childcare-50years

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The availability of a high proportion of qualified residential staff
provides Northern Ireland with a good base from which to expand
provision and to develop more specialist models of service for
children who require residential care. Although it will be a major
challenge to recruit and retain a significant increase in the workforce
to staff the large number of new homes in planning. The current
model of general-purpose homes has not the capacity to utilise staff
resources and skills to the level necessary to sustain morale and retain
staff within this workforce. There is a need to establish models of
service, which enable staff to operate to explicit statements of
purpose and function and to achieve good outcomes for children.
Residential care and foster care are not mutually exclusive options
rather they are integral parts of the child welfare system. The
successful functioning of each is linked closely to the health and well
being of the other.
There is a need for concerted effort if residential services are to
develop both to the number and type required and to be informed
by an ethos which views residential care as an essential part of the
child welfare system, accessed according to children's assessed needs,
rather than as a last resort. In 1950, welfare authorities were
encouraged to build and to commission children's homes to enable
the Poor Law provision to be ended for children. Now 50 years later
the Department is again asking the successors of welfare authorities,
HSS Boards and Trusts, to expand their provision. Early indications are
that the progress being made today is not at the pace of those
charged 50 years ago with this duty.
50 YEARS OF CHILD CARE IN NORTHERN IRELAND
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