This short study published 10 years ago provides an insight into the nature of children’s residential homes, the characteristics and circumstances of the young people who lived in them and on the short-term outcomes for these young people. It built on other research for the Department for Education (DfE) Raising the Bar? An Evaluation of the Social Pedagogy Pilot Programme in Children’s Residential Homes (Berridge et al., 2011). This focused specifically on the introduction of social pedagogues into residential settings in England, gathering data from 30 children’s homes to compare homes which employed social pedagogues with others which did not. In the course of this study a great deal of general information was gathered about the nature and functioning of residential children’s in England. In this study the researchers drew on a purposive sub-sample of 16 homes from the sample in the earlier study, collected new data on these homes and re-analysed data gathered in the earlier research…

Research report source: Living in Children’s Homes Research report – DFE-RR201.pdf