John Diamond

Introduction by Hannah Dodds: I have sixteen years experience of working in children’s residential care in the UK and the USA. I have worked in various children’s social care settings and directly worked with children who have suffered neglectful and abusive early childhoods and ongoing placement breakdowns. My passion for working in this sector increased … Read more

A review of Quality Standards for professional alternative child and youth care in group homes.  Verlag Plochl FICE (Austria) Freistadt Austria ISBN 978-3-903093-59-1.  “Quality” is an elusive term. It’s an aerosol word, liberally sprayed to increase the value of a product or suggest a kind of service which goes well beyond the normal. And yet, it … Read more

Here is a story I have written that captures some of my difficulties working with the way the ‘work’ in Alternative Provision is funded in my Local Authority. My concern is how children are ‘banded’, supposedly to meet their need  for care and exploration through meaningfully accommodating children in places and spaces. The problem is, … Read more

It’s a privilege when a child in care is delighted it’s you.  R. J. (Sean) Cameron and Colin Maginn. 2021. The Pillars of Parenting Ltd (Publishing), Sunderland, pp 204. £26.00 (paperback). ISBN 978-1-8381-3410-5 Book review by Dr Chris Hanvey. Children require two things from their parents: “roots and wings”. Roots help make stable emotional growth … Read more

The violence in assessment: excellence,  conformity and uniformity vs The care in appreciation: development, plurality and difference   Never mind anti bullying week   –  what about a week in our schools free of all assessment, judgement, and criticism? Is the use of assessment in schools contributing to the kind of culture that with undue force, violently  ‘dis’ appoints, ‘dis’ … Read more

Introduction (Bruce Hauptman, M.D.) The title of this richly descriptive, impressionistic collection of clinical vignettes is a creative attempt to impose structure and discipline on a critical issue in psychiatry and in clinical medicine itself: an attempt to ascribe the inductive as well as deductive aspects of the diagnostic process. A gifted clinician takes her … Read more

Young people may have spent some of their life, most of their life or even all of their life in residential care. Irrespective of their reasons for being educated away from home what benefits might we want them to have as a consequence of their residential environment? We do not consider a ‘tick box’ culture … Read more

For a combination of reasons there has been an increasing stream of requests from those who lived at Mill Grove as children, to know more about their stories and to see what records and photos there are.  It would be interesting to know from colleagues whether any such trend is apparent elsewhere.  The three factors … Read more

I am not sure whether the 2020 film The Windermere Children, directed by Michael Samuels, and based on The Windermere Project has become one of the resources for those seeking to help children who have experienced trauma.  But while watching it recently, it was a powerful reminder that all children who are placed in some … Read more

Introduction Therapeutic Communities and other residential placements for children and young people are expensive resources that are usually only used when other community or family -based placements have failed repeatedly.  These failures are usually due to behaviour from the child that prevent their carers from functioning as carers, and can often be linked back to … Read more

A short biography on Harold Bridger: Harold Bridger was born in Tavistock Crescent London England on 15 May 1909, the oldest of five children. His father came from Russia and his mother was born in England as a child of Polish migrants. Bridger attended Marylebone Grammar School continuing with mathematics at University College London and … Read more

Key words: Natural world; Planet Earth; child-level; transitional objects Recently, during a Golden Wedding anniversary celebration, there was a surprise impromptu version of the TV game, Mr and Mrs. (For those unfamiliar with this, the idea is to find out how well a husband and wife know each other.)  On this occasion, the questions were … Read more