Listen to thisIn Canada, but I am quite sure in other countries too, it is becoming quite difficult to find well trained Child and Youth Care practitioners willing and able to work in residential care settings. There are likely many reasons for this. For one thing, working in residential care often means working at the lower end of pay scales, sometimes without extended health benefits. Upward mobility is not always available, at least not for most. The job remains one that is largely unregulated, which means that there is neither a professional body to belong to (other than voluntary professional associations that are struggling for membership) nor a meaningful advocacy component for the profession. New options for Child and Youth Care practitioners have emerged, particularly in intensive treatment settings such as day treatment and in-home support work, but also in transition work, schools, and other settings. Most of these new opportunities don’t involve shift work, and rarely involve working on weekends. The shortage of well-trained Child and Youth Care practitioners impacts the quality of care, and by extension, the quality of the work environment in residential services, and that, in turn, makes the job of working there even less desirable. And for some social groups, notably Black and Indigenous workers, the longstanding problems of racism and oppressive practice make these settings very unattractive. For workers with disability, the profoundly ableist context of almost all Child and Youth Care practice settings renders employment in those settings largely prohibitive. In fact, most group homes and live-in treatment centres in Canada are not accessible from a mobility perspective, and entirely inaccessible for deaf or visually impaired workers. Most of these settings are also particularly incompetent and intolerant when it comes to worker mental health challenges. Ironically, there are no settings that upholds greater stigma associated with mental health challenges than the settings that are specifically focused on mental health service provision.
When students in Child and Youth Care programs are asked about their preferred work settings once they graduate, residential settings almost always rank at the bottom. Schools and hospitals typically rank toward the top of the list. In a way, this should come as no surprise, given that much of post-secondary Child and Youth Care education has painted all residential care settings as oppressive, useless, ineffective, and harmful. In fact, most programs at Colleges and Universities offer, at best, one elective course on residential care and treatment, and usually it is a course that cements the view that these settings ideally should not exist.
To be sure, the argument against residential care and treatment is compelling. One does not have to work too hard to find instances of catastrophic service provision in which young people are commodified for quick profits for owners and workers are expendable and not supported at all. In some provinces in Canada, where substantial parts of the sector are private and for-profit, such catastrophic service experiences are the norm. I really can’t blame anyone for wanting to just get rid of the whole system. On the other hand, there are also instances of excellent service provision, and of residential care settings about which even young people say good things. There are lots of settings that try very hard to improve, to integrate anti-oppressive practice approaches, to ensure trauma-informed care is ever-present, and to develop approaches to care that take account of research, evidence, and relational practices. And there are many settings that pay their workers reasonably well, that provide relatively comprehensive benefits, and that are connected to other types of services such that workers can move from one experience to another with relative ease, thus developing further and gaining new forms of satisfaction from their employment. The problem for these settings is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain high standards, to continue to invest in growth and development, and to continue to ensure currency in best practices and quality measures. This is because many of these settings are experiencing significant shortages of qualified workers who can carry on the tradition of service excellence. Highly qualified Child and Youth Care practitioners don’t apply to work in these settings. This creates further problems.
It means that many otherwise excellent settings find themselves constantly dealing with crises generated by their novice work force. Many are so preoccupied with recruitment and hiring processes that they cannot focus on quality processes. And perhaps most significantly, these kinds of under-qualified workforces yield under-qualified supervisors and leaders. And if there is one thing we know about sustainable excellence in residential care, it is that this requires sustained excellence in supervision.
All of this reflects longstanding issues and systemic problems. It is, for example, quite disturbing that in Canada, carceral settings (youth custody) have always provided for higher pay and better benefits for workers than voluntary treatment or child protection settings. They also provide for greater regulation, more emphasis on quality (of security measures), and are in almost all cases publicly funded or even publicly operated. It seems that there is greater ideological consensus in Canada, that the containment and surveillance of the disproportionally represented racialized, Black and Indigenous youth in custody is of such importance that it deserves decent pay.
What can be done? It is perhaps important to note that I would not want to create measures to improve this situation that inadvertently sustain bad services. On the contrary, my patience with bad services in residential care has run out long ago, and I am quite in favour of shutting these down for good, and while we are at it, perhaps suing, or even criminalizing the profit-seeking behaviours of the owners who have caused untold harm to young people for decades. I would love to see them ‘cared for’ by the relatively well-paid corrections workers in custody settings.
But I do think that something needs to change to sustain residential services that offer good, healing-oriented, culturally and racially responsive upbringings to young people for whom that might be the best (and only) option and who themselves insist that this is what they want. We must find ways of producing highly qualified human resources for residential care, including direct service workers and supervisors who can support those workers meaningfully. There is not, in my view, a quick fix for this. But there are some long-term strategies that we might consider.
The first thing is that we need to acknowledge that Child and Youth Care practice, as a field of practice and a discipline in post-secondary education, is diverse and multi-faceted, and therefore cannot be assumed to qualify someone to work in residential services. Most graduates of Child and Youth Care programs learn absolutely nothing about residential care and treatment, and in many cases, learn to loathe this way of being with youth. In fact, most instructors in Child and Youth Care programs themselves know very little about residential care and treatment, and yes, that includes those who thirty years ago worked in a group home for a couple of years. Being able to critique residential care and treatment, even if the critique is entirely valid and reasonable at the systemic and structural levels, does not qualify one to work there.
Second, we should acknowledge that we do not need to mass produce Child and Youth Care graduates for residential service settings. Instead, we need to produce small cadres of such graduates and develop their very specialized knowledge and skills. In other words, a residential service stream in Child and Youth Care programs ought to be somewhat exclusive, focusing on Child and Youth Care students who demonstrate particular capacities and skills, as well as academic excellence, such that getting into this stream is far from certain for most. If you are going to work in a sector that features as much harm-doing as healing, you better be damn good at what you do.
Within that stream, we ought to provide special supports, including bursaries and scholarships, that enable students who themselves have faced or are now facing significant adversities to participate. This applies especially to students who have care experience themselves, or who have lived experience of racism, exclusion, ableism, heteronormativity, sanism, or other ills in institutional and community contexts.
This stream ought to be partnered with residential service providers who we assess ourselves for their service quality. Only those assessed as high-quality services are invited to participate. Those assessed as ineligible are explicitly, and not very politely, told that they do not meet our standards. Furthermore, the stream ought to have curriculum that is, wherever possible, co-developed and co-taught with careleavers, or young people with care experience.
Placements in such a stream obviously unfold in residential care settings. These students are not placed in elementary schools or community-based children’s programs. Their learning is focused and the level of supervision and debriefing they experience with respect to their placement experiences is significantly enhanced.
These kinds of program streams can feature all kinds of pedagogic innovations, including, for example, simulation-based learning in buildings that used to be group homes (there are lots of those out there and now abandoned given the crisis in residential care). But what really matters is that we limit the number of students admitted to such programs. We intentionally undersupply the market such that demand for these graduates always is greater than supply. Only then will they be recognized as essential to the sector, paid accordingly, and no longer be seen as expendable. The goal is very simple. For years, we have asked that the leaders of residential care sectors make change for the better. They have failed. It is time that we create the infrastructure where the leaders of tomorrow are developed so that they can make change for the better.
One other element of resolving the current human resource crisis in residential services is to focus on the training of supervisors. I will write about this next month, but for now, let me just say that any change in residential care and treatment will rely heavily on the work of supervisors who know how to supervise, which means how to support and develop new Child and Youth Care practitioners in residential services. This is not merely a matter of direct service experience; supervision is a complex activity that requires advanced skills and knowledge. The fact that the Child and Youth Care post-secondary education sector has no post-graduate programs of any kind to train supervisors, and in fact, no current Child and Youth Care college program, undergraduate university program or graduate university program even has a single course in supervision, is quite revealing about how much we have abandoned quality care for young people.
In brief, the current human resource crisis in residential services cannot be solved with band aid solutions. We need to think about how quality care itself and post-secondary training for Child and Youth Care practitioners in residential care is mutually reinforcing. Only then will things change for the better.
