More than 20 councils in England and Wales have paid the equivalent of £1m a year or more to place a single child in a private children’s home as the cost of specialised care soars, data released to the Guardian shows.

UN human rights experts today expressed concern about the situation of children with disabilities in Ukraine placed in institutions and being displaced to other institutional settings either within Ukraine or further afield.

Disabled children are being abused and neglected in institutions across Ukraine, UN experts have warned. The human rights officials said the war had made their situation even worse and called on the Ukrainian government to right its "historic wrongs".

Fourteen-year-old Serhii Sorokopud is still haunted by what happened when Russian tanks rolled into his village five months ago. He lifts his T-shirt to show the deep scars across his back -- a reminder of a trauma both hidden and visible.

The objective of this article is to identify those situations where the families of fostered unaccompanied migrant children are made visible in order to favor the incorporation of these families into the pathway planning. The fieldwork was carried out in Spain and involved working groups with specialized professionals.

Institutional rearing negatively impacts the development of children's social skills and executive functions (EF). However, little is known about whether childhood social skills mediate the effects of the foster care intervention (FCG) and foster caregiving quality following early institutional rearing on EF and social skills in adolescence. Participants included abandoned children from Romanian institutions

Luiza Baloh left her home in Dnipro, central Ukraine, in March. Fleeing the constant sound of explosions, she and her five children came to the Czech Republic hoping to find refuge. Instead, they found themselves behind a barbed wire fence in a repurposed immigration detention center that was, she says, dirty and full of strangers, some of whom were aggressive towards her and her children.

Coverage of the conflict in Ukraine has been a stark reminder of the pace and extent to which war turns lives upside down. The terrifying experience of conflict sees people turning to loved ones and places that are familiar and comforting. Children are no different. And yet, even before the war in Ukraine started on 24 February, for over 100,000 Ukrainian children the familiar wasn’t a family environment, but an institution.

This research highlights the importance of involving parents and their children in improving parenting skills and the reunification process by implementing parental education programs through a unique work plan. This study examined the experiences of families in the Spanish Child Protection System.

In July, Russian mortars rained down on a psychiatric home in northern Ukraine, while dozens of elderly and disabled residents were sleeping.

Flames soon swept through the facility’s dining room, and its dormitory and administration buildings were wrecked. Miraculously, only three people were injured. But it marks the latest in a series of deadly attacks in which some of Ukraine’s most vulnerable have been caught up in a savage conflict far beyond their control.