In this submission I use previously published works, my book Rethinking Residential Child Care and two articles ‘Reading Bauman for Social Work’ and ‘Care Ethics in Residential Child Care: A Different Voice’, to develop a critical account of changing rationalities of care in the context of residential child care. Much of my writing draws upon professional experience gained over 20 years of residential child care practice and I begin this account by justifying the use of this experience as the basis of professional and academic knowledge. I then go on to explicate some of the discursive influences that have fed into the way that residential child care is currently constituted. Specifically, I locate many current assumptions and practices within dominant neoliberal political systems and assumptions. This has led to the commodification, instrumentalisation and, within an increasingly regulated polity, the bureaucratisation of public care. Against this backdrop, public care is conceived of in narrow and abstract concerns around rights and protection. The concepts of care itself and of upbringing that ought to be at the heart of adult engagement with children are left, largely, unarticulated. I seek to address this gap by developing possible conceptualisations of care and upbringing. I conclude by arguing that residential child care and, indeed, much public care, is governed by the wrong rationalities, by economic and administrative priorities rather than caring and relational ones. Finally, I suggest some directions that future work might take.

The aim of this study was to explore care leavers' experiences to independency after being discharged from public care. The study explored the services provided for young adults who have left public care and how they perceived the support provided for them during their transition and after. The study has also an interest on the care leavers' rights according to the UN Convention on the Rights of a Child. A qualitative study approach was used to collect data, due to the focus on the interpretation of the care leavers' experiences and to get in-depth information and descriptions about their experiences and perspectives. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with four participants who have left care. Moreover, the findings show that the participants were disadvantaged in many areas during their transition and the support received were limited. From the findings, the care leavers were lacking stability, encouragement and both emotional and adequate practical support after being discharged from care.

Dans un contexte général caractérisé à la fois par la dépopulation et une forte mortalité infantile, la IIIe République manifeste dès ses débuts une volonté politique sans précédent envers la protection de l’enfance. Entre 1874 et 1923, environ 800 enfants sont admis à l’Assistance publique dans les Basses-Alpes, un effectif restreint lié principalement à la faiblesse démographique de ce département rural et montagneux du sud-est de la France. Il s’agit le plus souvent de nouveau-nés abandonnés par leur mère célibataire, victime de l’opprobre social, mais on admet également des orphelins pauvres et des enfants légitimes négligés ou maltraités. Dès leur admission, les enfants sont placés dans des familles nourricières. Vers treize ans, garçons et filles sont en général placés à gages en domesticité. Si la situation globale des pupilles s’améliore indéniablement au cours de la IIIe République, la stigmatisation dont ils sont l’objet apparait flagrante, et un certain nombre d’entre eux demeurent taraudés par le désir de percer le secret de leur histoire. / ABSTRACT: In a context characterized by depopulation and high infant mortality, the Third Republic shows its early political desire to protect children which makes this period particularly relevant to observe from the point of view of the vulnerable population of assisted children: as wards of the State, they are likely to benefit more than other children from the new legislation in favour of health, education and work.. Between 1874 and 1923, about 800 children are admitted to Public Care in the Basses-Alpes, the small number reflecting the sparse population of this rural and mountainous department of the south east of France. It is most often new born babies who are admitted, abandoned by their single mother, victims of social stigma, but also orphans and legitimate children who are neglected or abused. Upon admission, children are placed in foster families who raise and educate them with varying degrees of commitment, but always under the control of the Inspector of Public Assistance. Until the age of thirteen, these young wards live pretty much like most children living in the countryside, that is, working on the family farm as well as going to school (which becomes compulsory in 1882.) Subsequently, both boys and girls are generally placed in domestic service on the farms or less often as servants in the city. During these challenging times, as with all young people, they experience friendship, love, and adventure. However, if the overall situation of the wards is undeniably improving during the Third Republic, nevertheless they continue to suffer from a pervasive social stigma, which drives some of them to search for the truth behind their story.

The purpose of this study is to examine the situation of the school for boys 15-21 years of age lacking compulsory school attendance and is being located at five residential care units from the pedagogues’ point of view. The study was conducted by interviewing four pedagogical leaders and two teachers. The results demonstrate that the boys can choose the subjects they study as well as the amount of time they spend on studying each week. The teachers include non-learning activities during their lessons. Some of the pedagogues’ teach at a ninth grade level regardless of the boys' actual level. The boys have access to books. The pedagogues explained that they have a good relationship with the boys and that they noticed a lack of interest from the care workers regarding the boys' education. Most of the situated boys lack complete grades from the ninth grade when they leave the residential care unit. The major findings of this study are that the residential care units don’t offer education in all subjects in ninth grade. The pedagogues’ describe that they are afraid of insulting and scare the boys away from the school which affects the education of the boys.

The aim of this study was to examine whether certain background variables (sex, age group, reasons for placement, amount of problems, involuntary placement/voluntary placement) affect the probability of children/youths being placed in emergency homes (jourhem) and whether these variables correlate with the occurrence of placement breakdown. The material consists of 445 requests for children/youths to be placed in emergency homes in six municipalities within the Stockholm region during a three-year-period (2016-2018). Frequency tables, cross tables and simple and multiple logistic regression were used to analyze the data and Bronfenbrenner's theory of developmental ecology was used as the theoretical framework. Results show that emergency homes differ from other types of placement in some regards: behavioral problems reduced the probability of placement occurring significantly compared to problems relating to the parent's abilities as a caregiver. Youths had a significantly higher risk for placement breakdown than children. Involuntary care reduced the likelihood of placement occurring and increased the risk for placement breakdown compared to voluntary placement. The prevalence of placement breakdowns was similar to the figures found in prior research on other forms of placements. The implications for social work and the need for further research is discussed.

This master’s thesis focuses on educational discourse as it appears in texts about reading promotion interventions directed towards children in public care and children in families with long-term financial assistance. Three case studies of interventions are presented: Skolfam, Paired Reading and Letterbox Club Sweden. The aim of the thesis is to investigate how the interventions are related to the Foucauldian concepts of governmentality, pastoral power, normalization and technologies of the self. The method used is based on the ideas and concepts of Michel Foucault, who deals with the different modes by which we as human beings perform our subjectivity in relation to discourses and institutions. The case studies analyse how reading and math activities are directed towards socially vulnerable children for the prevention of adverse outcomes and social exclusion in adulthood. The relationship between social problems and literacy are of central importance to the analysis. The results of the analysis reveal that the interventions are linked to liberal governmentality. The reading promotion activities are expected to change the children’s reading behavior and attitudes toward education. It is hoped that the interventions will achieve a self-regulating capacity among the children, in order to make them improve their school achievements. The underlying ambition is to form and shape subjects to become independent, democratic citizens who are capable of maintaining a life without long-termed social assistance.  The interventions are especially focused on supporting the foster parents to best meet the needs of the children in accordance with liberal governmentality. This is a two years master’s thesis in Archive, Library and Museum studies.

The educational outcomes of children in care, as they prepare for and eventually complete the transition out of care, have been the subject of a growing body of research. Despite the progress made, no unified theory of risk and protective factors associated with educational outcomes has yet arisen from the longitudinal, cohort, and cross-sectional studies conducted with youth in care. This dissertation presents three papers that examine the effects of risk and protective factors on a range of educational outcome variables. The studies follow the timeline of a young person preparing for transition, moving into supported transitional living, and then eventually exiting care altogether. Study 1 presents cross-sectional and longitudinal tests of the generalizability of many of the risk and protective factors identified by O’Higgins, Sebba, & Gardner (2014) in their systematic review of predictors of educational achievement among young people living in foster or kinship care. The cross-sectional sample consisted of 3,662 young people aged 12 to 17 years who were residing in out-of-home care in Ontario, Canada. An additional longitudinal sample was composed of a subsample of 962 young people from the cross-sectional sample who had also been assessed 36 months later with the AAR-C2-2010 during year 13 (2013-2014) of the OnLAC project. Supporting evidence for twelve of the twenty factors identified by O’Higgins et al. are revealed in the broad cross-sectional study and for the four factors that were found to predict change in academic success over a longitudinal timeframe suggest we are on the right track. Study 2 uses a lag-as-moderator approach to see if the time between assessments influences the predictive capacity of variables assessed when the young person was in care to predict educational variables evaluated when the youth had completed the transition to support independent living. Results from this thorough methodological study of gap length over six years of OnLAC data are encouraging: 87.5% of the predictors tested for statistical moderation effects by the length of time between assessments were shown to be stable predictors across all gaps (i.e., no moderation by gap length effect). Study 3 presents a pilot 12-month follow-up study conducted with young people at the point of a major transition within or from child welfare services, comparing their characteristics with those of samples from the general population. When assembled together, the three studies provide a foundation towards the formalizing of a list of risk and protective predictors of educational outcomes (namely, academic success, educational attainment, educational aspirations, and NEET status) originally selected from a systematic review that identified a range of factors to be associated with the educational outcomes of youth in care (O’Higgins, Sebba, and Gardner; 2014). Additionally, this dissertation presents a series of recommendations regarding the management and multiple imputation of missing data and the use of Lag as Moderator statistical methods in child welfare research.

<p>Syftet är att få samt skapa förståelse för hur en kommun resonerar inför införskaffandet av tekniska hjälpmedel. Köpbeslutsprocessen för B2B utgör den teoretiska grunden. En kvalitativ undersökning i form av semistrukturerade telefonintervjuer genomfördes och totalt intervjuades elva respondenter. Slutsatsen är att på nämnd- och tjänstemannanivå finns ett tydligt intresse för ny teknik. Fördröjande faktorer för implementeringen av tekniska hjälpmedel är snarare personalens skepsis och ej anpassade förhandlingsdirektiv. Resultaten pekar dock på att marknaden för tekniska hjälpmedel kommer att växa.</p> / <p>The purpose is to gain and create an understanding of how municipalities argue at the prospect of procuring technical aids. The Buying Decision-making Process for B2B is the theoretical base. A qualitative study made up by semi-structured telephone interviews was conducted and in total there were eleven respondents. The conclusion is that on a political and managerial level there is an evident interest for new technology. Delaying factors are the scepticism of the staff and out-dated directives for negotiations. The results do however indicate that the market for technical aids will grow.</p>

Syftet är att få samt skapa förståelse för hur en kommun resonerar inför införskaffandet av tekniska hjälpmedel. Köpbeslutsprocessen för B2B utgör den teoretiska grunden. En kvalitativ undersökning i form av semistrukturerade telefonintervjuer genomfördes och totalt intervjuades elva respondenter. Slutsatsen är att på nämnd- och tjänstemannanivå finns ett tydligt intresse för ny teknik. Fördröjande faktorer för implementeringen av tekniska hjälpmedel är snarare personalens skepsis och ej anpassade förhandlingsdirektiv. Resultaten pekar dock på att marknaden för tekniska hjälpmedel kommer att växa. / The purpose is to gain and create an understanding of how municipalities argue at the prospect of procuring technical aids. The Buying Decision-making Process for B2B is the theoretical base. A qualitative study made up by semi-structured telephone interviews was conducted and in total there were eleven respondents. The conclusion is that on a political and managerial level there is an evident interest for new technology. Delaying factors are the scepticism of the staff and out-dated directives for negotiations. The results do however indicate that the market for technical aids will grow.

Background: The implementation of the Care Matters: Transforming the Lives of Children and Young People in Care Green Paper (Department for Education and Skills, (DfES) 2006) and the subsequent Care Matters: Time for Change White Paper (DfES, 2007), witnessed the consolidation of a universal ambition to improve the opportunities for all children living in care. Arguably, the most important recommendation in this pursuit is reflected in the need to provide people who have lived in care as children with independent support, which enables them to discuss their experiences, and suggest ways in which the care system might be improved. However, whilst this recommendation has been implemented with a diverse range of care leavers, the impact of the experience of living in care and the associated disadvantage experienced by Travellers and Gypsies remains under researched, understated, and unacknowledged (Cemlyn et al., 2009). Methodology: Guided by the philosophical assumptions of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), this study represents and constructs the experience of living in public care by focusing on the voices 10 Travellers and Gypsies who lived in care as children. Testimonies were collected through a wide variety of methods that included face-to-face interviews, focus groups, telephone interviews, blogs, emails, letters, song lyrics, and poems. Findings: Following a considered application of IPA, six main themes emerged from the analysis. These were social intervention; an emotional rollercoaster of separation, transition, and reincorporation; a war against becoming settled; leaving care and the changing relationship with the self and others; inclusion and strength; and, messages for children living in care. In line with the tenets of phenomenology, these findings are presented in such a way to as to invite the reader to move away from their own personal understanding of the world in order to enter the ‘lifeworld’ (Husserl, 1970, 1982) of Travellers and Gypsies who lived in care as children. However, to assist in this sense making activity, this study also provides a discrete interpretation of the findings before developing this knowledge to form a more detailed theoretical construct entitled ‘the model of reflective self-concepts’. Taken together with the testimonies of each person who took part in the study, the thesis enables an understanding of how the experience of living in care is inextricably linked to a process of social and psychological acculturation. By staying close to the experiences provided, it reveals how a process of change is determined, more often than not, by a sense of personal resilience directly related towards a Traveller or Gypsy self-concept. In attempt to move towards service improvement, this thesis offers a series of recommendations and conclusions which aim to support social workers and carers empower Traveller and Gypsy children to develop a secure Traveller and Gypsy self-concept thus enabling them experience improved outcomes including those opportunities set out in Care Matters social policy agenda (DfES, 2006; 2007).