Abstract
This article questions the value of internal inspections of closed institutions by external agencies, drawing on my unanticipated experience of being deeply immersed as a researcher inside a Secure Children’s Home at the time of an inspection. I describe how an ethnographic approach enabled me to see a dramatic change in the staff–young people relations – from adversarial to cooperative – in the presence of outside inspectors. I make sense of this change through an original application, and novel extension, of Goffman’s theorising. I conceptualise the staff and young people as insiders of a ‘total institution’ working together to perform a misleadingly harmonious ‘institutional display’, motivated by a shared sense of institutional identity. I argue that although the potential for insider misrepresentation can be acknowledged, the extent of it cannot be known by outsiders. This finding is of significance for social policy as closed institutions accommodate vulnerable populations and cases of institutional abuses attest the need for external monitoring. This article calls for recognition of the inherent limitation of external face-to-face inspection processes, and research into new methods of assessment.
Highlights
Secure Children’s Homes (SCHs) are locked institutions in England and Wales that accommodate children who have been deprived of their liberty
This article finds that the observational component of OFSTED inspections of SCHs captures an ‘institutional display’ (Goffman, 1959) rather than ‘what the home is really like and what happens at the home on an ordinary day’ (OFSTED, 2011: 4)
This article has added to the limited knowledge about life inside SCHs and OFSTED inspection practices
Summary
I show that for the duration of the inspection, the staff and young people came together in an ‘institutional display’ (Goffman, 1959) of cooperation and contentment, which is a misleading representation of the nature of the day-to-day adversarial relationship between these two groups of social actors and masks their shared dissatisfaction with the institution. SCHs are small locked (‘closed’) institutions for young people aged between 10 and 17 who have been deprived of their liberty They are registered children’s homes that form one part of the secure estate in England and Wales. This article argues that this predominant focus on reliability and validity in existing research overlooks a fundamental issue with the OFSTED inspection process itself; that inspectors – as outsiders – can only access the version of everyday life that insiders present. On this basis, the OFSTED grade awarded is a measure of the institutional representation afforded to the inspectors, rather than an objective assessment of service quality. I argue that this new insight is only possible because of my experience of being an immersed ethnographer inside a SCH at the time of an OFSTED inspection, as I explain
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