Report of the Care of Children Committee.

  • Great Britain. Care of Children Committee.
Date:
[1946]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report of the Care of Children Committee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    93/200 (page 91)
    or in probation hostels. While probation hostels are free to admit any young people in the same age group, the payment of grant and the laying down of certain conditions tends to keep out other cases. Against this must be set the difficulty of maintaining a standard of care, when payment is made only for isolated cases, and of providing specialist care for young people who may be both difficult and delinquent and considered unsuitable for placing in other APPROVED SCHOOLS 283. We visited 52 approved schools in England and Wales of which IO were provided by local authorities and 42 by voluntary organisations. We do not think it necessary to describe these two groups separately, as all alike were inaugurated and are managed in close consultation with the Home Office. Some of the schools we regarded as doing very good all round work for the children. This does not imply that there was nothing to criticise about them, but that we were satisfied that in these schools the staff had succeeded in creating an environment in which children could thrive, and that they were skilled and understanding in their work and able to co-operate in future developments of a progressive kind. In a minority of schools we thought radical changes were necessary if the welfare of the children was to be adequately secured. Management 284. Each school has a local Committee of Management except in a few cases of local authority schools managed by a Sub-Committee of the Education Committee. The Committees of Management usually meet at the School at monthly intervals. We were informed at two schools that the members took a lively interest in the school and in the welfare of individual boys and girls. The staff of several voluntary schools were appreciative of the help given by the Committee in arousing local interest in the work of the school. The counsel of the Chairman in discussion of detailed needs was in some cases particularly appreciated, and we gained the impression that the Com- mittee added to the confidence of the staff and to the status of the school in the community. Admission 285. The method of admission in almost all schools is now through the Home Office direct, or through a classifying school. It was not possible from our visits to two classifying schools, a girls’ school and a boys’ school, to gauge the system adequately, but from the little we saw, and on general grounds, we felt that it should be thoroughly examined by experts before it is widely extended. At the girls’ school we saw intelligence tests being given by someone who clearly did not understand their full implications. At the boys’ school it was said to take as long as two months to observe and test each boy and to reach a reliable conclusion about him, although it would, in our view, have been possible to assess many of the boys in a few days. Both these visits were made by groups including members specially qualified to judge. It seemed to us that, when a boy or girl had been for some time in an approved school, the transfer became a break rather than a beginning of a training, and valuable time appeared to be lost to no good purpose. This view was reflected in the uneasiness of the schools at the receiving end, where the opinion was held that residence in the classifying school merely unsettled the boy or girl who must be discouraged from forming loyalties to a place of temporary stay, and that the proper place for classi- fication was in the remand home. In some schools considerable trouble