Fulcher and Ainsworth (1985) point out that: ‘The siting and physical design of a centre may represent in bricks and mortar the ideas of earlier generations of practice’ (1985, p 61). This chapter attempts to uncover the ideas of earlier generations of practice and to outline some of the twists and turns of policy, practice and ideology that have contributed to how residential child care is currently constituted. The history of how children were cared for over the centuries is not a story of uninterrupted social progress. Nor is it to be found only in the legal and policy documents that form the ‘official’ version of events in respect of residential child care; these merely give some pointers to concerns and beliefs extant at any period of time. Policy documents merely reflect wider ideas and ideologies that have determined how the service has developed, ideas and ideologies about children and childhood and how best to provide for them.

What and how we think about children also reflects the power of particular professionals and interest groups. Michel Foucault the French historian and philosopher argues that power in respect of how we care for people has been vested, for most of the 20th century, in the hands of those he calls the psy-professionals, psychiatrists, psychologists and, more recently, social workers, who seek to privilege their own ideas of children and how to care for them. These ideas are based largely around medical or quasi-medical models of diagnosis or assessment and treatment. Dominant professional ideologies can assume a self-evident status, privileging particular ways of thinking and making it difficult to challenge these. This in turn can lead to the adoption of easy but unhelpful value positions, which serve to judge rather than to understand what went on in the past. An example of this might be a tendency to look back in horror at ideas of sending children from residential homes and schools to the colonies. In some situations such policies might resonate with present-day examples of ethnic cleansing, as in the case of government policies in Australia and Canada throughout most of the 20th century, which resulted in a ‘stolen generation’ of aboriginal children, removed from their homelands and placed in residential schools in order that they might assimilate the dominant culture and be ‘civilised’.