This report makes a series of recommendations on issues affecting all types of care, including foster care, adoption, kinship care, children’s homes, and support for disabled children in the UK.

This study, conducted in the UK, aimed to better understand the experiences of foster carers who are caring for children who have experienced trauma and loss.

This Norwegian study examines how unaccompanied refugee minors in foster care (re)create a sense of home over time, identifying security, familiarity, and autonomy as key intertwined aspects. It underscores the dynamic role of past experiences, present circumstances, and future aspirations, emphasizing the need for foster parents and child welfare workers to support cultural, relational, and personal continuity.

In Norway, legislation requires consideration of a child’s culture in all phases of child welfare work. Through a quantitative content analysis of 285 child welfare expert assessment reports, the authors explored experts’ utilisation of a cultural perspective, comparing reports concerning immigrant and non-immigrant background children.

In this paper, two researchers with backgrounds in ethnography describe and reflect on their experiences from a qualitative, transnational study called 'Back to the Future: Archiving in Residential Children's Homes (ARCH) in Scotland and Germany. Important goals of the study are the investigation and development of digital community archives for young people, care workers and care leavers from residential homes in order to support their memories of shared everyday life.

This article explores how infants’ rights in alternative care are understood and advocated for by practitioners in Finland, drawing on interviews with foster carers, social workers, and other professionals. The findings show that advocacy is driven by recognition of gaps in standardised practice and is enacted through embodied, institutional, and structural approaches, highlighting the need for age-aware expertise to fully recognise infants as rights holders in care.

Using group-based trajectory modelling on Swedish children born 1990–1999, this study identified six distinct patterns of out-of-home care placements that varied in onset, duration, and type. Findings show greater parental disadvantage among children entering care earlier, highlighting the need for early intervention and family-centred prevention strategies.

An analysis of 14 national foster care policies across six European countries found that while most acknowledge children’s cultural, ethnic, religious, and linguistic backgrounds, they provide little concrete guidance on ensuring relational and cultural continuity—particularly for children with migrant backgrounds. The study highlights four policy patterns, including prioritizing adult over peer relationships, emphasizing parental contact over extended family or transnational ties, assuming Western cultural norms, and struggling to balance immediate care needs with maintaining cultural and relational connections.

This is a recording of a presentation Dr. Patricia Lannen, the principal investigator of the “LifeStories project”, delivered during a meeting of the Evidence for Impact Working Group of the Transforming Children's Care Collaborative on 2 October 2024. LifeStories is a 60-year longitudinal study of individuals placed in infant care institutions.

This briefing looks at what data and statistics are available about children in care to help professionals, and the organisations they work for, make
evidence-based decisions.