This chapter explores the role of publically engaged social science in the development of a new Foundation Degree in Therapeutic Child Care. This initiative was jointly developed by psychosocially informed social scientists at the University of the West of England (UWE) and the Mulberry Bush School (MBS) in Oxfordshire, a residential educational facility for some of the UK's most disturbed 5–13 year olds. We discuss the development of the collaboration, the animating social-scientific ideas that informed it, the impact of the Foundation Degree on the school and its work, and the lessons that can be drawn about publically engaged partnership between the social sciences and the world of residential and therapeutic child care.

The collaboration and its background

Residential child care in the UK, much like residential care in general, is uneven in quality and does not have uniformly high standards of training and qualification (College of Social Work, 2012). This is very unlike the situation in many parts of Europe, where training to graduate or postgraduate level in ‘Social Pedagogy’ is a recognised minimum qualification. We discuss what is meant by social pedagogy in more detail later. For now, suffice it to say, ideas about the need for residential care to address the whole child and for staff to engage in sustained professional reflection are not a large part of thinking of either existing training or management thinking, and, as a result, most staff are not well supported in their work.

Only the most troubled of the UK's 67,050 looked-after children end up in residential facilities (DfE, 2012). Often, there have been multiple failures in their care – both familial and statutory – before they arrive in residential facilities. While there are minimum national standards to which care staff must be trained, as a rule, it is rare to find organisations that ‘go the extra mile’. The ‘extra mile’, in our view, delivers training that is based on a profound understanding of what such children have experienced and need, and a profound understanding of what staff working with such children might experience and need in order to do this work and do it well.