Guided by the life course principle of expected ‘diversity in life course trajectories’ this paper identifies the pathways taken through education among 18 care-experienced adults (aged 24–36) in Ireland and some of the experiences and events that influenced these pathways.

This small pilot project was conducted to start to understand and compare the situation of grandmothers caring for children in a diverse range of countries when their parents are in prison.

In this article the authors attempt to disentangle different aspects of potentially harmful care for looked after children, as well as to discuss potential pathways to more systematically approach and report adverse events for this group.

This paper sets out to explore why formal kinship care has emerged in such a marked way in recent decades by investigating the emergence and development of formal kinship care in two neighboring jurisdictions in Europe where it now accounts for a substantial proportion of all care placements in Scotland and Ireland.

This study extends the research on the experiences and outcomes of siblings in care by comprehensively mapping sibling networks both within and outside the care system and measuring sibling estrangement (living apart and lack of contact) over time among children in Scotland.

Given that research identifies parental experiences of shame and humiliation in the child protection process, this article reports on a qualitative study that investigated how and why parents experienced such emotions within the English system.

This paper considers the importance of material objects for looked after and adopted children integrated as part of life story work practices.

This paper asks how state parental responsibility towards unaccompanied minors is given meaning, and with what consequences, for both frontline workers and unaccompanied minors alike?

This study examined the possible differences in educational level by comparing Finnish national register data for 814 former reform school (RS) residents in four cohorts (placed in out-of-home care in 1991, 1996, 2001 and 2006) to 4021 of their peers in the general population matched by gender, age, and place of birth.

The article examines from a comparative perspective how Sweden and Germany reacted to the unprecedented increase in unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASC) in 2015. By illustrating the reactions of two countries, the study shows that an unprecedented wave of refugees/asylum seekers can trigger both more incremental, adaptive and drastic transformative policy changes.