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Foster care and higher education: Sonia Jackson and Sarah Ajayi report findings from the first UK study of young people in care who go to university. They suggest that foster care could play a major role in enabling more looked after children to access higher education and complete their courses successfully.
- Article from:
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Adoption & Fostering
- Article date:
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March 22, 2007
- Author:
- Jackson, Sonia; Ajayi, Sarah
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Copyright informationCOPYRIGHT 2007 British Association for Adoption & Fostering. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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It is still an exceptional achievement for a young person in care to go to university. There are no reliable figures but the most optimistic official estimate is that six per cent of care leavers now continue into higher education. This represents an improvement on the one per cent estimate of the Social Exclusion Unit in 2003, but still compares very poorly with the figure of 39 per cent for the general school population. Two retrospective studies (one of them reported in this issue) found that some care leavers who have had little success at school return to education in their 20s and 30s, but they are almost certainly a small minority (Jackson and Martin, 1998; Mallon, ...