ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the professional identity of residential childcare. It examines some of the tensions that surface in seeking to conceptualize residential childcare within social work, arguing that the tasks, the sites of practice and the means through which they are enacted mask fundamental differences between what might be thought of as two players in the wider field of child welfare. The chapter argues that residential childcare is, by its nature and in contrast to the technical rationality of much current social work, a practical moral task. The idea of upbringing – often mentioned in reports on childcare, but rarely articulated – augments ideas of care by bringing a cultural dimension central stage. Residential childcare practitioners "take as the theatre of their work the actual living situations as shared and experienced by the child". This is a life-space orientation whereby workers seek to use everyday life events to promote children's care and upbringing.
