ABSTRACT
Most adults coming into residential work are motivated by a genuine desire to do something positive which will be of help to children and young people. Although these adults may have had only limited previous experience they must be attracted to the prospect of working with young people. In future this is also likely to be a requirement for the recruitment of prison officers, who will increasingly be selected for the specific purpose of working with the group of young people in custody who are under the age of 18 years. One of the aims of a good induction and initial training programme is to harness this early raw enthusiasm and underpin it with a knowledge and skill base upon which staff can go on to develop sound professional practices. Enthusiasm and a desire to help young people are essential prerequisites for this kind of work, although they are not sufficient in themselves. However, an important question to ask staff, whose core work is the day-to-day care and management of young people and who have a very important role to play in the delivery of intervention programmes, is also a very simple one: ‘Do you like young people?’ There is also another part to the question: ‘Do young people like you?’ Sometimes there are different answers to these questions and if that is the case then there are some further questions to be asked in supervision.
