1.1 A Convergence of Purpose
"Therapeutic Living With Other People's Children: An oral history of residential therapeutic child care c. 1930 - c. 1980" was made possible by the coming together of the aims and objectives of three bodies: The Planned Environment Therapy Trust; the Planned Environment Therapy Trust's Archive and Study Centre; and the Heritage Lottery Fund.
1.1.1 The Planned Environment Therapy Trust
The Planned Environment Therapy Trust was founded in 1966 by a trio of pioneering therapeutic child care practitioners and a visionary solicitor.
The Trust's Founder was Marjorie Franklin (1877-1975): a student of progressive educationalist Charlotte Mason in the late 1800s; a medical doctor who set up maternity clinics in France at the beginning of World War I; a psychiatrist who trained under the pioneering Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi; a practical social reformer whose long career spanned seminal involvement in a number of ground-breaking and influential new organisations and social/psychological experiments: The Institute for the Scientific Treatment of Delinquency, founded in 1931, whose clinical work continues in the Portman Clinic of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust; the Howard League for Penal Reform; the Q-Camps Committee, through which she introduced the influential paediatrician and child psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott to the rich and complex world of therapeutic residential work with children and young people (see Craig Fees, "A Fearless Frankness", Children Webmag September 2010: http://www.childrenwebmag.com/articles/child-care-history/a-fearless-frankness).
Marjorie Franklin's co-founding Trustees were David Wills O.B.E, Arthur Barron, and Ambrose Appelbe - the former pioneers in residential therapeutic work with children and young people, and the latter a Lincoln's Inn solicitor. They were a group of deeply experienced practitioners who had known and worked together from the late 1930s. They understood the difficulties of the work, and the difficulties of doing the work, and also had a keen sense of the value of archives and history as practical tools for learning, training, and developing practice: Gathering, preserving and using records are woven into their discussions and core concerns from the founding of the Trust in 1966 on.
- What is "Planned Environment Therapy"?
The term 'planned environment therapy' was coined by Marjorie Franklin before the Second World War to denote a way of living and working particularly with disturbed, delinquent, and traumatized people, an approach which was first deeply tested and developed in the work of the Q Camps Committee at Hawkspur Camp in rural Essex between 1935 and 1945, the subject of David Wills' first book, The Hawkspur Experiment (1941). Child psychiatrist Kajetan Kasinski described 'planned environment therapy' in 2003 as "... probably the first unified model for the therapeutic community work with young people ..."; writing in 1971, Maurice Bridgeland said that it was "... the most generally acknowledged theoretical base for work done with maladjusted children in this country ..."; and more recently, in 2009, Danish psychotherapist Hans Kornerup has written of it as "the most complex form of treatment that exists. At the same time, when carried out in a sufficiently deliberate manner it can also be the most effective form of psychotherapy available for dealing with some of the most intractable developmental issues and conditions."
[The source of these quotes: K. Kasinski, “The roots of the work: Definitions, origins and influences”, in Therapeutic Communities for Children and Young People, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, London (2003); M. Bridgeland, Pioneer work with maladjusted children: A study of the development of therapeutic education, Staples Press, London (1971); H. Kornerup, ed.,“Milieu-Therapy” with Children: Planned Environmental Therapy in Scandinavia (published by Perikon (Denmark), distributed by Karnac Books (London), 2009]
1.1.2 The Archive and Study Centre
Against this background - and in the knowledge that there had already been significant as well as potential losses of archives and other irreplaceable heritage materials in the history of residential therapeutic environments -, in 1989 the Trust took the ambitious decision to found an Archive and Study Centre devoted to bringing together, protecting, and making available in a professional and appropriate manner the papers of individuals, institutions and organisations involved in environment therapy/milieu therapy/therapeutic community, and in that 'democratic' or 'alternative' approach to schools and education which has been called "therapeutic communities for normal children". In reflection of the history and philosophy of the Trust, the Trustees mandated it to be an engaged archive: an active centre for research and discussion, actively reaching out to, involving, and working with the general public and the full range of individuals, organisations and communities concerned and involved with therapeutic environments. In this spirit and from the outset the archivist was encouraged to build relationships and to add to the preserved history and heritage of the field through an active oral history programme.
Within twenty years of its founding - by the time of the First Round application to the Heritage Lottery Fund at the end of 2008 – the Archive and Study Centre contained over two hundred archive collections, a Research Library with over 7,000 volumes, an audio-visual/oral history collection with over 1500 audio and video recordings, and an active information, support and outreach service which had built and managed a half dozen websites for related organisations, as well as its own; set up and managed nearly twenty email discussion groups for various relevant purposes and organisations; produced a joint newsletter for the major voluntary organisations in the field; and in partnership pioneered numerous online audio, visual and textual research and information resources related to the history and practice of therapeutic environments. All of these statistics have been significantly re-written in consequence of "Therapeutic Living With Other People's Children".
1.1.3 The Heritage Lottery Fund
For its part, the Heritage Lottery Fund was set up in 1994 to distribute money to heritage projects which had been raised by the National Lottery. It had three core Strategic Aims: "to conserve the UK’s diverse heritage for present and future generations to experience and enjoy"; "to help more people, and a wider range of people, to take an active part in and make decisions about their heritage"; and "to help people to learn about their own and other people’s heritage."
These three HLF principles - Conservation, Participation, Learning - were at the core of the Archive and Study Centre’s mission from its inception, and flowed naturally and directly from the founding principles and philosophy of the Planned Environment Therapy Trust itself.
Added to this convergence of aims and objectives, the Trust and the HLF shared underlying principles of social cohesion, participation and inclusion, as expressed in the opening paragraph of the Heritage Lottery Fund's "Strategic Plan 2008-2013" (which appears again in the 'Equality Scheme' of HLF's parent body, the National Heritage Memorial Fund, published in 2010):
Our view of heritage is broad, progressive and inclusive. We believe that understanding, valuing and sharing our diverse histories changes lives, brings people together and provides the foundations of a confident, modern society.
These principles, which are fundamental principles underling therapeutic environments as such, led to the Trust's application.