Phase Two: The Present

Phase Two ran from September 2021 – March 2024. We worked in partnership with young people, care experienced adults, and care workers to explore what types of everyday information or records they would like to be able to access, at what point in their lives, and why. From this, we created ‘The Memory Bank’ that is accessible to those who live and work, or have lived or worked, in the residential children’s homes.


Phase Two Updates

November 2023

In November, Siân Lucas (ARCH co-investigator) and Laura MacDonald (Social Worker, Birthlink Scotland) went on a fieldtrip to Germany. The full blog about their trip can be read here.

July 2023

In July, Mervyn Miller (Scottish advisory group member), Skye Foster (Co-Researcher) and Andrew Burns (Research Fellow) travelled to Berlin to meet Tanja Abou who is a member of the German advisory group.  Tanja is an academic working for the Institute for Social and Organisational Pedagogy at The University of Hildesheim. She is also a DJ, queer activist, and all-round cool person, who also happens to have lived experience of the care system in Germany. Check out the blog post here for more about their Berlin trip.

AND we made the news!

NEWS: Children in care deserve memories too, say experts behind unique memory keeping project

June 2023

In June, we held a free event open to anyone interested in memory and record keeping for children and young people in care. This one-day event brought together people from a variety of backgrounds to discuss, problematise and present current issues, innovations and research on memory keeping & records in residential childcare. Check out the information below for more detail.

April 2023

Check out our latest blog post here for an update on phase 2 data collection.

November 2022

We worked with young people and adults at a children’s home in Scotland to explore their ideas for the living archive. They recorded potential content for the archive, which we discussed as a group, considering; what should be included, consent processes for those who are in pictures/videos/audio content, and who should have access to the archive. Malte Heyen, our IT lead from Germany also visited the home in Scotland to discuss the potential look and functionality of the archive.


Phase Two Events

Treasuring memories: Findings from ARCH 20th June 2024

ARCH-Archiving Residential Children’s Homes: Exploring memory keeping in childcare 20th June 2023

Phase Three: The Future

Theme by the University of Stirling