New research shows that the Residential Child Care Initiative might actually have done more harm than good to the morale and retention of skilled residential child care staff. Ruth Winchester reports

A succession of inquiries into abuse within children's homes, most recently the Waterhouse inquiry in North Wales, have called for better training, pay and conditions for staff in children's residential care.

New research has gone further and pointed to the failure of training for senior residential staff under the Residential Child Care Initiative. It suggests that a co-ordinated training strategy for the entire social care workforce is needed.

Sir William Utting's 1991 review of residential child care, Children in the Public Care, recommended that local authorities should ensure that anyone running a children's home was qualified to Diploma in Social Work level. In response, the Department of Health, local authorities and social work training council CCETSW set up a specific, time-limited scheme to train senior residential staff - the Residential Child Care Initiative.

The results of an investigation into the long-term success of this initiative, which ran between 1992 and 1997, has just been published by the National Institute for Social Work and the findings are striking. While the majority of students found their two-year DipSW courses satisfying, stimulating and valuable, their experience of transferring new skills into practice within residential child care was overwhelmingly dismal.

People who had previously been happy in their work returned to children's residential care fired with enthusiasm, only to become gradually more frustrated and depressed by their inability to challenge and change the culture of work places.

One DipSW student's comments summed up the feelings of many of those surveyed: "I was extremely happy with the course, had wonderful placements and enjoyed the whole two years.

"However, having left the course feeling exhilarated and ambitious and looking forward to the future, I am now, 18 months later, demoralised, lacking in motivation, interest and enthusiasm. I feel this department has failed to value my work or me as an individual. For the first time in 18 years I do not look forward to going to work."

Common problems faced by managers returning to the frontline included a severe lack of support, chronic recruitment problems and understaffing, insufficient resources, poor quality staff, lack of strategic planning, and little or no control over admissions.

Residential child care managers with strong ideas about how to deal with children with specific difficulties returned to a system that they felt consisted of little more than warehousing and containment. Units had so little control over admissions that they were forced to take children whose needs could not be met and students, fresh from the theoretical best practice environment of the Residential Child Care Initiative, described the children's homes they returned to as "dumping grounds".

In essence, the study found that the RCCI had "created a vision for the practice of residential child care". Yet students leaving the course and returning to residential care found it impossible to impose order on a system in crisis and disarray.

One of the main problems with the initiative was that it was based on the premise that senior managers would be able to turn around a deeply entrenched culture alone and in isolation.

This has not proved to be the case. Julie Kent and Chris Payne, who carried out the research, describe many students attempting to challenge the system as individuals but being "thwarted by the oppressive nature of the systems under which they were operating".

Ironically, the vast majority of those students who completed the RCCI were still working within residential child care more than two years on, despite the problems outlined in the report. There are strong financial disincentives for senior managers to leave well-paid posts within the residential field, and most staff recognise that the situation might be worse in other field social work posts.

The key messages from the research were the need for structured inductions, managed workloads and achievable targets for newly returned staff, as well as the widespread recognition that residential child care is a system in crisis.

But worryingly, Kent and Payne also highlight separate research, which found little evidence that professional training and education within social work is actually cost effective or has any real impact on the quality of work with children. Neither did it find that quality of care was related to the professional qualifications of heads of homes. In fact, staff qualifications tended to lower morale, both for individuals and for the whole workforce.

The report concludes: "The clear message from the current research is that there are more effective ways of improving residential care than merely increased staffing and relying on qualifying training."

With luck, the new national training strategy, currently under construction by TOPSS England, will address the training needs of everyone working in the care system, rather than any single group such as senior residential staff.

It should also look at the issues around workforce planning and ensure that in the long term there will be appropriate numbers of people with the right mix of skills, when and where they are needed.

· After the RCCI, What next? from National Institute for Social Work, publications unit on 020 7387 9681.