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Films/Videos Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story 2022 During the 2 part documentary (on Netflix) Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story, Welsh journalist Meirion Jones, speaks of being concerned as a small child at the free access Jimmy Savile had to Duncroft Approved School in Surrey. He would visit his aunt there; she was the Head of the School which housed girls aged between 15 & 17 who were regarded as "emotionally disturbed". Surrey police in 2015 said there were 46 sexual assaults by Savile of 22 of those girls while Savile was visiting there. There are other allegations of Savile sexually abusing children in other children's homes too. External Website

Authors F Larissa FastHorse ➝ Antwone Fisher ➝ Back to Top

Authors A Inside Out: An Autobiography ➝ Letters to Gil ➝ I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings ➝ Would It Surprise You To Know…? ➝ All at Sea: Memories of a Coram Boy ➝ Wards of the state: An autobiographical novella ➝ Thrown Away Child ➝ Mixed Blessings from a Cambridge Union ➝ Dirty Laundry ➝ Deliver Me From Evil ➝ Ushant: an autobiographical narrative ➝ A Place to Call Home ➝ Labeled: Ward of the State ➝ Fifty-One Moves. ➝ Let Me Tell You. Mending a Broken Childhood ➝ Back to Top

Authors T The people making a difference: the woman who created a community for fellow adult adoptees ➝ The Vatican's Children ➝ Intelligent women are dangerous, no?’ Samantha Morton on sexism, success and survival ➝ The care leaver who made a number one album ➝ Back to Top

Television Shows Pernille 2025 Netflix series: Pernille is a frontline child welfare service caseworker and single parent, balancing the demands of her job with caring for her two teenage daughters, teenage nephew (due to the death of her sister), and an aging father. Her professional role exposes her to vulnerable children—some neglected or abused—and she grapples with high-stakes decisions about child safety . External Website

News - broadcast, print, internet, magazine articles Grecce Simpliefies Citizenship Restoration Schengen News 2025 According to this article in Schengen News, Greece is working to facilitate a process of recognizing the citizenship of Greek-born adoptees. There are approximately 3,000 to 5,000 Greek-born adoptees (with the majority living in the USA) some of whom have made the request that they be re-registered as Greek citizens. Secretary General of the Ministry of the Interior, Nasos Balerbas has stressed “anyone born to a Greek citizen, even if they are adopted, and their parents ask to renounce Greek citizenship, has the right to take it back whenever they want.” External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Life She Was Given Ellen Marie Wiseman (4) 2017 The Life She Was Given (2017) tells the story of 9-year-old Lily Blackwood who, in 1931 and after years of being confined to the attic at her home, Blackwood Manor, is sold to a circus. Lily has albinism and her mother is ashamed of her. For years, Lily works several acts—such as the Ice Princess from Another Planet and the Albino Medium—without pay for Barlow Brothers’ Circus. Lily’s story is interwoven with that of 18-year-old Julia Blackwood, also of Blackwood Manor, who is left the property after the death of her mother in 1956. Like Lily, Julia can’t abide the ill treatment of animals and she rejects some of the old money-making practices at Blackwood Manor, such as having foals taken immediately from their mothers and fed elsewhere. Much of Julia’s story is devoted to what her parents had keep secret. External Website

News - broadcast, print, internet, magazine articles Living in Adoption's Emotional Aftermath The New Yorker 2023 A poignant and disturbing article by Larissa MacFarquhar for The New Yorker on the difficulties faced by adult adoptees. Deanna, for example, talks about how being adopted means you “first have to lose your entire family”. MacFarquhar writes about the different generations of adoptees in the US, such as those from the “Baby Scoop Era”, unmarried woman compelled to “relinquish” babies between the end of WWII and the passing of Roe v Wade in 1973. The majority of these would have been closed adoptions, whereas the most recent generation have open adoptions. She covers the history of adoptions from Korea, driven initially by Christians and often involving the adoption of children from orphanages who had living parents. MacFarquhar says: “You can divide adoption into three main categories: plausibly invisible…in which a child is adopted by parents of the same race; transracial adoptions; and international adoptions.” Also discussed is the “re-homing adoption adoption market, for children whom parents had adopted but didn’t want anymore, or couldn’t keep.” External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Donor Helen Fitzgerald 2011 Care Experienced people are crucial to the plot in The Donor (2011). Mum, who was in foster care, leaves her husband and twin daughters when the girls are three. She doesn’t re-enter their lives for 13 years when dad is desperately seeking a kidney transplant donor. Mum is so ravished from using heroin for decades her kidney is not an option. She is not only drug addicted, she’s also addicted to a fellow former foster kid, a violent man who beats her. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Mister Pip Lloyd Jones 2006 Mister Pip by NZ writer, Lloyd Jones, tells the story of a group of children on the Island of Bourganville being read Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. The initiative is that of the only white man left on the Island, Mr Watts, who says that he was orphan as a child in New Zealand. Bourganville is in the middle of a civil war and the story helps the children to 'escape' their difficult circumstances, at least for a while every day. 13-year-old Matilda is the protagonist and she describes her night time reflections on the day's readings and how her mother, a devout Christian, becomes disturbed by Matilda's fondness for the book. As a young adult, Matilda decides to investigate Dickens further for her PhD thesis, an investigation that, necessarily, involves a trip to England. Read this delightful review by Dr Dee Michell, link below. External Website

Children's Fiction Pictures of Hollis Wood Patricia Reilly 2002 Pictures of Hollis Woods is a 2002 young adult novel by Patricia Reilly Giff. The novel received a Newbery Honor Award in 2003. It was adapted for television in 2007. Hollis Woods is the place where a baby was abandoned is the baby’s name is an artist is now a twelve-year-old girl who’s been in so many foster homes she can hardly remember them all. When Hollis is sent to Josie, an elderly artist who is quirky and affectionate, she wants to stay. But Josie is growing more forgetful every day. If Social Services finds out, they’ll take Hollis away and move Josie into a home. Well, Hollis Woods won’t let anyone separate them. She’s escaped the system before; this time, she’s taking Josie with her. Still, even as she plans her future with Josie, Hollis dreams of the past summer with the Regans, fixing each special moment of her days with them in pictures she’ll never forget. Patricia Reilly Giff captures the yearning for a place to belong in this warmhearted story, which stresses the importance of artistic vision, creativity, and above all, family. External Website

Authors J Death in Holy Orders (Novel) ➝ Fifty Shades of Grey ➝ The Late Train to Gipsy Hill ➝ One Another (Novel) ➝ Paper Nautilus ➝ Innocent Blood ➝ Codename Villanelle ➝ The Orphan Master's Son ➝ The Fish ➝ The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignacius Sancho ➝ The Turn of the Screw ➝ The Orphan's Tale ➝ Mister Pip ➝ Hand Me Down World ➝ Back to Top

Autobiography/Memoir Tell No One Brendan Watkins 2023 In Tell No One One, Brendan Journey traces his footsteps in discovering his birth parents Brendan was 8 when he was told he was adopted (he grew up in Melbourne) – which made sense for him of why no one in his family looked alike. In his 20s, Brendan began seeking out his birth parents. He was surprised to find out that his birth mother was 27 when she ‘gave him up’. It took until 2018 before Brendan found out – via a DNA test – that he was “the son of a celebrated missionary priest.” Tell No One includes Brendan’s research on ‘children of priests’. External Website

Writers Kate Adie 1945- Kate Adie (b. 1945) was adopted as a baby. She studied at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and then began work at the BBC. By 1976 she was working as a journalist, covering major stories such as the Gulf War, the 1994 Rwandan genocide and, earlier, the Lockerbie bombing in 1988. Kate Adie retired in 2003 and has since worked as a freelance journalist and host of a document series on starting out life as a foundling. External Website

News - broadcast, print, internet, magazine articles Being homeless felt inevitable': after years in care, I was living in a tent. Who was to blame? The Guardian 2022 Daniel Lavelle is a UK based freelance writer, who has written for The Guardian on social problems including homelessness and mental illness. In this recent article, Daniel tells his own story of being in care, of doing night school while working full time, and of becoming homeless in 2013 towards the end of his university degree. The article is an extract from his soon to be published book: Down and Out: Suriving the Homelessness Crisis. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/may/12/being-homeless-felt-inevitable-after-years-in-care-i-was-living-in-a-tent-who-was-to-blame External Website

Behind the Scenes Paul Abbott Paul Abbott (born 22 February 1960) is an English television screenwriter and producer. When he was nine his mother left home to pursue a relationship with another man. His father, left two years later. Abbott and his many siblings were in the care of their pregnant seventeen-year-old sister. Although a compulsive truant, Abbott cites his English teacher at Barden High School as an early positive influence. Age 11 he was raped by a stranger, leading to him jumping from the roof of a multi-story car park in an attempt to take his own life. Two years later after another suicide attempt he was sectioned into an adult mental hospital for a short while, later becoming a voluntary patient. On his release, he was taken into foster care. He attended a local Sixth Form College and started attending Burnley Writers' Circle. Abbott enrolled at the University of Manchester in 1980 to study psychology but decided to leave to concentrate on writing when a radio play was accepted by the BBC. Abbott has become one of the most critically and commercially successful television writers working in Britain today, following his work on many popular series, including Coronation Street, Cracker and Shameless, the last of which he created. He is also responsible for the creation of some of the most highly acclaimed television dramas of the 1990s and 2000s, including Reckless and Touching Evil for ITV and Clocking Off and State of Play for the BBC. External Website

Authors T JRR Tolkien ➝ Back to Top

Authors W Integrating personal and professional experiences: Seven phases to integrating loss and grief. ➝ Oliver Twisted: the origins of Lord Voldemort in the Dickensian orphan. ➝ Lost Boys and Recovered Classics: Literary and Social Memory in Lorenzo Carcaterra's Sleepers (1995) ➝ Back to Top

Radio & Podcast Living in class limbo Today in Focus 2025 In this Today in Focus podcast, British writer Danny Lavelle talks with Helen Pidd about his experiences of Britian’s class society. He describes moving between classes, eg, living in a middle class situation when his mother moved in with a solicitor, but later going into the ‘care’ system and being homeless. Today, in his thirties, he is finding it difficult to buy his own home. Lavelle is the author of Down and Out: Surviving the Homeless Crisis (2022) in which he addresses some of these issues, especially the impact of UK government cuts. External Website

Children's Fiction The Boxcar Children Mysteries Gertrude Chandler Warner 1990 "The Boxcar Children" originally published in 1924, the series was written by Gertrude Chandler Warner, an American first-grade school teacher and follows the adventures of four orphaned siblings—Henry, Jessie, Violet, and Benny—who create a home for themselves in an abandoned boxcar in the woods. Today, the series includes more than 160 titles, with more being released every year. External Website