title: The end of the road: residential disposals in the Scottish children's hearings system.
abstract: In a study of a representative sample of 301 "children's hearings", particular attention was given to 27 cases in which the child was committed to a List D school. Because the Scottish juvenile justice system has an explicit commitment to promoting the welfare of the children with whom it deals, the decisions were examined with special reference to the objectives that the hearing members hoped to achieve. These decisions could be divided into: (1) those which reflected only a sense that all alternatives had been exhausted; (2) those which aimed to ensure that the child received formal education or was placed in an environment which would help resolve his personal difficulties; (3) those designed to protect the child from family stresses or to achieve some other specific purpose. Since decisions under (1) are incompatible with the formal philosophy of the system, most of those under (2) entail no knowledge of the effectiveness of List D schools for the purposes in question, and some of those under (3) were wholly misconceived, it is concluded that there are some significant inconsistencies between the system's ideology and the actual practice of its members.
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D002669:Child Welfare; D003416:Criminal Law; D003657:Decision Making; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007603:Jurisprudence; D007604:Juvenile Delinquency / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence* / Q000534:rehabilitation; D008297:Male; D012114:Residential Treatment; D012606:Scotland; D012947:Social Work