Voices from Care | Care Placements and Settling at School
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- Lack of communication between schools and social workers
- Coping with mental health issues
- Care planning, relationship with foster parents and care professionals
- Conclusion
“I had to meet a new family and that was stressful enough, and that stress would have impacted how I would have met new people in school and kind of worrying about meeting new people all the time in my new schools.”
“I was informed of being moved like the Friday beforehand and I was moved on Monday … I got home from school we just took all our stuff and then went to the new place and I feel like that can be quite, I don’t know, jarring to not know anything about the new people that you’re gonna go and live with.”
“In my secondary school my teachers weren’t informed, and it …. was literally the previous Friday I had got told. And by the Tuesday I had moved, and it was a case that the teachers hadn’t seen me, like the teachers didn’t even know where I was. … I basically disappeared for like 3 weeks and then the school got a phone call from the social workers because they needed I think an address or something like that. …. There is definitely a need to inform the schools.”
“And she [deputy principal] was saying to me how she was very angry with the social workers, that she hadn’t been informed that I’d be moving placement … but I remember feeling at that time kind of conflicted because I really liked my social worker… I think everybody who’s in the child’s life needs to be informed about the big changes that are happening.”
“I know a lot of people that are in care do suffer from mental health and stuff … You know, like there just needs to be more support there, … they don’t have that one person that they could go to and ask them for …. So, like a lot of them do drop out of education because of that, and I wouldn’t blame them for a drop.”
“A lot of it did come down to a lot of moving, not a lot of guidance, not a lot of the support for my academics and my mental health there. There was pretty much no help for mental health.”
“And when I turned 18, I got an aftercare worker, and I still did not know what I wanted to do. And I was pressured into going to college, even though I didn’t want to. And I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and it was affecting my mental health at the time, and it was making my anxiety really bad and other things were really bad at the time.”
“Uh, for me, my foster mom, she was on the parents committee team, so she kind of knew all the teachers and she kind of communicated with them on a regular basis about what is happening and what I was facing and that I think that was really good as well.”
“Yeah, maybe the last three and a bit years of my time in foster care, I wasn’t getting a lot of visits from my social worker. I wasn’t getting a lot of, you know, support from the outside.”
“I had a good relationship with my foster parents, so it was kinda like they were pushing me to do well in school, but then I had a different social worker after nearly every six months, which they didn’t understand, my struggles with school and my learning disabilities. So, they were kind of like pushing me beyond what I could actually do. My foster parents were trying to explain to them, but then my social worker would change and would be the whole thing again.”
“Well, … when I went to the different primary schools, my social worker had already kind of sorted it out with the principal. They knew that they were gonna kind of do it slowly, so that I wasn’t just like thrown into the school the first day. Like I was prepared. It was good that way that they did that transition for me. They helped me move in more, but then kind of as you get older, it’s different.”
“And in terms of the adults or who supported me while in care and I suppose, firstly, I think obviously my EPIC advocate would have been a huge support for my and education throughout which I think was very important because it’s just it backs you up when you’re speaking to social workers and it’s a huge support.”
Care Placements and Settling at School
This chapter explored the factors that influence care experienced children’s school adjustment. Change of schools may also reflect care placement shortages in Ireland, whereby it may prove challenging to find another foster family near the school that the child attends, in case of placement breakdown. Multiple moves may have an adverse impact on young person’s ability to adjust to new routines and rules, their educational outcomes, ability to form interpersonal relationships and their well-being. While consistency of placements is important, so is the quality of the placements. Proactive and supportive foster parents play a key role in supporting the education of young people in their care and helping them in developing aspirations for their future.
In addition to the foster parents, social workers can play an important role in supporting care-experienced young people, including help with adjusting to a new school. However, communication between social workers and school personnel may sometimes be insufficient. This is particularly problematic when a care-experienced young person has multiple and complex needs. Ineffective communication between schools, foster families and social workers could also reflect the turnover of the latter.