Children in institutional settings

Anne Longfield - The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health

In this commentary piece, Anne Longfield, Children’s Commissioner for England, explores the use of children's care homes in England and the need for improved supports to prevent placement in children's home and to provide for the needs of children and young people who are placed in these homes.

Institutionalisation and deinstitutionalisation of children: the Executive Summary from a Lancet Group Commission

Niall Boyce, Jane Godsland, Edmund Sonuga-Barke - The Lancet

This Executive Summary provides an overview of the Lancet Group Commission, which advocates global reform of the care of separated children through the progressive replacement of institutional provision with safe and nurturing family-based care.

File

Lancet Group Commission on the institutionalisation and deinstitutionalisation of children

Lumos Foundation, King’s College London, and Maestral - The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health and The Lancet Psychiatry

This Lancet Group Commission, published between The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health and The Lancet Psychiatry, advocates global reform of the care of separated children through the progressive replacement of institutional provision with safe and nurturing family-based care.

Preventing and Responding to COVID-19: Key messages to support those working with vulnerable children and families in Kenya

Republic of Kenya Ministry of Labour and Social Protection, Office of the Principal Secretary

This guidance is designed to inform child protection actors in Kenya in light of the COVID-19 crisis. It guides actions targeting, and services provided for, vulnerable children and families, including children living in institutions, children living on the streets, children with disabilities, and others.

File

Hindi Translation of Technical Note on the Protection of Children during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Children and Alternative Care

Better Care Network, The Alliance for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action, UNICEF and an Inter-agency Task Force

The aim of this Technical Note is to support child protection practitioners and government officials in their immediate response to the child protection concerns faced by children who are at risk of separation or in alternative care during the COVID-19 pandemic.

File

COVID-19 and children

UNICEF

This webpage from UNICEF links to the Policy Brief on the Impact of COVID-19 on children, the Dashboard on Data to inform the COVID-19 response, and other key data resources on COVID-19 and its impacts on children.

Joint Statement of The ASEAN Ministerial Meeting on Social Welfare and Development Mitigating Impacts of Covid-19 on Vulnerable Groups in ASEAN

Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)

This Joint Statement the ASEAN Ministers responsible for social welfare and development outlines their concerns and commitments to action regarding meeting the needs of vulnerable people impacted by the COVID-19 crisis, including children with disabilities, children deprived of liberty, and children in institutional care, among other groups.

File

Webinar Recording: COVID-19 - Responding to the Crisis of Care and Learning: Lessons from humanitarian contexts

Inter-Agency Network on Education in Emergencies (INEE), the Early Childhood Development Action Network (ECDAN) and the Moving Minds Alliance (MMA)

This webinar focused on Early Childhood Development in Humanitarian Settings in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Checklist to ensure EU-funded measures contribute to independent living by developing and ensuring access to family-based and community-based services

European Expert Group on the transition from institutional to community-based care with Hope and Homes for Children

The purpose of this checklist from the European Expert Group on the transition from institutional to community-based care, with Hope and Homes for Children, is to ensure EU funds in the 2021-2027 programming period contribute to independent living and inclusion in the community, including by supporting desk officers to check the consistency of the measures to transition from institutional to family-based and community-based services for children and the prevention of institutionalisation and separation of children, including with disabilities, from their families.

File

Not in Care, Not Counted - A legal loophole: homeless 16- and 17-year olds and unregulated accommodation

Kady Murphy & Natalie Williams - Just for Kids Law

This paper from Just for Kids Law (JfKL) explores an issue that the organization has come across through their work: cases of under 18s (mainly 16- and 17-year olds) in the UK who are facing homelessness and do not receive the support they are entitled to from local authority children’s services. 

File

Recent Immigrations in Spain and a Brief Approach to Unaccompanied Foreign Minors

Juan Ramón Ferreiro Galguera - Migration, Religion and Early Childhood Education

In this paper, after a historical introduction, the authors will refer, from a general point of view, to the current moment of immigration witnessed in Spain offering not only statistical data regarding this phenomenon but also legislation, and description of the policies carried out by the central and regional governments on issues like immigration, asylum and integration, with a particular focus on unaccompanied minors.

Family Treatment Court-Involved Parents’ Perceptions of their Substance Use and Parenting

Margaret H. Lloyd Sieger & Robert Haswell - Journal of Child and Family Studies

For this study, in-depth interviews with 17 currently or recently-involved parents in a Midwestern U.S. family treatment court, which are specialized child welfare dockets designed to address substance use, were conducted and analyzed using constant comparative coding, in order to understand parents’ perspectives on their own substance use, including its impact on their parenting, before and during child welfare system involvement.

Relational permanence and the potential for delinquency among African American adolescents in foster care

Abigail Williams-Butler, Jacquelynn F. Duron, Amanda Costantino, Adam Schmidt, Geri Hanten - Children and Youth Services Review

Relational permanence – a form of social support characterized by the presence of an ongoing caring and supportive person in the context of the foster care system – is the primary type of social relationship that is explored in this article. Regression analyses were conducted examining whether relational permanence predicted later delinquency.

The institutional shaping of children’s educational experiences in secure custody: A case study of a secure children’s home in England

Caroline Andow - International Journal of Educational Development

Through the lens of institutional ethnography, this paper explores how experiences of education inside one Secure Children’s Home in England are shaped by the institution.

Mental health and substance use in urban left-behind children in China: a growing problem

Feng Wang, Leesa Lin, Jingjing Lu, Jingjing Cai, Jiayao Xu, Xudong Zhou - Children and Youth Services Review

The purpose of this study was to examine the mental health status and substance use behaviors of urban left-behind children and urban children still living with their parents in comparison to rural left-behind children.

Child welfare and future assessments – an analysis of discretionary decision-making in newborn removals in Norway

Ida Benedicte Juhasz - Children and Youth Services Review

This study explores a particularly wide discretionary space set for decision-making within the Norwegian welfare bureaucracy; care order decisions concerning newborns directly removed from the hospital by the child protection system.

Substantiation of child maltreatment among parents with disabilities in the United States

Elizabeth Lightfoot, Mingyang Zheng & Sharyn DeZelar - Journal of Public Child Welfare

This article describes the first United States-based national study to compare the rates of substantiation of maltreatment among cases reported to child protective services involving caregivers with and without disabilities.

Why parenting matters for children in the 21st century: An evidence-based framework for understanding parenting and its impact on child development

Hannah Ulferts - OECD

This paper provides a structured overview of the existing parenting literature with the aim of developing an evidence-based and culture-sensitive framework of parenting and its influence on child development.

File

Understanding out of home care rates in Northern Ireland: a thematic analysis of mixed methods case studies

Will Mason, Kate Morris, Brid Featherstone, Lisa Bunting, Gavin Davidson, Claire Mccartan, Paul Bywaters, Calum Webb - British Journal of Social Work

Drawing on the narratives offered by child and family social workers, this paper considers a series of possible explanations for Northern Ireland (NI)'s significantly lower out of home care rates.

Basic education assistance module as a material and psychosocial support intervention for orphans and vulnerable children in Gutu District, Zimbabwe. An evaluation

John Ringson - New Ideas in Psychology

This article is a qualitative phenomenological study seeking to examine the perceptions, views and feelings of the orphans and vulnerable children (OVC), care-givers and community leaders on their experiences with Basic Education Assistance Module (BEAM) as a material and psychosocial support intervention in Zimbabwe.