Group care is defined as institutional care, residential group living, and other community-based day care services that supply a range of developmentally enhancing services for groups of people. For example, group care within the health care system can be found in mental hospitals; in the education system it is found in boarding schools; in the social welfare system it is found in orphanages and community homes; and in the criminal justice system it is found in prisons or juvenile detention facilities. The authors analyze the purpose of group care for children and young people in each of the four systems. The authors show how the differing purposes of the systems create the dilemma that the functions and goals of the institution must be woven around the “core of care” for the individual. The authors consider the methods and skills involved in group care practice, focusing on how direct and indirect care skills must interact to produce a responsive system of care. Six ideologies and related theoretical developments are described that have had a major impact on group care services for children and young people across all four of society’s major resource systems during the past quarter century: (1) normalization; (2) deinstitutionalization; (3) mainstreaming; (4) minimal intervention; (5) diversion; and (6) use of the least restrictive environment. The occupational aspects of group care, such as how group care personnel in each of the four main systems are assigned occupational rankings, are briefly considered before the authors introduce the remaining chapters in this journal issue, all of which focus on group care practice with children and young people. Tables, figures, references