Introduction

In this chapter we first analyse the claims for enhanced child guidance provision from both outside and inside central government. Partly as a result of the evacuation experience, although also in line with pre-war trends, child guidance proponents argued that maladjustment was a national problem which had to be dealt with nationally. Such arguments were successful in that by way of the Education Acts of the mid-1940s, child guidance was legislatively embedded in the emerging welfare state. It is thus crucial to see child guidance as part of, and contributing to, a broad wave of social reconstruction which began to take shape in Britain as the war came to an end. Child guidance took its place alongside such new services as socialized health care and state-provided family allowances in the attempt by the British state to protect its citizens against unforeseen problems and to promote social stability, social solidarity and social harmony. Such aims were broadly agreed and came to be seen as a key constituent of Britain's political and social post-war consensus. In this context we also examine what it was that child guidance's advocates saw it as contributing to social reconstruction and the extent of child guidance services by the mid-1950s. Legislation and expansion notwithstanding, child guidance remained a contested field and we shall see how Scottish provision came to influence that elsewhere in Britain.