The National Picture: Policy and Insight

This chapter examines professional and policy discourses around the approved schools, drawn from the archives of the Home Office and the Children’s Department, and from the Approved Schools Gazette, the monthly journal of the approved schools’ staff association. These two sources provide key insight into the operational world of the approved schools, demonstrating the dominance of boys in discussions about these institutions. It also provides insight into the ideas and practices which influenced the staff in the schools, such as the emergence of new kinds of medico-legal terminology, culminating in a distinct diagnostic shift in the approach to the children resident in the schools.