Daisybank 1983-1989. An audit of a residential home preparing adolescents for permanent placements

This paper describes the evaluation of a small children's home, Daisybank, set up to prepare adolescents, who had been in care for several years, to live in permanent placements. The home seemed largely to fail in this explicit task, but appear to succeed in helping a majority of its residents make substantial progress in coming to terms with their deprived and disrupted lives. It provided them with genuine care and commitment, which they acknowledged and appreciated. We believe that the success of the home needs to be judged by these criteria, since for young people in mid- to late adolescence the search for new permanent parental homes probably conflicted with other psychosocial tasks relating to adolescence. On the other hand, Daisybank seemed unable adequately to resolve the problems of a subgroup of adolescent males with serious conduct problems who were responsible for the not infrequent physical abuse of several female staff.