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With so many stories of horrific residential child care practice emerging in the press these days, it can well be said that the publication of this book is timely. It is clear that residential practitioners, working in such everyday proximity with distressed and disturbed children, need to be more than adequately trained, managed, and supervised. It is equally clear that they and their managers need time and space to think and reflect on what they are doing - and that this can best be done in consultation with an outsider whose perspective is fresh and different from what may prevail within their establishments.
This book is about such consultation. It is a collection of chapters written by six consultants and two consultees describing their experiences in nine different residential establishments. The style and focus of the consultants is very varied; so too the work of the residential establishments. There is no question that the art of consultation takes many forms, as idiosyncratic as the consultants and the consultees who take part in it and as varied as the establishments and cultures in which it takes place. However, despite this rich mixture, the book managed to gather together the essential aims and functions of consultation and offer some very good theoretical understanding of what lies behind these different approaches. Some of its contributors provide remarkably honest accounts of their experiences which give the reader the opportunity to identify with and understand the human difficulty and uncertainty of it all.
This is a book also about residential establishments for children. This may have not been the primary purpose of the book but it is self-evident