Barbara Kahan and Peter Righton

Absolutely essential reading – clarifies the links between Louis Minster, former director of Social Services at Richmond at the time of the Elm Guest House Scandal, Barbara Kahan, leading figure in the social work profession and at one point Minster’s boss, and Peter Righton, the paedophile who corrupted the whole profession.

Bits of Books, Mostly Biographies

Barbara Kahan pioneered the development of social work in UK with children and families, taking it on as a career from 1948 and its very inception. From the point at which she took her first post at Dudley in 1948  as Children’s Officer where she created its first local authority children’s home to spending 1951 – 1970  building Oxfordshire’s cohesive approach to social services, working closely with her husband an Oxford based child psychiatrist, managing Louis Minster (9 years before he was to become Director of Social Services at Richmond), as County Care Child Officer for Oxfordshire in the mid 1960s to taking opinion from Peter Righton report on Staffordshire’s Pin Down regime in  the 1991 report and championing distance learning education particularly for residential children’s care workers – a special interest of Righton’s.

Due to Kahan’s pioneering role, she is a person around which others have pivoted in their…

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