talked about some of the how-tos in terms of systems and processes and, yeah, that was my starting point and I've worked with those standards, um, in deeper and deeper ways. Uh, ever since it's, that's become a complete um, uh, yeah, complete turning point in my, in my kind of practicing and career.
Colby:Yeah, yeah, uh. Peter wilson, a very recent guest, said his life has been a series of serendipities. You referred before to you had some mentors that you had when you were getting into the work and I really wanted to ask you, when you mentioned them, what it was that you took from those mentors that helped you in your own practice and career progression um.
Kevin:So I think, in in my very first step into, uh, into the independent sector. So when I, after about 18 months, two years of working in the local authority, um, so in the uk, as, as people may know, um, we most children's services in the UK now are delivered by the independent sector. Most of that is private sector. There's a small amount of third sector provision and public sector provision has been very, very low for a long period of time and when I was first joining the profession it was right at the beginning of that journey. So the independent sector was relatively new. It was probably a decade. We've been around for about a decade but it was growing, growing, growing. So my career has been lived through the experience of public sector shutting everything and a new market of private provision and how that market has evolved and matured, which we can talk about later. So in that very early stage I was working with two experienced local authority child protection social workers who were and this this was very common in terms of how those early services were set up it was predominantly experienced local authority practitioners who were, you know, disappointed or frustrated with the way that services were organized, who decided to go out and set up on their own to do things differently. And so I worked with these two guys who were, um very well established in their own reputations. They knew what they were doing. The service was, you know, solid in terms of um its understanding. You know it wasn't yes, it was a for-profit organization, but back in those early days this wasn't set up as a money-making venture. That wasn't the, that wasn't the kind of way it was positioned. This was like new innovation. So being around them and having their support was, um just very reinforcing in those early days. And then I moved to um a larger organization. I took a sort of immediate middle, sort of middle senior management role in a larger organization that was already working therapeutically in different ways, and I had a there was a female managing director there, again very, very long in the tooth established local authority child protection social worker who'd been managing these services for a number of years and had that mix of the kind of operational leadership in a space where the services are being purchased by local authorities but still needing then to operate, from a practice perspective, quite a diverse portfolio of different provisions. Um. So again, there was a bit of troubleshooting to be done there, um, so it was good experience and she was um, as I touched on earlier. She was somebody who appreciated what I was able to do and gave me space to just crack on with it but was an absolutely amazing backstop and mentor. So in terms of if I was hesitant about something, that sounding board, but it really felt like a peer relationship rather than it being a line management relationship, it felt very kind of creative and that then was a stepping stone then into the organisation.
Kevin:I think a mutual colleague, patrick Tomlinson. I joined SACS so there was a bit of full circle there. So SACS was a very, very reputable therapeutic childcare organisation in Shropshire in the Midlands and the first independent sector role that I had where there was the bought-in therapy, the bought-in therapy was being provided by SACS. So I began to have a sort of an awareness and a working relationship with them and three or four years later I then joined as a director when that organization was expanding and that was one of the most significant periods in my kind of, you know, middle part of my career, the the expertise. There was a lot of commitment in that organization to really developing the evidence base of what they were doing. They developed a body of work. They had a very clear treatment and intervention and assessment process. The systems were very structured. The people that they had had recruited into that kind of senior team.
Kevin:There was a lot of thinking going on. They were writing, you know, publishing articles um, supporting the writing of books, um, it was. Yeah, it was a really fertile um period in terms of being exposed to thinking. I mean, that's when I started to get more exposed to psychodynamic thinking. First came across the Tavistock. It's through that organisation that I uh, alongside that, as part of that kind of reflective work, which was not something that I'd done earlier in my life, um, so it was a. It was really interesting to come at personal therapy under the auspices of a work and a qualification, um, but it was. It was really that point where I properly got to understand that you're using yourself in the work, um, in a very explicit. My understanding became much more explicit, um, and then my understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of that and what that looked like in terms of organisational structures and systems and the idea of anxiety in organisations and containment and how that pertains to leadership. All of those ideas absolutely came through my time at SACS and that and that qualification. Yeah, there was said there were several, several very influential colleagues there and they were also an organization that was very outward facing and networking with other practitioners. So it certainly laid the foundations. It gave me introductions and contacts with other people and into the other networks that I'm still very much in contact with today, 20 years on. So that was definitely very, very significant. And I think the other person I would say would be very significant for very different reasons Before I came to Amberley so I've been at Amberley now for 10 years.
Kevin:But after I finished that consultation qualification, I uh I started to do some individual consultation work to make it live, you know, to make it a real, a real thing. And uh, I used to, I used to meet up regularly with other providers in our part of the country, kind of networking groups, and the original owner and founder of Amberley was somebody that I used to see regularly in these spaces and we got on well and she needed some role, consultation, because she was a director, a registered manager, a responsible individual, you know she was wearing a lot of hats in quite a small organisation and needed some thinking space, some kind of coaching and thinking space, and that relationship was ongoing for six and a half years, providing that supervision and doing. I did some board strategy days and some team development days at various points and there'd always been a bit of a joke. I was running a much larger service as an employee, um, and there was always a bit of a joke about, oh, when you're going to come and work for us so I can retire, you know, I could hand over to you, and that conversation became more serious in 2015. And so that's how I joined Amberley. So Amberley has been around for 20 years and I've been connected with the service for almost 17 of those, but employed in the leadership role for the last 10.
Kevin:So that relationship with that particular woman uh, you know that that founder um was a, you know provided me with the opportunity that I, that I have today.
Kevin:I wouldn't be, I wouldn't be in the role I mean now had I not had that, that working relationship. So it's definitely significant, not always straightforward. I mean the idea. I mean that was a learning in itself, the idea of um, you know, helping to manage the transition of a founder, you know, leaving the thing that they have put their blood, sweat and tears into for a, for a decade, um, and that kind of handing over the service to somebody else, to kind of take it for a very complex process to have lived through, you know, not always easy and uh and learned a lot through that, but, um, but definitely a significant person, um, you know, I wouldn't be here now without, without that opportunity, so I'm always mindful of that what's become really uh clear in the expression of people who work in this space and in related endeavors is the role of supervision in, as you put it, providing some thinking space, that opportunity to reflect about the work, because if we're not thinking about the work, then how are we practicing, is the question.
Colby:You mentioned earlier the word containment quite a number of times and I was going to ask you about the kind of theories that particularly influence your practice. I'm very much of the view that the people who do well in this space, they can be quite a diverse group, but the one quality that I think really makes people stand out is that they're good at containment. Yeah, some people are just naturally good containers, you know they're just, they are, I think.
Kevin:I think in terms of, um, I think there's a responsibility to the children. And, if I was to use a slightly different perspective, these are paid for services, whether it's delivered by the state or whether it's delivered by a private sector organisation. It's public sector money, it's a state intervention when we're looking after children. So I think there is a, I think there's a moral and uh and an economic um, um responsibility. But to the children, um, they're with us, not by choice, you know. They're with us as a result of, you know, these significant early traumas and we owe it to them to work with them and alongside them in the best way that we possibly can.
Kevin:And I think, in relation to therapeutic care, as opposed to any other descriptor and we may talk about that in a while it needs to be purposeful, it needs to be deliberate. So I think, the thing about the kind of the learning and the knowledge and what that might mean for containment, for people who are leading a shift if that's the language that's used or a registered manager or a senior manager we've got to understand the nature of the work on the ground and to play our role in the system to make sure that those young people and those staff are getting the maximum amount of support, relational opportunities and different inputs and supports to be able to, uh, help with healing and recovery. So so, yes, we, we could go along and do that in a very uninformed and just go with what's natural, but loads of mistakes are going to be made and these young people deserve much better than that. So I think that's, I think I think sophisticated. You know, having a more deliberate or sophisticated approach I think is absolutely essential, but then it's a deliberate thing.
Colby:Yes, it's the intentional use of yourself, the intentional use of the self, and so there needs to be a guiding framework, um that so you, so that there is an understanding of the children, of the work of, of relate, the relational environment in which you're working, so that, um, so that you can be intentional about it. And it needs to be the opportunity to stop and think about the work and how I approach it and use myself in a way that is reflective of good care standards and of the needs of the children.
Kevin:I think it's. What is the work? I mean children's homes, you know I've spoken a little bit recently about which some people can find slightly controversial. These are not forever homes. These young people are coming to us at a point in their life where they need particular types of help. They're only going to be with us for a relatively short period of time. Maybe that might be a couple of years or three or maybe a bit like, if we're lucky. I mean, in the uk the average length of stay in residential care is getting shorter um, so it's not forever, um, but whilst they're with us it is their home, but it's. It's a special home where they're there to get specific sorts of help from a diverse group of individuals.
Kevin:So the purposefulness it's. You know we can't afford drift. We need to be clear on what are we doing, why are we doing it, how are we keeping it responsive? How is it responding to changing needs? I mean, I work with teenage boys and if they're with us for three or four years, they're growing up as young men, young adults. So their personalities evolve and are shaped by the people and the experiences that we provide. I mean that's a. You know, I'm not a parent outside work and it's interesting that I know I've spoken with, with family and colleagues along along the way. I think there is a there is a strong parenting motivation within me that gets satisfied through the nature of the work that I do.
Kevin:Um, so, yeah, it's strange when, when you know, when you have, like, a media presentation about children's homes and and young people can then either be put into these polarised positions of being these poor victims that need to be looked after by the state, and if you start from that position, a whole load of assumptions can unfold or it's a more demonised view about troublesome individuals that need to be managed away from society, and both of those positions are obviously unrealistic.
Kevin:Um, but they, but they both then set up a set of assumptions at a societal level about what a children's home is or what it's for. Um, and, yeah, this idea about them not being forever homes. There's nothing in my mind, there is nothing cold or unfeeling about that which would, which would be the kind of criticism, and quite the opposite, it's a much more responsible um approach to say how can we make sure that these young people feel loved and welcomed and protected and encouraged and um enabled to flourish and given all the opportunities they can within the parameters of the time that we've got, with an understanding of their starting point when they arrive with us, with the application of theory and practice, so that by the time that they're moving on they are healthier on all levels healthier, more rounded, more confident human beings to be able to go on and navigate life more successfully under their own steam. I mean, that's the outcome from my perspective.
Colby:I think yeah it's not so controversial with me, kevin, I've been thinking a lot about the best way to use residential care, in a sense, because I do think it has strengths. It has really clear strengths in a number of areas. So, yeah, the idea is that we should be very much aware of those strengths and we should be very much aware of the populations of children and young people who can benefit from it. I'm interested to hear more about you know how you view residential care as, as compared with um, foster care, for example yeah, well, again across my career.
Kevin:So again, this is where the understanding evolves over a career. So I now have a much more, a much clearer understanding of the um, the wider societal roles about um. You know economic policy for argument's sake in a country and how that translates to the funding of services. So if we look in the in across my 30 years in the uk system, um, it's moved from massive decline in public sector provision into the private sector and then that sector not very well managed, given that we've only got local authorities who are commissioning services. Then, if I look at the last 10 or 15 years in particular, because there are some extreme pressures in the UK, as there are in many systems, we've had 15 years of real cuts in public funding. So our local authorities, in terms of all of those early help, help for families, early intervention, youth clubs we had Sure Starts centers in the uk, a lot of these initiatives that were helping children and families to have the best start in life and ultimately reducing some of the numbers that would be coming into care they all got stripped away.
Kevin:Um, at the same time we're on a societal level. We've had real economic pressures, a more unstable labour market, a more unstable housing market, fuel pressures, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So all of the societal pressures that are going to drive demand into a kind of a looked after system have risen at the same time when a lot of those preventative and protective structures were being taken away. So it's been a perfect storm. We've seen rise, rise, rise in terms of the numbers of of children and families coming into the system, um, and then it's a bit of a crude analogy. But if, if we were to look at that a bit like a funnel in terms of, you know, greater numbers coming in um and greater complexity within that, where that kind of filters all the way through, um, you know you're thinking we've now got a situation where about 90 percent of children who are in care are in foster-type settings in the UK, foster-type settings or sometimes kinship care, and about 10% in residential care.
Kevin:But that line between, you know, the line between moving from fostering to residential care, has moved further down that funnel. So, you know, you've got young people who 20 years ago might have been in residential provision now absolutely in foster care, and a lot of that is driven by economics, not by practice, um, so fostering gets talked about like it's a single thing, and of course it isn't. It's a spectrum of different types of provision. So we've got therapeutic foster placements and solo foster placements and you know those for siblings and so on and so forth. And then when you get to that point where you know if you're a young person where the local authority is deciding that a family is not right for you, authority is deciding that a family is not right for you or quite often multiple foster families have been tried and failed and that and children need to go through that, sadly, before they're able to start accessing the resources of residential care.
Colby:That that's um the line and distinction when that change is made has moved more and more as they kind of down that funnel, sorry, there's something that you just said there that I want to just jump in on because I think it's really important to hear more about and talk more about you. You mentioned that some it's almost as if some children have to go through a succession of foster placements before they get they. They end up in residential care. Yeah, yeah, and and it can't be really understated what the impact on the children is of those, those successive breakdowns in foster placements before they Multiple rejections yeah.
Colby:And that also then feeds into this idea of residential care being an option of last resort, last resort, and I wonder what you thought of that. I wonder what you think about this idea of it being an option of last resort.
Kevin:Yeah, I mean that's been the kind of narrative in the background across pretty much the entirety of my career. You see it at policy level. I mean we just had in the UK a couple of years ago we had a big independent inquiry into children's social care by Josh McAllister, who's now an MP, kind of putting forward a number of reforms, and it was interesting in that in terms of who they spoke to and what the kind of narrative was guiding that kind of that kind of inquiry, because residential care was hardly even included in it. And you know, you look at it and think, well, yes, it's a, it's a relatively small part in terms of the numbers of young people, um, but they're the young people who are the most diverse and they have the most, um, you know, complex lives in terms of competing needs and it's also the highest cost interventions. It's where the system is spending the most of its limited resources. And yeah, the whole narrative is almost about we don't want it. I mean I get it.
Kevin:When the Children Act was introduced, that kind of reinforced this idea of residential care as last resource.
Kevin:And I I get it because you know, I absolutely subscribe the best place for a young person to grow is in their family or in a family setting where that's possible.
Kevin:Um, but the way our laws and our systems were created, it almost had a systems level thinking that was that's what we should be focusing on at all costs.
Kevin:And so, inevitably, residential care becomes, yeah, absolutely the end of the line. Care becomes, yeah, and absolutely the end of the line. So you end up with processes where children do need, you know, do end up having lots of failed placements and you kind of you sit there sometimes as a social worker and kind of think what, why is nobody, you know, in terms of the decision makers who were kind of managing this young person's care planning, when the second family placement has failed? Where is the conversation that says maybe we should be trying something different rather than carrying on and trying another three or four or five? But then, you know, by the same token, I'm not in the position of sitting in those resource meetings where those local authorities are trying to manage. You know, you'd like to think that residential care would be used earlier and more purposefully to do the work in order to allow young people to move into family-type settings successfully.
Kevin:And that definitely is what happens in some of the countries. I think some of the Scandinavian think some of the scandinavian models work like that, but their whole welfare system and how that's funded is entirely different to a uk context. So we've had experiments in the uk when people have looked at um, you know, social pedagogy models from scandinavia or germany and tried to kind of bring them in and they haven't really worked because the wider system around them isn't geared up to embrace that way of working, because it's like turning the UK system on its head and we're not set up for that.
Colby:It's too culturally different, but it's interesting. On this question of option of last resort and, by the way, I agree that there are compelling reasons for it to be the option of first resort, but the people who would keel over at their desks, of course, are the chief financial officers of the commissioning organisations, because you wonder whether it is expensive to do it. To do it compared to foster care, residential care, High cost.
Kevin:Just to put it in language there I say you know, I make a distinction between something being high cost and something being expensive. High cost is realistic in terms of the amount of resource that needs to go in. I think something's only expensive if you don't get very much for your money, because there's a conversation about the cost of things and about value for money and how you determine that. So they are absolutely high costs. There's a sensitivity to that in the UK because we have examples of profiteering, which is something that's become quite a you know, a political and a media element in the kind of wider narrative. That's why my ears pricked in that language.
Colby:Again, I think you raise a very, very good and very interesting point around and and that is around value for money and um, I want to get into talking to you, about talking with you a little bit about the heterogeneity of residential care, that it's not all the same, just in the same way that not all families are the same and not all not all foster and and there and there seems to be a relentless pursuit to try and make and I've been part of it to try and make all care experiences as same as possible. But reality defies us. The reality is that there is always going to be diversity. But just getting back this idea of the option of last resort, but just getting back this idea of the option of last resort, I mean you do, I am turning my mind to whether that's is it the option of last resort for financial reasons, or is it the option of last resort because it's a lower standard of care?
Kevin:No. What are your thoughts about?
Colby:that.
Kevin:Yeah, yeah, interesting point. I think the financial drive is very, very significant within that and, as I say, over an extended period of time when the financial imperatives for local authorities have changed in points, when they're under dire cuts, that financial motivation becomes much more to the fore. But I think, before that, I think, going back to the comments I made about the Children Act, I think there's something rooted in our systems thinking, in our cultural thoughts about, you know, what is the proper place for children to be brought up in, what is the environment? So this idea of the family and the family home and for children to grow up in that environment, and what we might think of as ideas of normality and childhood and so on and so forth, there's something deeply ingrained at a cultural and systems level, and even in terms of our legislative framework. That means that we are prioritising family and in many instances I absolutely agree with that, you know, I completely agree with that. But I think that needs to be balanced with and, yes, and sometimes a family has been the place where trauma has been created to such an extent that that young person needs something different for a period of time, to such an extent that that young person needs something different for a period of time.
Kevin:When we go back to kind of you know, thinkers and writers, somebody whose work is absolutely as relevant now as the day that it was written, adrian Ward, who was writing back in the 1980s about, you know, leadership and and residential care, and in relation to therapeutic care he was well, residential care. He was kind of saying, well, if it's not therapeutic, what is it? And I think he was speaking to a point that I I certainly make loud and clear now when we look at the profile of need of young people who are being referred into residential services in the UK I'm sure this is true elsewhere. By definition, by default, those young people come with significant underpinning trauma needs in all kinds of ways that express themselves in all kinds of risks and behaviors. So so all residential care must surely be therapeutic and planned and purposeful. How can it be anything else, like I, given the nature of the task.
Kevin:But then that's where there's a disconnect. When you look at the way that um, and there are some changes emerging in the UK, but broadly speaking for a long time, when you look at the way local authorities describe, specify, commission, purchase residential care, standard places and and and core provision and and somehow other things are then enhanced and bolted on, like the. There's a, there's a. There's a difference in thinking um, and I think some of that is informed by procurement and commissioning language rather than about social work language. I think it's two different mechanisms trying to talk about the same thing in the middle, um, but we are, we are definitely beginning to see some change there.
Kevin:I think um and that goes back to this idea that you know, children's homes need to come in all different shapes and sizes, both in terms of their locations, the size of the building. Are they going to be single gender or mixed gender? There are definitely different cohorts of needs for young people, some of which can be clustered together and overlap, some of which you need to work quite distinctly with, and a good example I give to bring that to light. I mean, we're in amberley, we're working, um, in a psychodynamic group therapeutic community. So it's unusual, um, in the uk residential settings where we have up to 19 boys, uh, on one of our sites and one of our communities in two buildings and up to 13 boys in the other.
Kevin:Now, most children's homes in the UK are two or three, maybe four places, so they're unusual in their size and we work with a very specific cohort of young people. So we're very clear who we don't work with, our environment and that operating model of using the power of a group and using relational practice in that context would not work for certain types of risk profile um. And yet we've got the mulberry bush school, which is a very, very long established, you know well-renowned therapeutic community. So they operate to the same set of therapeutic standards that we do, but they have. They're working with primary age children whereas I'm working with teenagers, and they have a campus model of five small homes around a school, all on one site. Now, same set of standards, same psychodynamic thinking, a lot of the same structures and practices, but the but the way that is delivered in the day-to-day um and some of the kind of the theories and structures, like their approach to assessment, for example, and intervention is rooted in the needs of younger children. So it's a way of having the same framework of practice in terms of governance, but the methodology that you're then hanging on to that framework is bespoke to the nature of the children that you're working with, and I think that speaks to this idea that we need diversity of provision.
Kevin:You can have some standard frameworks to help create some common language, but that allows local authorities when they're more confident in engaging with that. It allows local authorities to be able to make more of a comparison between apples and pears, because if they think that residential care is all the same and they're presented with a plethora of models and descriptions and acronyms and the reality is, is that some of those are robust, some of those are well-meaning but maybe a bit thin. Some of them are just marketing BS. I mean, that's that's the reality of the kind of diverse system that we have in the UK and local authorities are in a really difficult position in terms of how to navigate that and knowing what questions to ask. So you have a real experience on the ground of.
Kevin:You know, they know the quality services they're working with. They also are in their hamstrung at the moment because there isn't enough provision. You know volume coming through the door is huge, complexity is huge. They haven't got access to enough diverse services that meet need. So there's all kinds of failing arrangements um, you know, unsatisfactory arrangements for children, um, overly expensive, certainly not delivering value for money. You know we've got, we've got a lot of that, uh, in our system in the uk, but it's, but it's not the whole by any stretch of the imagination. But where it would have been a frayed edge to our system maybe a decade ago, those are now big tears.
Colby:But there are some challenges. It's definitely expanding, there's no question. No question.
Kevin:You know it's definitely. It's definitely expanding. Yeah, there's no question. Yeah, no question. And now we, we're now beginning to see the kind of over the last, you know, I'd say the last half a dozen years maybe we're beginning to see an increasing focus now on wanting more diversity, focusing more on practice. Therapeutic community standards, therapeutic child care standards they've always been around, but now they're starting to be rediscovered and re-engaged with, which is it's great. It's also a little bit frustrating at the same time, because there's been lots of people and lots of government reports over the years that have been pointing to these things, but somehow the system just wasn't in a place to be able to make that shift. So there's still a lot of work to go, but there's definitely promising green sheets.
Colby:Well, listen, kevin, it's been an absolute pleasure to speak to you about these issues related to the work. I feel like, just kind of, this is a bit of a press pause, because there are some things that already that I'd like you know. Time permitting, I would like to follow up with you and, if you're game, I'd love to have you back, you know, in in a little while on the podcast. But thank you for for making the time and um contributing, uh, to what's been, for me, quite a very enjoyable and, uh, informative conversation well, no, thank you so much.
Kevin:I mean, it's been, it's been looking to spend time with you and, yeah, I, I, you know I've happily unpack, unpack more of these issues in more detail, I suppose by way of apology. Uh, you know, you know, sometimes, um, the ideas link from one to another and maybe some of these points could have been put across more, more succinctly for you. Um, but no, I really really appreciate the opportunity to, to speak to you this morning and I hope that you know, viewers and listeners find, uh, find, some of that interesting and helpful. Thanks, kevin.
