David Lane interviews Adrian Ward

Over the last twenty years or so, Adrian Ward has been the leading lecturer in residential child care in England. It has been a neglected subject and Adrian has been one of the few people to maintain training in this field. We were therefore interested to know what drew him into this sort of work, what he feels has been achieved and what may lie ahead.

Roots

Adrian was brought up in Surrey, and was the middle child of five brothers. His parents were both civil servants although his mother later returned to teaching. She came from Ireland and Adrian retains a strong affinity with the Irish. His father died in 2001 but Adrian is in close contact with the rest of his family, although they are dispersed between London, Edinburgh, Ontario and beyond; for example his youngest brother Greg travels extensively, writing Rough Guide travel books.

Adrian went to school in Wimbledon, a well-to-do area in the south of suburban London but his schooling was not an altogether happy experience. He was educated by Jesuits, who of course had a reputation for being very intellectual but also extremely tough. Some of the Jesuits who ran his school were, in his words, “miserable and vicious”. He rebelled, and probably liked upsetting them, to the point that after passing his A Levels, they refused to have him back to sit for Oxford entrance exams. Adrian did, nonetheless, succeed, perhaps because he demonstrated an ability to study on his own and persevere, and he was accepted by Balliol College to read English.

Adrian’s first real contact with social problems had been in Yorkshire, when, as a schoolboy, he went to help run a student-led summer play scheme for deprived children in Halifax. He had known nothing about the north or about poverty, and he found the experience “a huge education”. Part of the project entailed a survey of housing. Despite the poor living conditions which people endured, and which left a deep impression on him, he found a cohesive, happy community, with a strong and lively sense of neighbourhood spirit.

The other part of the project was getting the children involved in painting, which he enjoyed, being interested in the arts himself. He experienced working with them in groups, “milling around and annoying each other”, and obviously enjoyed it. He noticed that working with children was not everyone’s cup of tea, and that some of the students, while politically committed and arguing for the redistribution of wealth, “hadn’t a clue about kids”. The bug got him, though, and he returned the following year.

An Education

Professionally, Adrian’s education began in the gap period before University, when his mother suggested he should work in a nearby children’s home in Guildford. It was a long-stay Surrey County Council home for twenty children aged 4 to 18, and some of the older children were only a little younger than himself. One day when he answered the front door, a tradesman mistook him for a resident.

The home was run by a charismatic man called George Williams, deeply concerned for the welfare of individual children, able to manage the group as a whole, and something of a maverick, at times irritating those in authority. He had “an intuitive feel for what mattered to kids”. He was forthright in making the children face up to their predicaments, but he made their everyday lives happy, he organised stimulating activities and he made them feel special. Summer holidays at Perranporth in Cornwall were a special event, when the whole home, staff, children and George’s family, decamped to the south west to experience a new range of activities and freer relationships in the holiday setting.

George, said Adrian, created an atmosphere of “inspiring vibrancy”, an effective combination of social work and child care. He taught Adrian “a healthy disrespect for stupid rules and procedures”. It was a powerful experience, and for Adrian at the age of 18, he found working in the home “real life”.

Formally, Adrian studied English at Balliol, and he did enough to get through and obtain his degree. He found, however, that the University was only interested in writers who had been dead at least fifty years. Creativity was seen as a distraction from study, and he was more interested in the living arts. He therefore spent his time painting, writing and running the Students’ Arts Centre and the University Poetry Society. What he saw of the privilege and snobbery of some sections of Oxford life did not attract him.

During the University vacations, George lured Adrian back to the children’s home, where he was fortunate to be paid for work which he enjoyed so much. Over three and a half years he was able to witness the children growing up into young people and the value of long-term commitment from dedicated residential staff.

Starting Work

Adrian was not sure about what he wanted to do after Oxford, but George badgered him to apply for the post of Deputy in the children’s home. Although he had gained a lot of experience over the previous three and a half years, and had learnt a lot from George, to become a Deputy at the age of 21 was a high hurdle to jump.

A bigger challenge was to come. Two months after Adrian had taken up his post, George left for another job, and Adrian became Acting Head of Home. While this opportunity offered useful experience, Adrian was young, untrained and not ready for it. He had some difficult times, especially in coping with older lads and crises, and retrospectively, he feels he was exploited by his employers.

After nine months in the Acting role, Adrian was, in a sense, rescued. An aunt who was a Medical Social Worker recommended that he should train, and he was seconded by Surrey County Council on the Master’s course in social work at Sussex University, where he studied under Mike Clare and Hugh England. This course trained students for field social work, and although Adrian valued many aspects of the course he found himself bored when on field work placements.

By now he had realised that residential work was his strength and main interest, so he managed to arrange one placement at the Mulberry Bush School during the hot summer of 1976 under the supervision of Richard Rollinson, and he was “bowled over by the extreme nature of the children’s difficulties”. He found that the way the School was run was geared entirely to meeting children’s needs. The programme had been very carefully thought out, and it dawned on him that “That’s how it should be done”. The placement added an understanding of therapeutic care to the foundations laid in the children’s home by George Williams.

Another placement at a hybrid field and residential centre near Brighton was less successful. The attempt by the Central Council for Education and Training in Social work to see residential and field work as different aspects of social work was then at its height, but Adrian thought that in this case the two elements did not combine well in the same setting. The outcome was that the field social work element enjoyed high status, with qualified staff, while the residential element was more institutional, of lower status and with poorly trained workers.

For his dissertation, Adrian returned to the Mulberry Bush to study children’s concepts of time.

Promotion

Once qualified, Adrian went back to Surrey County Council, who had no post ready for him, and they wanted to slot him into basic grade residential child care jobs, to the point that he decided to break his secondment agreement and look elsewhere. Despite threats that his career would be jeopardised, he found just the right niche.

With his experience as Acting Head of Home, his social work qualification and his recent knowledge of the therapeutic field, Adrian was well fitted to apply for the post of Superintendent of Hartfield Children’s Home in Roehampton, run by the London Borough of Wandsworth.

The home had featured in a television programme A Home Like Ours, (although it was in some disarray when he took up post) and it took up to 20 children, though on average there were only a dozen or so at any one time. They were aged 5 to 11, and were all in need of therapeutic care, being emotionally disturbed. There was an Inner London Education Authority schooling unit on site with two teachers working with a group of half a dozen children, the remaining children having progressed on to mainstream schooling.

On average the children stayed about three years in the home, and the aim was to get them back into normal schooling and to re-integrate them into their families if possible. Adrian says that they built up a good record of success despite the huge difficulties which many of the children faced.

Being head of his own establishment meant that Adrian was able to develop his own approach to residential childcare, which evolved over time. He held weekly staff meetings, and the children asked whether they too could have meetings. These meetings were planned and managed carefully, dealing at first with practical matters, but moving on over time to become a vehicle for groupwork and therapy too.

Eventually the meetings became daily and were central to the running of the home as a way of getting the day’s programme off on the right foot. Adrian insisted that, whatever the children said, they would be listened to in the meetings, a powerful message. Later the children began to take turns in chairing some of the meetings, thus gaining enormously in confidence and social skills. Following George’s model, Adrian believed in the need “to break boundaries a bit” by doing the unusual, to extend children’s experience of life and build up a fund of good memories.

Work in the home entailed long hours and a lot of overtime. The staff team was not large – just seven or eight workers, which meant that there were three on duty at times of peak activity.

Adrian at first lived on the premises, though he later moved out and married Mary, who had also previously worked in the home, and all the children from the home attended the wedding reception. Mary and Adrian now have two children of their own, Lucy (17) who is planning to go to art school, and Matt (14) who is a promising jazz musician. Mary still works with children in a local school.

After some years in the home, Adrian was exhausted and began to experience a degree of burn out and considered moving to a different setting. Advised to stay on for a while, he began writing as a way of clearing his mind, and he won a prize in a Community Care competition, obtaining a travel scholarship for his efforts. This scholarship took Adrian across the Atlantic, where he met up with Jim Anglin at the University of Victoria and with Henry Maier and Jim Whittaker at the University of Washington in Seattle, all influential figures in different ways. It was this early achievement in writing about his work which encouraged Adrian to consider an academic career.

Academia

Adrian had been working at the home for seven years when a Lecturer at Bulmershe College near Reading, Sara Stevens, suggested to him that he might like to apply for a post on the staff there. The College was originally established to train teachers, but it was now moving into social work training, and when Adrian joined the team in 1984 under Doug Badger’s leadership, it was the last new course set up by CCETSW to train for the Certificate of Qualification in Social Work. What is more, it was established explicitly to integrate field and residential social work training. For Adrian it was “the right place”.

The course was designed to attract residential workers who intended to return to work in that setting, and it was a requirement that all students had to have one assessed placement in residential care, so that all field social workers would gain an “insider’s view” of residential work. It was out of his teaching for this course that Adrian was later to publish his first book Working in Group Care (1993) a practice-focused book on all aspects of social work in residential and day care settings. He is currently revising and updating that book, and it will be re-published by Policy Press next year.

The College also offered the Certificate in Social Service programme, which Adrian found very stimulating and challenging, as the students spent approximately half their time at work and half at the College, testing out theory in practice and subjecting practice to theoretical analysis. He found these students “very engaged” as this course was their chance to learn about a job they enjoyed doing.

In all, Adrian spent sixteen years at Bulmershe, but there were major developments during this time. First, the College became part of Reading University, and the social work courses became part of the School of Education. The new academic status enabled the faculty to set up Master’s degrees, which offered Adrian a new opportunity.

Discussion with Brian Bishop and Melvyn Rose of the Peper Harow Foundation indicated a need for training experienced residential child care workers in therapeutic care. Consultation with the Charterhouse Group of Therapeutic Communities suggested that the provision of a Master’s course would be preferable to the availability of a programme of short courses, and this led to the establishment of the Reading M.A. in Therapeutic Child Care.

This course only took practitioners with a previous qualification or relevant degree, but it drew students from all parts of the country and from a wide range of professions, though there was always a core of workers from therapeutic residential care on the course.

The focus of the course has been on meeting the needs of troubled children, and Adrian developed the “matching principle”, meaning that the course itself acted as a model for the type of child care it advocated. The students (all on day release) have therefore begun their days with an ‘Opening Meeting’ in which they could unburden themselves of the baggage they were bringing to the course from their jobs. Equally, at the end of the College day, they had a debriefing meeting to prepare them for return to work.

When seeking Chris Beedell’s advice about setting the course up, Adrian was told that the first year would go well, the second satisfactorily and on the third the students would give him hell. Chris’s words proved prophetic, although Adrian sagely observes that this was perhaps more of a reflection on the staff than the students.

The course was spread over two years, with cohorts rising in numbers from about ten to sixteen or twenty per intake as the course became established. Its reputation now means that staff are properly seconded and replaced as necessary; at first, some students had had to finance themselves and attend in their own time.

When the course was being planned, it did not fit with CCETSW post-qualifying course criteria, but Phyllida Parsloe advised them to proceed, as “CCETSW would catch up”. In due course, the programme was given recognition. Adrian wrote about this course in the book which he co-edited with Linnet McMahon, Intuition is not Enough. Matching Learning with Practice in Therapeutic Child Care (Taylor & Francis, 1998), which is an account both of the model of learning and of the approach to child care practice taught on the course.

The MA in Therapeutic Child Care has remained a highly valued course, and although it is currently on its final cohort at Reading, new versions of it may emerge elsewhere. In fact a clone of the course has already been running since last year at St Patrick’s, Carlow College, in the Republic of Ireland, led by Damien McLellan following consultation from Adrian and other Reading staff.

After sixteen years in Reading, Adrian felt the need for new stimulus and new horizons, and he has spent the last five years at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. The UEA has a well-established School of Social Work with a good reputation, although it had not focused on residential care before Adrian’s arrival. Under his influence the social work students now all have assessed placements in residential settings and the course includes a much greater emphasis on the ‘use of self’ as a core element in professional practice.

Another project which Adrian worked on during his time at UEA was a Review of residential child care in Wales, with Professors Roger Clough and Roger Bullock. The report of this review (on the Welsh Assembly website) has been well received and a publication in hard copy is planned.

However, Adrian has not fully settled at UEA, and he is therefore about to move again, this time to the Tavistock Clinic in London, which has set up a new social work qualifying course jointly with the University of East London. While the University will provide the academic teaching on sociology, law and other disciplines, Adrian’s team will be responsible for teaching about human growth and development, human relations, professional development and practice issues in meeting people’s needs.

Adrian is looking forward to working in this setting with its long tradition of therapeutic practice and learning, and to developing other projects around his interests in residential care and therapeutic practice.

Challenging and Being Challenged

People who act in varying capacities as advocates for children in need often have something of the rebel about them, challenging authority.

Adrian says he rebelled at school, often being beaten for this as was the custom at that time. One of his school reports complains that “Adrian still appears to believe that the supreme art of the schoolboy is to outwit the master” – a view which he probably still holds! Adrian felt that the punishments were often unjust and brutal, and that he was misunderstood. This experience probably gave him some understanding of what deprived children sometimes suffer at the hands of authority figures.

He clearly felt that George Williams had something of a kindred spirit in his contempt for some aspects of bureaucracy. When breaking his secondment agreement he challenged the local authority system. In setting up the Master’s course outside CCETSW’s guidelines he was again challenging the establishment. Always polite, courteous and good-humoured, Adrian stands within a tradition of independent thinking and refusal to conform when a challenge needs to be issued.

He has also been challenged himself, having to cope with the unexpected promotion to Acting Head of Home at the age of 21, for example, or as Superintendent when newly qualified. He has met these challenges. As George Williams said to him, “You learn by opposition”. Adrian has opposed, and has learnt.

Threads

There have been other threads running through his career, of which the main one has been his concern for residential child care. During the course of his time in practice and academia, CCETSW dismantled the old training system, and its replacement lacked the specialist focus on residential child care. A lot of expertise has been lost in this field, but by setting up the course at Reading, Adrian has kept the flame alive. That course too is due to close shortly.

Where will residential child care workers turn then for their training and expertise? Adrian has already begun discussing how to use his new base at the Tavistock Clinic to set up new training opportunities for residential staff. Adrian has also been one of the advocates for a centre in England to match the Scottish Institute of Residential Child Care. Indeed, it was he who coined the working title of Momentum, in the hope that movement would be achieved. A ministerial decision is still awaited.

Adrian has always emphasised the human relations aspect of social work, at a time when there has been ever-mounting pressure from the powers-that-be to observe detailed procedures, tick boxes and at all costs avoid egg on faces. For the last two years he has been Co-Chair of the Network for Psychosocial Policy and Practice, a group of social work educators who want to emphasise relation-based practice.

This interest is reflected in his theoretical approach. Always an advocate of therapeutic methods, he is alarmed by strict behaviourism, feeling that it has no answers in attempting to understand children’s deepest problems and most challenging behaviour, or in helping them to achieve long-term change. His main concern has been to use the understanding and practice wisdom of the therapeutic community approach to influence mainstream residential child care. He argues that the research confirms that those children and young people now in residential settings have very high levels of mental health difficulties and are therefore likely to need very special handling and understanding.

Talking of the very troubled children in most therapeutic settings, he says, “You have to get it right in understanding and respecting these children, or they explode and fall apart. They need a huge amount of attention, and need to be reassured that their inner worlds will be taken seriously. Not all children are so troubled, but they all need to be listened to carefully. The therapeutic model offers ways of making sense of what is otherwise inexplicable and of helping children and young people to sort out the great difficulties which confront them.”

He has written more on these themes in his other co-edited books Helping Families in Family Centres. Towards Therapeutic Practice (2001) and Therapeutic Communities for Children and Young People (2003), both published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Watch This Space

Since Adrian entered residential child care, things have changed enormously. Staffing ratios are much higher, to the point where meeting requirements is expensive and risks overstaffing. There is more assessment of risk and bureaucracy. He insists, though, that these changes do not preclude good practice and mentions some excellent projects with which he works locally. Given good training and good support, residential child care workers can still meet children’s needs, and is after all the preferred option for some young people.

As Adrian opens another chapter of his career with his move to the Tavistock, we shall be watching to see how he rises to the challenge of the new setting and what challenges he himself poses as he fights the corner for children and young people in academia.