The Howard League shows the way : raising the profile of training for residential child care workers

First posted at http://www.goodenoughcaring.com/ on September 4th, 2009

It is good news that on September 3rd, the Howard League was able to make the BBC headlines about the need for professional training for prison officers.
Link : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8233001.stm
We suggest that national government and interested lobbying bodies concerned with the training of residential child care workers should promote a wider public awareness of the needs of children in residential child care and raise the profile of the training needs of those who look after them. The lone voice trying to achieve this in recent years has been the National Centre for Excellence in Residential Child Care but it needs further support to do this from others, particularly from the DCSF.
Our media seems fearful too that we will tire of hearing of the suffering of children over a sustained period of time. It prefers to stick with short-term, blaming sensationalism, or the filling up newspaper columns or news bulletins with children's matters only when there is no political or international crisis brewing. We know that residential child care needs the sustained interest of the public if really healthy developments in the service are to take place. If we - people in one way or another involved in residential care - can sustain wider public interest in our work then we may go even further than the Howard League has done by publicising the issue of prison officer training. We may even manage to foster a wider and more informed public debate and use it to help us achieve the implementation of a national programme of professional training for residential child care workers. This will require the same kind of determination from everyone in our field particularly the DCSF to stick with the task in the same tenacity that is expected of residential child care workers in their care of children and young people.