We’re delighted to welcome Joe Gibb as the latest contributor to our Voices of the Sector series. Joe is a Lecturer in Social Care at Glasgow Clyde College, with an MSc in Advanced Residential Child Care and over a decade of frontline experience in the sector. Passionate about relationships, education and community, he brings together practical experience and academic insight to support the development of future practitioners. Through his teaching and voluntary podcast work, Joe creates space for conversations about practice, research and the opportunities and challenges facing residential child care.
The views expressed in this guest blog are Joe’s own and do not represent those of his employer.
His contribution is below:
Professional Progression Without Professional Exit: Rethinking Residential Childcare Education
Henry Giroux’s concept of the “border pedagogue” asks us to think about people who operate across boundaries of knowledge, culture, experience and power.
It provides an interesting lens through which to consider the residential childcare worker.
A young person in residential care may have psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, teachers, nurses, therapists, lawyers and other specialists involved in their life.
Many of these professionals will have qualifications at considerably higher academic levels than the residential childcare worker.
Their specialist knowledge matters.
But qualification level and knowledge are not necessarily the same thing.
There is an academic word that is useful here: epistemic.
Put simply, epistemic means relating to knowledge: how knowledge is acquired, what we accept as knowledge, whose knowledge is valued and who is recognised as someone who “knows”.
A psychologist may know a young person through assessment and formulation. A social worker may know them through statutory assessment, care planning and review. A teacher knows them through education. A psychiatrist may know them through diagnosis and treatment.
The residential childcare worker often knows the same young person through living alongside them.
We know the breakfast before school. We know the atmosphere in the car after a difficult meeting. We know when “I’m fine” probably means something else. We see the arguments, laughter and silences. We experience the phone call home that changes the rest of the evening, the refusal to go to school, the excitement before a birthday and the conversation that suddenly happens late at night when nobody planned for it.
That produces knowledge too.
It is relational, situated and lived knowledge.
This is where Giroux’s border pedagogue becomes particularly interesting.
Residential childcare workers operate across borders every day.
We move between care and education, therapy and relationship, authority and advocacy, risk management and ordinary childhood, the institution and the idea of home.
But perhaps one of the most important borders we cross is between different forms of professional knowledge and different professional languages.
Residential childcare workers regularly find themselves in rooms alongside children/ young people where psychologists talk about formulation, attachment, trauma and regulation; social workers discuss statutory responsibilities, permanence, risk and care planning; health professionals use clinical terminology; educators bring another professional language; and legal processes introduce another language again.
Then the residential worker returns to the house.
Somehow, all of that professional knowledge has to become meaningful in the everyday life of a child.
That requires translation.
But the translation also has to travel in the opposite direction.
Residential childcare workers accumulate enormous amounts of knowledge through hundreds, sometimes thousands, of ordinary interactions with a young person.
We then have to take that lived and relational knowledge and translate it into a professional language that psychologists, social workers, educators, managers, Children’s Hearings and other decision-making systems recognise and take seriously.
That raises a question about power.
What happens when one profession possesses the language through which a system defines credible professional knowledge, while another possesses rich relational knowledge but has less access to the language required to communicate it?
Whose knowledge carries most weight around the table?
This is why Giroux’s thinking offers something more challenging than simply suggesting residential childcare workers need “more training”.
If we expect residential childcare workers to operate at the borders of psychology, social work, education, health, law and the lived world of the child, does their professional education adequately prepare them to understand, decode, critically evaluate and translate the knowledge produced within those disciplines?
And does it give them the intellectual confidence and professional language to carry their own knowledge back across those borders?
This is not an argument that residential childcare workers should become psychologists, social workers, teachers or lawyers simply by completing a residential childcare qualification.
It is an argument for considering whether a distinctive professional qualification should provide sufficient grounding in psychology, sociology, pedagogy, law, social work, community education, child development and other human services disciplines to allow workers to engage confidently and critically with the professionals around them.
If we get the ingredients of that initial qualification right, perhaps it could become the foundation of an educational journey rather than its destination.
Post-qualification, we could imagine opportunities to study at postgraduate level in areas such as social work, community education and learning, psychology, education, mental health, family work, leadership and other associated human services disciplines.
For some practitioners, that additional education could deepen their expertise while they remain in residential childcare.
Progression should not necessarily mean management.
There should be opportunities for someone to become an increasingly expert residential childcare practitioner without requiring them to leave residential childcare.
But there should be another possibility too.
For those who want to cross a professional border, the educational pathway could help make that possible.
Could a sufficiently rigorous residential childcare qualification, followed by carefully designed postgraduate study, recognition of prior learning and the necessary professional practice education, create articulated pathways into professions such as social work or community learning and development?
That would not mean bypassing the professional standards, registration requirements or assessed practice necessary to enter another regulated profession.
It would mean asking universities, regulators and employers a different question.
How much of what an experienced and appropriately qualified residential childcare worker already knows should have to be learned again?
Imagine someone who has spent ten years caring for children in residential settings. They may have participated in Child Protection Planning Meetings, Children’s Hearings, Looked After Reviews, multidisciplinary assessments and complex care planning. They may have developed considerable knowledge of trauma, attachment, child development, safeguarding, legislation, family dynamics, risk, rights and relational practice.
If that practitioner decides they want to become a social worker, should our educational system treat them almost as though they are beginning from the start?
Or could we create properly accredited bridges which recognise what they already know, identify what they do not yet know, and provide the additional academic and practice learning necessary to meet the professional standard for social work?
The pathway could therefore have two equally legitimate directions.
One practitioner might use postgraduate education to become an advanced residential childcare practitioner and remain in residential care.
Another might use their existing qualification, experience and further study as part of an articulated pathway towards social work, community education or another associated human services profession.
Neither represents success or failure.
They represent professional mobility.
And this takes us back to Giroux.
If residential childcare workers are already operating across professional borders, perhaps our educational system should make those borders more permeable.
We could educate workers to understand the professional territories surrounding them, give them the language and intellectual confidence to participate within those territories and, where appropriate, create legitimate educational bridges that allow them eventually to cross into them.
So perhaps the question is bigger than:
What qualification should a residential childcare worker have?
Maybe we should also be asking:
What should that qualification allow them to become?
It should allow someone to build a career, develop intellectually and become an expert practitioner without ever leaving residential childcare.
But it should also mean that an experienced residential childcare worker who decides, for example, “I want to become a social worker”, can see a coherent educational bridge ahead rather than having to turn around and walk back to the beginning.
If we expect residential childcare workers to cross professional borders every day, perhaps it is time we gave them both the educational passport to cross them and meaningful destinations on the other side.