How can we ensure that children in our care system get the best possible start to life?

Suitable for 14 to 19-year-olds (secondary and high schools, and college), this article and accompanying activity sheet can be used in the classroom or shared with students online.

This resource links to KS4 and KS5 sociology and psychology.

It can also be used as a careers resource and links to Gatsby Benchmarks:
Gatsby Benchmark 2: Learning from career and labour market information
Gatsby Benchmark 4: Linking curriculum learning to careers

• Every child needs someone to look after them. Sometimes, for many different reasons, a child’s birth parents are unable to do so. When that happens, the local authority helps to find them someone else to live with. This is the care system. Going into the care system is probably more common than you think: in the UK in 2020, over 100,000 children were in care.

• Through no fault of their own, being in the care system can be disruptive to a child’s upbringing, so researchers are working to understand how it can be improved. One of these researchers is Dr Dominic McSherry, a developmental psychologist at Ulster University, who has been studying the lives of hundreds of children in care. His project, the ‘Care Pathways and Outcomes Study’, has discovered that one of the keys to support children’s health and wellbeing is ensuring that children stay with the same carers over a long period of time.

• This resource also contains an interview with Dom about his career path. If you or your students have a question for him, you can submit it online – go to the article using the Futurum link below and scroll to the bottom of the page. Dom will reply!

• The activity sheet provides ‘talking points’ (based on Bloom’s Taxonomy) to prompt students to reflect on Dom’s work.

• The animation summarises the key points in Dom’s article and can be used as a standalone resource or together with the article and activity sheet.

This resource was first published on Futurum Careers, a free online resource and magazine aimed at encouraging 14-19-year-olds worldwide to pursue careers in science, tech, engineering, maths, medicine (STEM) and social sciences, humanities and the arts for people and the economy (SHAPE).

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