Search Results

Children's Fiction De røde sko - The Red Shoes Hans Christian Anderson ➝ Peter Pan in Kensington Garden J M Barrie ➝ The Finding Nina ➝ The Ghosts and Jamal Bridget Blankley ➝ An Angel for May Melvin Burgess ➝ Tarzan of the Apes Edgar Rice Burroughs ➝ Walk Two Moons Sharon Creech ➝ James and the Giant Peach Roald Dahl ➝ Being Billy Phil ➝ Anna Casey's Place in the World Adrian Fogelin ➝ Coram Boy Jamila Gavin ➝ Who Am I? The Diary of Mary Talence, Sydney 1937 Anita Heiss ➝ Home For a While (4-8 years) Lauren Kerstein ➝ The Jungle Book Rudyard Kipling ➝ The Willoughbys Lois Lowry ➝ Delly Duck (4-8 years) Holly Marlow ➝ Saffy's Angel Hilary McKay ➝ Lucky Button Michael Morpurgo ➝ The Cherub Series Robert Muchamore ➝ The Cat Who Saved Books Sosuke Natsukawa (Author), Louise Heal Kawai (Translator) ➝ Fablehouse E.L. Norry ➝ Escape from Cockatoo Island Yvette Poshoglian ➝ Mostly Mary Gwynedd Vulliamy Rae et al. ➝ When Marnie was There Joan G Robinson ➝ Don't Ask The Dragon Lemn Sissay (Author) Greg Stobbs (Illustrator) ➝ The Leftovers Eleanor Spence ➝ The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict Trenton Lee Stewart ➝ The Circus is Coming Noel Streatfeild ➝ The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Mark Twain ➝ Uprising Alex Wheatle ➝ Tales of the Weird, the Wild and the Wonderful Sophie Willan ➝ The Illustrated Mum Jacqueline Lawrence Wilson et al. ➝ Hetty Feather (novel) Jacqueline Wilson ➝ Refugee Boy Benjamin Zephaniah ➝ The Snow Queem Hans Christian Anderson ➝ Cinderella Giambattista Basile ➝ Madeline Ludwig Bemelmans ➝ Paddington Michael. Bond ➝ The Secret Garden Frances Hodgson Burnett ➝ The Boxcar Children Mysteries Gertrude Chandler Warner ➝ Tell me again about the night i was born Jamie Lee Curtis ➝ Oliver Twist (adapted) Charles Dickens ➝ Moonfleet J. Meade Falkner ➝ The Graveyard Book Neil Gaiman ➝ Pictures of Hollis Wood Patricia Reilly ➝ Strong and Tough Rico Hinson-King and Nick Sharratt ➝ What Mummies Are Made Of by Stephanie Hutton Storgy Kids ➝ Watch over me Nina LaCour ➝ Goodnight Mister Tom Michelle Magorian ➝ The Children of the New Forest Frederick Marryat. ➝ Flying High: The Story of Gymnastics Champion Simone Biles (4-8 years) Michelle Meadows ➝ Alone On A Wide Wide Sea Michael Morpurgo ➝ Henderson's Boys Robert Muchamore ➝ Close Your Pretty Eyes (11-13 years) Sally Nicholls ➝ Runaways E.L. Norry ➝ The Ruby In The Smoke: 1 (A Sally Lockhart Mystery) Philip Pullman ➝ The Star Outside My Window (8-11 years) Onjali Q. Rauf ➝ Harry Potter and the philosopher's stone J K Rowling ➝ The Bad Beginning (A Series of Unfortunate Events) Lemony Snicket ➝ Heidi Johanna Spyri ➝ The Mysterious Benedict Society Trenton Lee Stewart ➝ Fosterboy Rhian Taylor ➝ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain ➝ Home Girl Alex Wheatle ➝ The Lizzie and Belle Mysteries J.T. Williams ➝ We Are The Beaker Girls Jacqueline Wilson ➝ My Mum Tracy Beaker Jacqueline Sharratt Wilson et al. ➝ The Coral Island RM Ballantyne ➝ The Wonderful Wizard of Oz L Frank Baum ➝ Peter and Lotta's Christmas Elsa Beskow ➝ My Forever Family: from fostering to adoption Nicky Brookes ➝ A Little Princess Frances Hodgson Burnett ➝ The Wanderer Sharon Diaz Creech et al. ➝ The BFG (book) Roald Dahl ➝ Great Expectations (adapted) Charles Dickens ➝ Understood Betsy Dorothy Canfield Fisher ➝ The Small miracle Paul Gallico ➝ A Walz Through the Hills G.M. Glaskin ➝ The Invisible String (3-6 years) Patrice Karst ➝ The Water Babies Charles Kingsley ➝ Pippi Longstocking Astrid Ross Lindgren et al. ➝ Back Home Michelle Magorian ➝ Little Women Louisa May Alcott ➝ Anne of Green Gables (adapted) Lucy Maud Montgomery ➝ A Long Way Home Michael Morpurgo ➝ We Are Wolves Katrina Nannestad ➝ The Sound of Everything Rebecca Normal ➝ Pollyanna Eleanor H Porter ➝ I was a Rat! Or, The Scarlet Slippers Philip Pullman ➝ The Boy Who Built a Wall Around Himself (4-9 years) Ali Redford ➝ Dennis and the Big Decisions (2-5 years) Paul Sambrooks ➝ Jamberoo Road Eleanor Roberts Spence et al. ➝ Extraordinary Birds (8-12 years) Sandy Stark-McGinnis ➝ Ballet Shoes Noel Streatfeild ➝ The Unadoptables: Five fantastic children on the adventure of a lifetime Hana Tooke (Author), Ayesha L. Rubio (Illustrator) ➝ Homecoming: Volume 1 Cynthia Voight ➝ My Bright Shining Star Fatima Whitbread (Author), Rhian Wright (Illustrator) ➝ Dustbin Baby Jacqueline Sharratt Wilson et al. ➝ Midnight Jacqueline Sharratt Wilson et al. ➝ Otto Tattercoat and the Forest of Lost Things Matilda Woods ➝ Back to Top

Authors A The Snow Queem ➝ De røde sko - The Red Shoes ➝ Little Women ➝ Back to Top

Films/Videos The Red Shoes (film) 1948 The Red Shoes (1948) is a British dance drama film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, based on Hans Christian Andersen’s 1845 fairytale. It follows aspiring ballerina Victoria Page, who joins the prestigious Ballet Lermontov under the demanding impresario Boris Lermontov. Cast as the lead in a ballet adapted from Andersen’s story, Victoria must navigate the relentless demands of art, her ambition, and her love for composer Julian Craster. As her career soars, she faces impossible choices between love and professional success. Ultimately, caught between loyalty to her art and her heart, Victoria tragically mirrors the fate of the Andersen heroine, her life and death inseparable from the symbolic power of the red shoes. External Website

Terry Galloway is a UK social justice campaigner with lived experience of the care system. He spent much of his childhood moving through the care system, living in over 100 placements, and facing trauma, instability, and discrimination. His sister Hazel, who also grew up in care, faced significant challenges and was killed by her partner — a personal loss that deepened Terry’s commitment to systemic change. After leaving care, Terry worked in a range of jobs before dedicating himself to advocacy. To support his campaigning work, he set up his own business and later a not-for-profit providing supported accommodation for care leavers. Norman Galloway Homes is a not-for-profit organisation providing supported accommodation and person-centred jobs programmes for care leavers aged 16–25 to help them build relationships, develop essential life skills and transition into independent living. He also co-founded the Care Leaver Offer comparison website, and serves as a trustee of NYAS (National Youth Advocacy Service). Terry leads a national campaign to have care experience recognised as a protected characteristic  under law, aiming to reduce discrimination and ensure policy makers account for the needs of care-experienced individuals. The campaign aligns with recommendations from the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care (IRCSC) , which endorsed making care experience a protected characteristic under the Equality Act. With national legislative change not yet achieved, the campaign has successfully persuaded over 120 local councils to adopt motions to treat care experience “as if it were a protected characteristic”  in their own policy framework. These motions typically commit councils to: consider care experience in equality impact assessments; involve care-experienced people in policy development; extend corporate parenting principles; and encourage wider bodies to adopt similar commitments. Together, Terry Galloway’s lived experience, service delivery, and policy advocacy have driven tangible change in how care-experienced people are recognised and supported across the UK.

Chris Wild is a UK-based activist, author, speaker, care system consultant, national advisor, and charity supporter advocating for children and young people impacted by the care system. Drawing on his own lived experience of growing up in care after the death of his father, Chris speaks publicly about systemic failures, trauma, and the long-term barriers faced by care-experienced individuals. His work includes public speaking, media engagement, policy advising, and partnerships with organisations focused on trauma-informed support, equity, and youth empowerment. Chris returned to the care system as a care worker, hoping to make a difference. Instead, he found a system largely unchanged, still failing the very children it was meant to protect. In Damaged , Chris shares his own harrowing experiences alongside the stories of the boys, girls, men and women he met along the way, exposing a broken system and demanding urgent action to protect Britain’s forgotten children. The State of It: Stories from the Frontline of a Broken Care System   extends this analysis to the wider impacts of systemic failures and offers insights on what must change. Through his writing, Chris amplifies the voices of those often unheard and frames care reform as a social justice imperative. In addition to his writing and advocacy, Chris works with other campaigners such as Terry Galloway on efforts to have  care experience  legally recognised as a  protected characteristic  under the UK’s Equality Act 2010. This campaign seeks to ensure that discrimination linked to care background is treated with the same legal seriousness as other protected characteristics, and has seen growing support from local authorities and civil society groups across the UK. Parliamentary debates have acknowledged the joint work of activists including Chris and Terry on this issue, which aims to embed care experience more firmly into equality policy and decision-making processes.

By Paris Bartholomew Peeling off my polo neck, I heard a sharp intake of breath from my  school  nurse and saw her eyes widen as she scanned my body. I was six years old and my skin looked like a battleground: burns on my arm where it had been held over a flame, blue-black bruises from where I’d been hit with a belt, scars all over my scalp & a feeling of terror that followed me like a cloud. The school nurse was accompanied by the lovely lady from the NSPCC, who gave me my first ever toy, a small black and white dog called Snoopy. I spent two weeks in the local hospital. The assessment and x-rays - which seemed relentless - had a two-fold purpose: to ensure I was not suffering from any internal damage & to piece together the awful experiences I had endured. The evidence of previously broken bones was what caused my mother to be arrested on suspicion of child abuse. After hospital, I was placed in an assessment centre, a large, brick building, devoid of windows, with high barbed-wire fencing all around the perimeter. There were 4 sections, an education facility on the premises, and residential staff who worked various shifts. I resided in section A, and section B, C and D housed the children who had behavioural and learning difficulties. Back then, the terminology was very different and full of negativity and offence. I recall my first night. With the light off and the glow of light under my door as a guide, I got up to use the toilet and realised my bedroom door was locked. I crawled back into bed tired, confused and sad. That night was the first time I had wet my bed in many years. Mum was convicted of multiple counts of abuse, neglect and what was termed ‘failure to thrive’, meaning she had consciously did what she could to prevent me growing and developing in a healthy and happy way. She was sentenced to four years in prison. Her ‘two-year reign of terror’ was splashed over the newspapers. However, I was astute enough to know that this was not something that had started two years ago. She served eighteen months in an all-female prison in North London called Holloway, spending most of her time in isolation to protect her from the abuse she would endure if her fellow inmates knew why she was there. I think about that protection she had while incarcerated, and the lack of protection I had from her as a child and, on reflection, it seems somewhat ironic. Even now I feel a sense of anguish at what I endured at the hands of my Mum. At Christmas, everyone went ‘home’ to their respective families, at which point it slowly dawned on me that my life was different, that I was different, in many ways. The staff expressed concern, as I was the youngest child and the only child who remained for the duration of the holidays. I ate lovely Christmas food for the first time, and I received my first life-size doll, who I named Kathy. A white member of staff, (I nicknamed him My Fox in my mind, as his hair was the colour of fox’s fur), had tried to wash my afro hair. He used a bar of soap, and I recall the pain as my hair matted into a clump and he tried to comb it. I began crying, and he said it was best if they cut my hair off. When the other children came back after Christmas, they decided I was no longer a girl & I was teased relentlessly. My short hair had turned me into a boy overnight, and for the second time in a short period, I realised I was different from the other children. When my dad came to visit me, he was sad and angry that my hair was gone, he wanted to know who had cut it & why they had done so. Once I left Luton House, I was placed in my first children’s home. This was a large, country-style house in Essex which housed around 22 children from ages 2 to about 17 years of age. I enjoyed having other children my own age to play with, and I felt safe - for the first time in my life, I actually felt safe. But I also felt anguish, as I thought about my mother, the prison and what that was like for her. I didn’t blame myself, but I didn’t want her to be locked up. In my eight-year-old brain, prison was a scary, dark, horrible place where people were treated badly and given very little to eat and drink. I envisaged her eating bread with no butter and drinking only water. One of the children had found out my Mum was in prison and had given me a picture of what prison was like. I never questioned his idea as he was bigger than me and older, so he knew what he was talking about, surely. It was at this point in my journey that I began to look at food differently, a sense of loyalty to Mum and a strange desperate feeling of being out of control, made me limit my food intake. I no longer enjoyed the strange, unfamiliar food I was given, and apart from the sweets I spent my pocket money on, I rarely ate. My keyworker at the children’s home informed me that an advert was being placed in the local paper for a new home for me. Initially, I felt excited and terrified. They asked me what I would like to be called, as they would change my real name to protect me, especially as my name was so uncommon.  Kathy, my favourite doll, that would be my name in the paper. There was a response to the advert, but it was hard to find black families with enough room to take in a child. But I was delighted when I met the Hendon* family. They had five children, one only 2 years old, so cute, although he was never keen on playing with me as he loved his cars and trains.  Julie* was the same age as me, and the only girl in the family. It was time for me to leave primary school, so we would attend school together, I was only a few months older, but I was in the academic year above her. We played together lots, but she was larger and stronger than me, and it wasn’t long before I was bullied into doing things I did not want to do, like shop lifting. It began with sweets and crisps, but soon led to bigger and more expensive items, and if I didn’t do it, she would hurt me. One day, I came into my bedroom to find the light off. It was bedtime, so I attempted to turn on the light switch to get ready for bed, only to be confronted with the bulb removed. Julie proceeded to jump onto my back, attacking me with a sharp object, which I later found out was my foster mum’s knitting needles. I tried helplessly to defend myself, but the muffled laughter in the background, as my foster brothers hid in the dark to watch the onslaught, gave me a dejected feeling of resignation. It was pointless. Julie reminded me that I was not welcome in her family. Kathy, my lovely life-size doll, had been damaged; Julie had cut off all her hair.  It wasn’t long before I asked to leave the family. I was unlucky! Four more families, with short stays in between in group homes, residential homes and a girl’s hostel, left me feeling displaced, unloved, and unwanted. For the next nine years in care, I bounced from place to place, never fitting in. Every family was different, culturally, racially, religiously and I found it increasingly difficult to stay positive and focussed, at school I began acting out. Racism from white staff members left me confused and alienated, I was called ‘a Bounty’ by the older black children, accused of being ‘brown on the outside’ but ‘acting too white’. I was criticised for not conforming with a family’s religion, and I was beginning to form an outer shell of anger and protection to protect myself from being attacked. I began isolating myself and reading books about twins who only communicated with each other, books about women, psychology, books which inspired me and gave me hope. Bell Hooks, Toni Morrison and Maya Angelo made a fierce and noticeable impression on me. They made me feel determined. I wanted to succeed, and I felt as if I could. I went to a conference led by an organisation called ‘Black and In Care’. It was the first time I was in a room filled with positive people who were all in foster care, children’s homes and other residential units. We spoke abut our experiences in smaller groups with people from Manchester, Bradford, Birmingham and Leicester, all mixed-race or black young people who were care-experienced, and most of the adults, the professionals, were people of colour too. For the first time in my life, I felt heard, seen, valued even. When Mum came out of prison, she sporadically visited me, but I noticed that these visits were less frequent if I lived in a family. She was odd, and I observed how untidy her home was in comparison to other places I had lived. When I confronted her about the abuse, she laughed at me and said I had been ‘brainwashed’ by Social Services. She said she was imprisoned because society was racist. I knew otherwise, and nothing she could say would change what I felt: I had never done anything wrong, not really, and I had never had any of my basic needs for love and protection met, while in her care. But what had hurt me the most emotionally, was the fact that these needs were not met while I was in care either. It might seem strange that I was able to forgive the woman who had ruined my life but deep down I knew it would help me heal. From the books I read about psychology, the way she spoke, the hoarding in her home and her general demeanour, I could tell she was mentally unwell.   I began to attend some group sessions organised by Black and In Care, the organisation which had held the conference, and I became a member of the Steering Group, then the Chair, leading the London arm of the organisation. I began sharing my perspectives with policymakers of what it had been like to live in care as a black child. This led to changes in the law - the 1989 Children’s Act. Foster carers were to be trained in understanding trauma and child development, and children from black and ethnic minority backgrounds were now being placed with foster carers from the same or similar cultural backgrounds. I felt so empowered. Mum had told me I would amount to nothing, and her words had penetrated deep. But she was wrong. Here I was, making life better for every young black person growing up in care. I knew I wanted to practice psychology, I wanted to help Mum and to use empathy and compassion to understand her and her struggles. I got a grant to do a degree in teaching, social work and youth work at Canterbury Christchurch University and as the years passed, I was drawn to jobs that helped people.  I volunteered for local charities, and I became a foster carer, fostering a little girl in 2014, helping me piece my heart back together. Jane* was unable to speak when she came to me, but with encouragement she started talking through singing & sign language. I gave her the love I had so desperately craved. I channelled my experience into a force for good, travelling the length of the UK as a motivational speaker, sharing my story and my expertise in psychology to inspire and motivate children in schools and professionals in business. And I continue to campaign for support for children in care. I’m currently an associate trainer for the Fostering Network, the UK’s largest foster care organisation, and I am a panel member for a private fostering agency, regularly reading reports and assessing prospective foster carers. I’m a motivational speaker, travelling the length and breadth of the UK to speak to children in schools, inmates in prisons, professionals in social work and teaching, therapeutic practitioners and as a keynote speaker at conferences and seminars to inspire change.   The number of children in care is set to rise to 100,000 by 2025. There is a shortage of foster carers in England and this needs to be addressed but much more is required across the care system, including more support when people transition out of care at the age of 21, more focus on helping LGBTQ+ children and, in my opinion, being in care should be a protected characteristic. Care leavers should be given a head start in life.  I feel passionate about awareness raising, research, and working with other organisations to develop positive interventions.   Long-term outcomes for care experienced people are shocking, with research across 16 countries showing a higher risk of social exclusion and marginalisation for former fostered young people ( Annick, 2011 ). Recent figures from England ( Department for Education, 2019 ) show 38% of those who leave care aged 19 to 21 are not in education, training or employment (NEET), compared with 11.6% for all young people. Another study reviewed the prevalence of mental health disorders among looked after children in the UK and found that around 1 in 3 had a diagnosed mental health condition with figures currently standing at 1 in 4 for the general population. Government statistics suggest that around 28% of adult prisoners are care experienced and one in four homeless people are previous care leavers or care experienced.   To anyone in care is reading this, I want to say:   “Believe in yourself. Don’t believe the rhetoric that you won’t achieve anything – I am proof that isn’t true. Get support and remember that being in care means you will be resilient and understand people better than anyone. Being in care is your superpower – remember that.”   Find out more about Paris here . Follow Paris on Twitter: @survivegrow