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This chapter explores the development and increasing regulation of the institutional care of children removed from their families by the state. The growth of reformatory and industrial schools in the 19^th century is dealt with, as are the reasons why these two types of school were never truly separate in Scotland. Their formal amalgamation into “approved schools” in 1932 is examined, as is the regulatory structures that evolved to ensure their appropriate running, including their registration, the managers, and the rules for discipline and corporal punishment. The regulation of children’s homes, originally run by charitable endeavours (voluntary organisations) and after 1948 increasingly by local authorities, is also covered. Various official reports reimagining the purpose of institutional care are examined in some detail, in particular the Kearney Report, as are the regulatory rules that developed from these reports. Finally, the development of “secure accommodation”, that is to say, locked accommodation, is described, with the regulatory framework governing the running of secure accommodation within institutional care of children.

The Sisters of the Holy Family and Northern Federation of California Colored Women’s Clubs answered the demand for childcare by repurposing houses in West Oakland. Welfare officials were wary of any intervention that made it easier for a mother to work outside her home, and white supremacists could not be put out of mind in the 1920s, with the Ku Klux Klan organizing nearby. Colored clubwomen, from the Beth Eden congregation, angered at the whites-only policy in children’s institutions, crossed the color line to locate the Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery next to the St. Vincent’s Day Home, the segregated Catholic day care center. With clubwomen committed to racial uplift during the Great Migration, intra-racial conflict exploded about the politics of respectability in the home, especially as it fell into disrepair. The building was cleared and the property given to St. Vincent’s Day Home, enlarged and racially integrated.

This chapter examines the child welfare situation in the Midwest, including the transition of care from poor farms to children-only institutions. Beginning in the mid-1870s but increasing considerably during the 1880s and 1890s, poor farms were used less frequently for children, as counties, states, and charities opted to build children's institutions. Putting children from county-poor farms in institutions marked an important step in efforts to increase farm placement. This chapter first considers how indentures were made between county infirmaries and local residents before discussing the various concerns that arose from the construction of county children's homes. It also explores the changes made in the terms of an indenture contract; the placement of African American children; how religion and ethnicity affected child placements; the role of the institutional manager in finding a suitable family for a child; and the problems of institutional life. The chapter concludes by explaining what happened after placement parents got a child.

As the transcontinental railroad transformed Oakland, white Protestant women seceded from the Oakland Benevolent Society to incorporate the single-sex charity, the Ladies’ Relief Society of Oakland, California. Inspired by the relief effort in Chicago, after the 1871 fire, and their sense of Christian duty, women pressed the charitable public for funds to construct an asylum for elderly women and indigent children, but could only afford to renovate a farmhouse at the urban outskirts. The concept, of dominated and appropriated space, is introduced and used to analyze the repurposed Children’s Home, full of immigrant boys and girls, and the purpose-built Home for Aged Women, added to this node in 1882, restricted to white Protestant women. Changing attitudes toward childhood, charity, race, and architecture are located in the economic and political crises of the 1870s and 1880s, which led to the Workingman’s Party of California and the Chinese Exclusion Act.

This chapter examines responses to the experience of children in wartime evacuation, the Blitz, and residential homes. Two conclusions emerge. On the one hand, the story of evacuation provided evidence of the damaging effect of separation of children from families and home. On the other hand, the story of children in the Blitz emphasized the resilience of children and the appeal of new freedoms in war. The dominant resulting message was that which highlighted the need for protection and the need for home, family, and emotional security. But this also reflected war-borne anxieties experienced by adults, and it was in some respects ill-timed in that war also placed considerable strains on the stability of the family

For many practitioners and policy makers embracing the youth justice reforms in the United Kingdom in 1998, the potential for integrating education into offending behaviour work through the new Detention and Training Order (DTO) introduced by the Crime and Disorder Act of 1998 was greatly welcomed. Young people on DTOs are held in one of three types of institutions: young offender institutions; secure training centres; or secure children's homes. This chapter explores the continuing limitations of the DTO nearly a decade into the youth justice reforms. Within this context, it makes a case for reviewing the purpose of the DTO, emphasising its link to education provision, while examining current policy changes within children's services and the 14–19 education framework that may facilitate any evaluation of the DTO. With the development of early intervention, targeted provision and the raising of the statutory school age, careful consideration should be given to a new hybrid sentence that places education firmly at its centre. This is called the Education Placement Order.

The government changes of 2007, which restored to the department responsible for children's welfare a share in responsibility for youth justice in the United Kingdom, has reopened an important set of questions about agency responsibility for young offenders at the local level. At the same time, there is a renewed and growing interest in how resources are used in the criminal justice system as a whole and whether increasing use of imprisonment represents a cost-effective response to crime. There seems to be widespread agreement that there is too much use of both custodial remands and sentences, but strategies to reduce it have so far met with limited success. Custodial establishments for juveniles fall broadly into three categories: young offender institutions, which form part of the Prison Service; secure children's homes, largely run by local authorities; and secure training centres, run by private companies. Introducing a radical new way of financing custody for juveniles offers the prospect of substantial reductions in its use, something that other initiatives have failed to produce.

In the summer of 1953, aged 7, I arrived with my father at the port of Southampton from the colony of Nigeria. We were making for Ledsham Court School, a boarding school in St Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex. It was a stately building sitting among many green acres. After about an hour with the headmistress, Mrs Redfarn, my father said goodbye, turned and returned to Nigeria. I did not know then that I would not see or hear from him for 10 years, by which time I had forgotten what he looked like. Ledsham’s only black pupil began his academic life speaking no English. I was duly placed in the kindergarten with daily lessons in the native tongue. After catching up with my age group, in addition to the core subjects I was thereafter given instruction in Latin, ancient Greek, poetry, and nature study. To eradicate ‘that funny African accent’ I was solely accorded a daily class of elocution for a year—one hour a day with a speech therapist, held in a long, oak-panelled gallery with a book on my head to improve my deportment. Although in receipt of the beginnings of a good classical education, I was also given what I came to understand was a prototypical quantity of punishment for a ‘darkie’—for most of that first year I was caned daily and frequently ‘sent to Coventry’ for the slightest indiscretion, usually for not understanding the customs and traditions of an alien white culture. Thus, for refusing to eat salad on my first day, I received ‘three of the best’. The staff were undoubtedly ignorant of the eggs that parasites can lay on raw vegetables in a tropical climate like Nigeria, where all vegetables were cooked and salad was unheard of. Perhaps, I thought with a child’s naivety, that with all the mosquitoes and eating of salad, no wonder West Africa was called the white man’s grave in my books and comics. I woke up—for I had clearly landed in the mother country in the wrong skin colour. It hurt. I had arrived knowing myself to be Yoruba. Suddenly, I was called ‘coloured’ and ‘darkie’.

Heralded as the most progressive legislation of the world, the Children Act of 1989 revolutionized children’s law in England and Wales. It is underpinned by six principles: the supremacy of the child’s interest in all decisions concerning their upbringing and education; the recognition that it is best for any chid to be brought up by their blood family, that his religious and ethnic background must be respected, and that siblings should not be separated; the abolition of the stigma of illegitimacy and its replacement with the attribution at birth of paternal responsibility to the child’s father; the unification of public and private law, and the creation of the ‘menu’ of Residence, Contact, Prohibition, and Specific Issue orders available to the court; the establisment of the new principle that time is of the essence in all cases relating to children; and the creation of the presumption that ‘no order is better than an order’ thus the ingerence of the court must be minimal. I believed in those principles and in the benefits that the Children Act would bring to my clients—children and parents alike. I had some reservations: the system was expensive to implement on two counts: first, it gave the child a ‘guardian’ (a qualified social worker appointed by the court through CAFCASS, a governmental agency), as well as their own solicitor paid for by Legal Aid, as was the representative of the parents, who had the right to instruct independent experts; second, because its requirements of social services and other agencies involved further training and increased resources, as well as further involvement of the judiciary, and increased court time. Hornby and Levy were at the forefront of its implementation: our entire staff received in-house training that was open to other disciplines, within the spirit of cooperation between agencies that permeated the Act and its implementation. I also lectured in Britain and abroad and was proud to tell others that social services were under a duty to keep families united, rather than removing children from parents, and make efforts to return to the family the child removed from it, or if this failed, to place the child within the extended family, or with adoptive parents, within a year.