childcare-50years

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1980s when a number of small group homes were established. During
this period there were initiatives, notably by Barnardos to transfer
children with learning disabilities from children's homes to foster care
placements and to provide supported housing and employment
training for such young people. It is an indictment on social care
services, however, that today some children continue to remain in
long stay hospital services as a consequence of the absence of
suitable community based resources.
Child care legislation, policy and the development of services
1947 - 1970
The Curtis Report (1946), a landmark in child care policy, identified
the need to keep children out of institutional care. Many of its
recommendations were enacted in the Children and Young Persons
Act (NI) 1950. Yet despite its original brief to look at the condition of
all children not living in their own homes, the reviewing team drew
its boundaries to exclude those who had significant disabilities,'
(Shearer, 1980). The Report stated:
'The mentally or physically handicapped child presents
different problems, most of which are outside our frame of
reference.'
One of the consequences of the lack of focus by the Curtis Report on
disabled children was that they were excluded from the strong
recommendation that children in care should be accommodated
separately from adults. Indeed, it specifically recommended that
children with severe learning difficulties should be moved to properly
staffed "homes or colonies", where they could live alongside adults
who were similarly disabled. Shearer (1980) has argued that the
Curtis Committee, 'whilst proposing dramatic changes in respect of
able-bodied children "proposed no more than a tinkering of existing
arrangements for handicapped children". The need for institutional
provision, particularly for those with learning difficulties, epilepsy
and severe behaviour problems, was not questioned. Nor were
recommendations made for the transformation of the residential
forms of living such children experienced' (Baldwin and Carlisle 1994).
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