ABSTRACT
The old saying, ‘the devil is in the detail’, applies in a particularly relevant way to residential work. However important the big picture may be, for a young person in a secure unit what matters is the single events, incidents and relationships that make up the day-to-day world that they inhabit. Beyond that world there are families, friends and communities about whom they think and to whom, at some point, they are most likely to return. Adults who work as members of staff in a secure unit are also mainly concerned with the routine events of their daily business and with keeping their performance of these duties fresh and enthusiastic. They have the additional responsibility, however, of looking beyond these activities and, through reflection and talking, making connections between what is going on in the present and what has gone before. A further task arises from this: to engage with young people in ways that encourage them to share in that reflective activity, to begin to make connections for themselves and to learn from the experience about how things might change in the future. It is precisely this process of thinking about the links between past and present, learning about how things might be done differently and trying to move on in a new way that encapsulates the fundamental purpose of secure units for the young people who are placed in them.
