ABSTRACT
By 1945 social policy for children had a complex history. Needless to say, children themselves had remained virtually silent during the making of this history. They had been figures in that familiar landscape of adult reform programmes, shuffled (sometimes humanely) from one area to another out of the way of the architects and builders seeking to construct new structures of administration in order to accommodate the changing concepts of welfare and the growing role of the State. In some respects little changed in the presentation of children after 1945. They continued to be seen as investments of one sort or another; their victim status remained marginal to the various social-policy agendas; and their identity as ‘threats’ remained well focused in the minds of many reformers, politicians and professionals. But it would be a mistake to confuse similarities with historical continuity. The perception of the welfare of children was not the same after 1945 as it had been in the inter-war period, and was markedly different from what it had been in the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras.
