Blogs/Web Pages/Articles Safer Compared to What? The Imprint 2025 Safer Compared to What? (2025) is a December 2025 published in The Imprint. Writer Richard Wexler explores findings from a recent Swedish study that “followed children in more than 21,000 cases of child abuse or neglect allegations”. Some of the sample children were in foster care, the others remained in their families of origin. The study found though… “…the two groups were no worse off to begin with, by age 20, the foster children were more than four times more likely to have died than the children allowed to stay with their families.” The lead researcher found the results “staggering”. According to Wexler, there are other studies (included in the article) which show that “family separation” is “inherently harmful”, that so often foster children do worse than those left with their families. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir A Tuesday Thing Kate Shayler 2004 The heartwarming sequel to The Long Way Home. A Tuesday Thing starts with a young adult Kate striving to be accepted as normal among her peers. Lacking the confidence, her dreams and expectations of ever becoming a member of a real family seem to evaporate. She starts an early childhood course at university but just as her teaching career brings her joy and new challenges, the dark secrets from her past resurface and Kate must face her demons - particularly the father who robbed her of a childhood but at the same time never stopped loving her. External Website

Television Shows Shadow and Bone 2021 Alina Starkov grew up in an orphanage. After she grows up and becomes a soldier, she discovers that she can "summon the light", an ability that means some powerful people take an interest in her. The fantasy series is based on Leigh Bardugo's Grishaverse books and the world of Ravka. External Website

Academic Books & Book Chapters The Scars Remain: A Long History of Forgotten Australians and Children's Institutions Nell Musgrove 2013 The Scars Remain presents the long history of placing Australian children in institutions, putting a human face on child welfare systems which have, over the course of more than two hundred years, touched the lives of hundreds of thousands of children as well as their families and friends. It explains how institutions which claimed to care for children could do greater harm than good, and challenges the mythology of egalitarianism which often shapes Australian histories. External Website

Authors F Freud ➝ Fearless ➝ For All Mankind ➝ First Dates ➝ Father Brown ➝ Fred & Rose West: A British Horror Story ➝ Fool Me Once ➝ Back to Top

Radio & Podcast Jackie Kay Desert Island Discs 2016 In this broadcast, Kirsty Young interviews Jackie Kay, adoptee, writer and playwright. Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father but was adopted by a white Scottish couple. She talks about her kind and generous adoptive parents, and about much later meeting both biological parents. During the program, Jackie selected music by other Care Experienced People: Bessie Smith, Ella Fitzgerald and Ray Charles. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Secrets of the Sea House Elisabeth Gifford 2013 Ruth has been raised in children's homes after losing her mother as a young child. Her mother always told her that she was a Selkie, one of the seal people and eventually her mother would return to the sea. Ruth prefers this version to the official death certificates: suicide by drowning. As an adult, Ruth returns with husband Michael to her mother's native Hebrides. This is a new start for them both in an old manse they're renovating. However during the works they make a gruesome discovery: the buried remains of a special child. This body has been there for over a century, since Rev Alexander Ferguson's time and, as the years roll back to reveal its origins Ruth realises this isn't the only surprise awaiting her. Scotland, 1860. Reverend Alexander Ferguson, naïve and newly-ordained, takes up his new parish, a poor, isolated patch on the Hebridean island of Harris. His time on the island will irrevocably change the course of his life, but the white house on the edge of the dunes keeps its silence long after Alexander departs. Based on a real nineteenth-century letter to The Times in which a Scottish clergyman claimed to have seen a mermaid, Secrets of the Sea House is an epic, sweeping tale of loss and love, hope and redemption, and how we heal ourselves with the stories we tell. External Website

Academic theses Hiraeth (a novel): Representations of Care-Experience in Literature Rosie Canning 2024 Hiraeth (a novel): Representations of Care-Experience in Literature. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis. Using a care-experience lens, Rosie Canning reflects on the practice of writing a novel and the representation of care-experience in literature. Hiraeth seeks to challenge stereotypical portrayals of young people in care, foster empathy, and explore how Canning's childhood experiences have shaped her creative process as both a reader and a writer. The novel is set between 1974 and 1976 and is narrated in third-person limited. The prologue introduces Mair, a young, unmarried Welsh woman who, in April 1958, gives birth to a baby girl at the summit of Snowdon, only to be forced to give her up for adoption. The narrative shifts to 1974, following sixteen-year-old Marianne as she leaves a children's home in Muswell Hill, where she has spent the last eight years. External Website

Writers AUTHORS U External Website

Television Shows The Mill 2013 The Mill is a TV series starring Kerrie Hayes, Ciaran Griffiths, and Barbara Marten. The hard labour of cotton mill workers in England from 1833 to 1842 - many of whom are orphans - and the abuse they endure is the main topic under discussion, along with the beginnings of the trade union movement. External Website

Films/Videos Nickel Boys 2024 Colson Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2020 for his novel The Nickel Boys (2019) which was based on the Florida School for Boys. Whitehead’s novel was adapted for film in 2024. The film stars Ethan Herisse as Elwood, a boy sent to Nickel Academy, a reform school. His friend in the school is Turner, played by Brandon Wilson. Nickel Boys has won a number of awards and been nominated for others, including 2 Academy Awards USA – Best Motion Picture of the Year and Best Adapted Screenplay. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Only: A singular memoir Caroline Baum 2017 Only, is a memoir of an unconventional childhood that explores what it means to be an Only Child -- as both child and adult. Also what it means to be the daughter of two people who were in foster care as children. External Website

Television Shows Strike 2017 Strike (also CB Strike) is a British drama series based on the Cormoran Strike series by Robert Galbraith (pseudonym for JK Rowling). In the series, Cormoran Strike (Tom Burke) is an Afghan war veteran now private investigator. He uses skills learned in the Specific Investigation Branch (military police) to solve cases that the police haven't been able to. In the first series, The Cuckoo's Calling, he investigates the supposed suicide of a supermodel, an adoptee. He discovers it was a biological member of her family who killed her. External Website

Academic Articles Fremantle: Reflections of a child migrant Michael McCarthy 2016 Michael McCarthy is a former child migrant. In this paper he reflects on his journey as six year old Michael May to Australia, of his time in St Vincent's Foundling Home in Western Australian and of being fostered to Tom and Irene Gollop. Many years later, he met with the woman who left him in a home because her husband was ill and when she returned to fetch him, was told he had been sent to Australia. External Website

Films/Videos Morvern Callar (Film) 2002 Alan Warner’s 1995 novel, Movern Callar, was adapted for film in 2002. The film stars Samantha Morton as Movern Callar, a young woman who was in foster care as a child. When finding that her boyfriend has killed himself, Movern sends his unpublished manuscript to the publisher he recommends – but claims the novel as hers. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir On Sunset Kathryn Harrison 2018 American writer Kathryn Harrison (b. 1961) was raised in the kinship care of her grandparents from the age of 6. Harrison was born in Los Angeles, California. Her young parents divorced when Kathryn was 6 months old. At the time, Kathryn and her mother were living with the maternal grandparents and they stayed there until, when Kathyn was 6 years old, her mother left home. In On Sunset (2018) Harrison weaves together stories of her own childhood with stories of the lives of her grandparents. Because her grandparents are elderly and not impressed by how Americans raise their children, she talks about what she has to endure (eg cod liver oil) and what she misses out on (eg watching The Brady Brunch). External Website

Authors M Manifest ➝ Marriage ➝ My Parents Are Aliens ➝ Mystery Road: Origin ➝ Man on Fire ➝ Mr Mercedes ➝ My Life with the Walter Boys ➝ McDonald & Dodds ➝ Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries ➝ Murder is Easy ➝ My Mum Tracy Beaker ➝ Maryland ➝ Back to Top

Autobiography/Memoir Half and Half: The Memoirs of a Charity Brat 1908-1989 Charles Nalden (autobiography) 1989 Born in 1908, he spent a grim, almost Dickensian childhood in London's Foundling Hospital. At 14, the Army was the only option, and he found himself, in uniform, working towards a career as a bandmaster. The whole story, much of it heart-rending, would eventually be revealed in an autobiography, Half and Half: The Memoirs of a Charity Brat 1908-1989. When it was time to leave England, Nalden chose New Zealand over India and Germany, opting for an academic life over that of a bandmaster. External Website

Television Shows Traces 2019 There is a Care Experienced character in the 2019 British series, Traces. Emma Hedges is a young university graduate who returns to her home town of Dundee to take up a job as a lab technician at the Scottish Institute of Forensice Science (SIFA). Emma has been living in Manchester with her aunt since she was 7, after the murder of her mother. Back in Dundee, Emma feels compelled to ask questions about the unsolved case. External Website

Poets John Keats John Keats John Keats (1795–1821) was an English Romantic poet. He was the eldest of four children and had a happy stable childhood until his father died in 1804. John's mother quickly remarried, and as quickly separated, moving her family in with John's maternal grandmother, and abandoning them. She returned in 1808 but died in 1809, when John was fourteen. School and literature became refuges for John. In order to have a stable career, in 1811 he became apprenticed to a surgeon. Keats' poems were in publication for only four years before he died but his fame grew posthumously. Today his poems are amongst the most analysed in English literature. External Website