From Craig Fees (2008), "The Institute for the History and Work of Therapeutic Environments: What is possible, and what makes it possible?", Childrenwebmag 1 March 2008 (here)
The Planned Environment Therapy Trust
In 1989 the Planned Environment Therapy Trust set up an Archive and Study Centre in the rural village of Toddington, Gloucestershire, “to gather, care for, and make available in a professional and appropriate way archive, library, audio-visual and other materials related to planned environment therapy, therapeutic community, milieu therapy, and related group therapies; and (for historical and philosophical reasons) progressive/democratic/alternative education more generally”.
Why? The spur was the discovery after the death of his widow in 1987 that there was no obvious home for the extensive personal and professional papers of David Wills, the pioneer of residential therapeutic child care, who was given an OBE in 1974 in recognition of his services to the field, and for whom the Association of Workers for Maladjusted Children (now SEBDA) established a celebratory Annual Lecture during his lifetime. Nor for the records of other people and places in the field.
The solution, for the Trustees of the Planned Environment Therapy Trust, was unprecedented: To set about creating a place where the full richness of the field – from a brass whistle used to call children into some kind of order in the 1950s; to personal diaries and letters from the early 1900s; to interwar photographs and case files; to post-war gramophone records, films and videos; to books from the 19th century and journals from the 21st , as well as statues, World Play toys and even furniture if it told a story – could be gathered, cared for, and made available to the widest possible general and specialist public, now, and – to the extent that this means anything in this ephemeral world – forever.
