In April 2001, Keith White wrote an early piece about Mill Grove, but his major contribution that month was titled Reflections on the History of Child Care in the United Kingdom and of the Current Context. It was the paper he had given at the Radisson Workshop run by the Social Education Trust. The Webmag had published the main Report from the Workshop in March – we remembered it last month. This Report has played a significant role in getting the concept of social pedagogy on the map in the UK. Keith’s paper took a long look at the history of British childcare, to understand the way that ideas have developed in the UK, and why social pedagogy has not played a significant role to date. Although there is now more talk of social pedagogy, it is not yet established, and Keith’s paper is still relevant.
The May issue contained an interesting piece by Roy Grimwood, looking back on the first year of the Youth Justice Board. The Board is now well established and has now had a major impact on the services. For its first few years, it acted independently, but more recently there has been closer co-operation with other agencies. Roy was quite critical in 2001. Are the Youth Justice Board and Quality Protects Compatible? he asked. What would his views be now?
For the June 2001 issue, we have picked Flying Saucers at Dusk, one of Gus Greene’s regular contributions from Bluebrick Children’s Home. Gus contributed a long series of articles about residential care practice, and regular readers got to know the staff and children at the home. This item discussed restraining children, portraying an incident graphically (crockery-throwing, not UFOs), and following it up with advice on good practice.
The Webmag has been going for over six years now, and we must have published over a thousand articles. Who refers to the musty piles of back numbers of hard copy magazines?
The Webmag articles are all there at the touch of the Back Issues button. Modern technology makes them available. But unless you are using a search engine, you might not think of rooting through our past issues, and if you are a new reader, you certainly won’t remember the pieces when they came out. There are some really good articles published years ago but still worth looking at, and this column is intended to draw attention to a few of them.