Continuing educational participation among children in care in five countries: some issues of social class

Abstract

Young people who have spent all or part of their childhoods in public care are at particular risk of social exclusion as adults and yet the pathway out of exclusion identified by policy-makers at both European and national levels, namely, education, is very difficult to access. Using data from a five-country study of the post-compulsory educational pathways of young people in public care, this paper examines the rates of participation of young people in further and higher education and considers what might account for the gap, looking at two factors: the impact of background social class on educational support and the educational intentions and practices of the care system. The paper concludes by considering the policy context and some possible tensions between policy aims and young people’s contexts and experiences.

Keywords:

• class
• comparative

Acknowledgements

The research leading to these results received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement no. 217297. The research project was undertaken by a team of cross-national researchers from: the Danish School of Education University of Aarhus, Denmark; the Institute for Social Policy and Labour, Hungary; the Research Institute on Quality of Life, University of Gerona, Spain; the Department of Social Work and the Department of Education, University of Gothenburg and the Thomas Coram Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London, England. All the researchers contributed to the research reported here but responsibility for this paper lies with the authors. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and not necessarily those of other partners or of the European Union.

Notes

1. While the UK was the partner country the focus of the research was England.

2. Reports and output from the study is available on the project website: http://tcru.ioe.ac.uk/yippee/.

3. Defined as including the following groups of occupations: small employers and own account workers; lower supervisory and technical occupations; semi-routine occupations; routine occupations and those who were long-term unemployed and never worked were also included (HESA 2009). These may be termed ‘working class’ occupations and the ‘wageless’.