Book review : An Essential Guide to Surviving and Thriving in Residential Childcare: Lessons from the Frontline on how you'll Laugh, Love and Cry… All Before Lunchtime by Jane Dalgleish

Tools

Burns, Andrew (2026) Book review : An Essential Guide to Surviving and Thriving in Residential Childcare: Lessons from the Frontline on how you'll Laugh, Love and Cry… All Before Lunchtime by Jane Dalgleish. Scottish Journal of Residential Child Care, 25 (1). pp. 169-172. ISSN 1478-1840 (https://doi.org/10.17868/strath.00096128)

[thumbnail of Burns-SJRCC-2026-Book-review-An-Essential-Guide-to-Surviving-and-Thriving]
Preview
 Text. Filename: Burns-SJRCC-2026-Book-review-An-Essential-Guide-to-Surviving-and-Thriving.pdf
Final Published Version
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 logo
Download (81kB)| Preview

Abstract

An Essential Guide to Surviving and Thriving in Residential Childcare is explicitly aimed at residential childcare workers. As I am a researcher, not a residential childcare worker, it is legitimate to ask why I am reviewing this book. In my role I have been involved in numerous research projects that relate in one way or another to care experience, including two specifically focussed on residential childcare. One of these was an ethnography, where I spent a lot of time in one particular setting over the course of a year. I genuinely felt changed by relationships that I developed during that project, leaving with a deep respect for the young people and adults there and in residential childcare more broadly. So, when I read the title and summary of the book, I was intrigued to learn about the insights of a very experienced worker and to see where my own, more limited, understanding sat in relation that.

CORE (COnnecting REpositories)