Functions and Staff in Residential Care: Training for Residential Care

At the beginning of the 1950s some voluntary organisations and a few new children’s departments probably achieved the best, all-round standards of personal care in institutions. It was assumed that the purpose of other residential institutions was either custodial, or moral reform, or to provide physical care or treatment, a ‘good upbringing’ or rehabilitation. During the next twenty-five years static complacency was punctured by the manifest failures of some institutions, by staffing difficulties, and by a few pioneers who began to look at what happened to the residents as people, to ask whether many need be there at all, and whether institutions were only a refuge from life or could be used to enable people to find themselves and live more fully.