T here's a loud shriek from the corridor outside the room where the senior residential care worker Sue Dodd is talking. She doesn't bat an eyelid. A few moments later, there is a guffaw of laughter.
It's the normal hubbub of life with kids, in other words. But normality is very precious in this short-term children's home, Shaping Futures, in Stafford, run by the county council. Many of the five young people who spend up to 12 weeks here have experienced great trauma from difficult family backgrounds and failed foster placements; they badly need stability and good relationships with adults after very little experience of either.
Historically, the English residential care system has served children badly. Comparative studies with countries such as Germany and Denmark repeatedly showed wide disparities with England in outcomes: kids in care in England were less likely to be in school or training, more likely to get pregnant or be involved in criminal activity. Central to these continental care systems is the work of social pedagogues trained to nurture every aspect of children's social and emotional development.
Is there something about the social pedagogy training in the German and Danish system that could be applied in the UK? The emphasis in social pedagogy is that relationship building needs to be at the centre of everything care workers do β cooking a meal, watching a television programme; all the everyday activities are opportunities for a pedagogue to develop better mutual understanding with residents.
Shaping Futures signed up to a pilot which brought pedagogues to the UK to work in residential care, and recruited two to work alongside its strong team. Social pedagogy is a widely recognised profession across many countries in Europe, particularly in Germany and Scandinavia, but it is little understood in England β and not easy to translate, so the idea behind the pilot project was to "show, not tell": by putting pedagogues to work with care workers, they could experience directly how it works in practice.
