Child protection hypothetical case studies for a virtual archive : professional perspectives versus the lived experience and expertise of care leavers in Victoria, Australia
- Authors: Mendes, Philip , Wilson, Jacqueline , Golding, Frank
- Date: 2021
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: British Journal of Social Work Vol. 51, no. 7 (2021), p. 2626-2644
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- Description: For children in out-of-home care (OOHC) and adults who experienced OOHC as children, the records compiled by care workers, social workers and other relevant personnel present multiple ongoing problems. The records often embody deeply contested narratives that may include distortions and misinterpretations of facts, judgemental inferences, moralistic attitudes and other problematic aspects that can leave the care leaver at best ill-served and at worst profoundly distressed and traumatised. This article, an auto-ethnographic collaboration between a social work professional and two care leavers, aims to address these issues by constructing a 'virtual archive' consisting of several hypothetical records compiled in the style typically employed by caseworkers, which are then critiqued by the care leavers. In each case, the record is found to have significant shortcomings in terms of what is included or omitted, the tone, and implied judgements. The article concludes with a discussion that identifies a number of thematic issues and pitfalls intrinsic to the task of record-keeping in the OOHC context and makes recommendations aimed at achieving inclusive, rights-based processes and procedures in the creation and maintenance of records. © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Association of Social Workers. All rights reserved.
Transformative justice: transdisciplinary collaborations for archival autonomy
- Authors: Evans, Joanne , Wilson, Jacqueline , Lewis, Antonina , McGinniss, David , Altham, Siobhan
- Date: 2021
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Archives and Records Vol. 42, no. 1 (2021), p. 3-24
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- Description: Worldwide inquiries into childhood institutionalization repeatedly document systemic and enduring problems with fractured and fragmented recordkeeping and archiving systems that put the protection of organizations and institutions ahead of the safety and wellbeing of those in their care. As importantly, they demonstrate how much recordkeeping matters in people’s lives and the role that records play in developing and nurturing identity, connection to family, community, and culture, and as instruments of accountability, restitution, and redress. They highlight the transdisciplinarity inherent in recordkeeping endeavours, and for research and praxis in child welfare and protection to transcend disciplinary, professional, and community boundaries to ensure that systems created to protect children from neglect and abuse do not themselves cause harm. In this article we explore the transformative justice approach of the Archives and the Rights of the Child Research Programme, that, through transdisciplinary collaborations investigating rights-based recordkeeping, aims to advance archival autonomy, the ability of individuals and communities to participate in organizational and societal evidence and memory structures with their own voice. This broad re-imagining of recordkeeping is vital if we are to escape endless cycles of ambiguous and disappointing transitional justice outcomes, through recognizing voice and agency in recordkeeping as a human right. © 2020 Archives and Records Association. **Please note that there are multiple authors for this article therefore only the name of the first 5 including Federation University Australia affiliate “Jacqueline Wilson, David McGinniss, Siobhan Altham" is provided in this record**
Decolonizing recordkeeping and archival praxis in childhood out-of-home care and indigenous archival collections
- Authors: McKemmish, Sue , Bone, Jane , Evans, Joanne , Golding, Frank , Lewis, Antonia , Rolan, Gregory , Thorpe, Kirsten , Wilson, Jacqueline
- Date: 2020
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Archival Science Vol. 20, no. 1 (Mar 2020), p. 21-49
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- Description: This paper presents the aims and findings of two research projects-Rights in Records by Design and Indigenous Archiving and Cultural Safety-making particular reference to the ways in which Australia's current child welfare systems and their recordkeeping and archival praxis have been indelibly shaped by colonization and its legacies, which persist into the twenty-first century. We posit that the classist, heteropatriarchal, sexist and racist colonial constructs of child welfare, the neglected and criminal child, and Indigeneity persist to this day and continue to be embodied in the form and content of records and archives, as well as in the principles and values embedded in recordkeeping and archival systems. The paper begins with discussion of framing concepts drawn from records continuum theory and critical theory, followed by an overview of both projects. We then explore in-depth findings of the Rights Charter, Historical Justice, and Educational components of Rights in Records by Design and Indigenous Archiving and Cultural Safety with particular attention to colonial values and negative constructs of childhood and Indigeneity, respectively, and their impacts from colonial times to the present. Importantly, we discuss the intersection of constructs of childhood and Indigeneity with colonial values and constructs embedded in recordkeeping and archiving systems. We note that the primary purpose of recordkeeping in colonial times was to provide critical infrastructure that enabled imperial control and exploitation. Consequently, we point to the need for childhood recordkeeping and archiving itself to be decolonized, to embody constructs of the child as having agency and rights, and, in turn, to play its part in decolonizing childhood. Finally, we discuss the contributions that each project is making to decolonizing recordkeeping and archiving theory and practice, and the potential for decolonized recordkeeping and archiving to play their part in decolonizing childhood for children in out-of-home Care and Indigenous Australian children caught up in the Indigenous child welfare system, respectively.
Changing lives : Improving care leaver access to higher education
- Authors: Wilson, Jacqueline , Harvey, Andrew , Mendes, Philip
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Oxford Review of Education Vol. 45, no. 4 (2019), p. 573-586
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- Description: Australian and international research documents the limited access of young people transitioning from out-of-home care (OOHC) to further and higher education. This paper examines the processes, outcomes, and key findings of the Raising Expectations project, a collaborative university and industry approach to promote higher education among care leavers at two Australian universities. That approach was informed by the co-authors' previous research, including interviews with enrolled care-leaver students. The paper highlights the relevance of that research in the design and implementation of Raising Expectations. Our findings reiterate the importance of policy and practice reforms informed by rigorous research, particularly involving the voices and agency of care leavers. We outline strategies adopted by the participating universities resulting in a fourfold increase in enrolments, growth in school outreach activities, and significantly improved retention rates. The paper also highlights barriers to higher education access and success, through care-leaver student interviews and policy analysis. These interviews revealed the need for better university outreach and information to prospective care-leaver students, improved support for enrolled care-leaver students, and better capturing of data by universities and governments. The paper also highlights policy barriers to the greater expansion of care-leavers at university, especially in the absence of extended state care.
Grassroots activism heritage and the cultural Landscape: The loud fences campaign
- Authors: Wilson, Jacqueline , Reeves, Keir
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: What Is Public History Globally?: Working with the past in the present Chapter 19 p.251–264
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- Description: The meaning of cultural, or historic, landscape resides in both its aesthetic qualities and the memories and experiences it embodies. Cultural landscape is a complex of interwoven expressions of ideas, ideals, ideologies and aspirations, of layered and contested narratives, of shifting community identity. The connotations of a landscape are often highly personal, while simultaneously reflecting broad public values and sensibilities. This is especially true in the case of revered institutions of the sort that combine a key role in community history, a consciously profound aesthetic quality and a central place in the community’s spiritual life. Wherever it is present, the Roman Catholic church has long held a deeply significant place in the cultural landscape, in local history-making and in the urban aesthetic. Everywhere the church is strong in terms of numbers of the faithful; its ‘penetration’ of the social environment makes it highly visible, highly potent as a social agent and centrally important to the local social memory, even among non-Catholic and secular populations. The church embodies tacit narratives of moral and spiritual guidance and of participation in and shaping of the growth of communities’ civic historical identity – a dynamic relational status that exemplifies what has been termed ‘authorized heritage discourse’.[1]252 This notion of heritage as officially sanctioned practice bound up with the community’s defining narratives reveals something of a paradox. The very aspects by which it contributes to social stability and identity also render it vulnerable to the socially disruptive effects of any contestation of those narratives, especially when that contestation is revealed in ways that resonate with people’s personal connection with a collective historical consciousness. This chapter addresses some of the processes involved, and the issues that arise, when such disruptive histories become public fare."From introduction"
Lost and found: Counter-narratives of Dis/Located children
- Authors: Golding, Frank , Wilson, Jacqueline
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Children’s voices from the past Chapter 13 p. 305-329
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- Description: Conventional histories of children in institutional care are dominated by official voices justifying a coercive welfare system which isolated children from their families and silenced them publicly. But a succession of formal inquiries has motivated survivors of institutionalised childhoods to testify about atrocious maltreatment. Freedom of Information legislation gave survivors incentives to understand their time in “care” and to reconnect with families. However, many found personal records missing, while those that were located were woefully inadequate, often inaccurate, and painfully pejorative. Care-leavers are now asserting a developing counter-narrative that challenges the dominant narrative of previous eras. This chapter summarises a case that goes beyond traditional welfare archives to reveal a story of multi-generational welfare custody, exemplifying the historic ideology underpinning child welfare in Victoria.
Personalised narratives of war and teaching engaging history
- Authors: Wilson, Jacqueline , Reeves, Keir
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Historical Thinking for History Teachers : A New Approach to Engaging Students and Developing Historical Consciousness p. 180-193
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Remembering dark pasts and horrific places: Sites of conscience
- Authors: Ashton, Paul , Wilson, Jacqueline
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: What is Public History Globally? Working with the past in the present 21 p. 281-294
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- Description: In 1947, the Polish government decreed that what remained of the Auschwitz-Birkenau-Monowitz death camps was to be kept to memorialize ‘the martyrdom of the Polish nation and other peoples’ under the Third Reich during the Second World War.
- Description: In 1947, the Polish government decreed that what remained of the Auschwitz-Birkenau-Monowitz death camps was to be kept to memorialize ‘the martyrdom of the Polish nation and other peoples’ under the Third Reich during the Second World War. The O
Strengthening the evidence base to improve educational outcomes for Australians in out-of-home care
- Authors: Harvey, Andrew , Wilson, Jacqueline , Andrewartha, Lisa
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Education in out-of-home care : international perspectives on policy, practice and research p. 47-60
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- Description: Postsecondary education outcomes of Australian care leavers are not systematically documented. Complexities of a federal system of government, and the early conclusion of corporate parenting responsibilities (usually when those in care reach 18 years of age) have restricted the ability to track educational progress. Historically, a lack of national data on care leavers in higher education has contributed to policy inertia and a culture of low educational expectations and outcomes. Extending the quantitative evidence base is critical to improving these outcomes and developing targeted postsecondary education policies. In this chapter we highlight ongoing legislative and policy challenges, but also explore recent policy reforms developed following three collaborative research projects. Major challenges remain to extend corporate parenting responsibilities, recast the national student equity framework, revise tertiary application processes, redesign institutional enrolment forms, and use fee waiver and bursary provisions to identify and track postsecondary care leaver students. However, we also outline recent progress in many of these areas, suggesting growing support for a stronger evidence base and better educational outcomes.
The “perfect score” : the burden of educational elitism on children in out-of-home care
- Authors: Wilson, Jacqueline , Harvey, Andrew , Goodwin-Burns, Pearl , Humphries, Joanna
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Education in out-of-home care : international perspectives on policy, practice and research p. 211-223
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- Description: Annual media attention in Australia on the students and schools with the highest scores in the final year of secondary education (Year 12) promotes a narrow and elitist perception of the educational value of such statistical achievement. This in turn leaves disadvantaged students and their schools effectively stigmatised. Various disadvantaged groups benefit from equalising processes built into the senior-year system, but children in or recently discharged from out-of-home care (OHC) and adults who were in care as children are excluded from the official list of “equity” groups at secondary and tertiary levels. A very small percentage of those in OHC complete secondary school successfully, and even fewer care-leavers attempt tertiary education. We argue that the elitist ethos embraced by the secondary education system and legitimised by the media plays a key role in disadvantaging these groups. We examine as case studies the media coverage of final secondary results, juxtaposed with the experiences of several care-leavers currently attending a regional university, as gleaned from in-depth interviews and enrolment data-analysis. These accounts consistently affirm an array of systemic and cultural obstacles to the successful pursuit of their education.
Hope Street : From voice to agency for care-leavers in higher education
- Authors: Wilson, Jacqueline , Mendes, Philip , Golding, Frank
- Date: 2018
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Life Writing Vol. 15, no. 4 (2018), p. 597-609
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- Description: In the early 1980s, one of the authors became an adolescent ward of the State of Victoria, Australia, and went into out-of-home care. While in care, repeated encounters with researchers, journalists and policy-makers left her disillusioned as to the efficacy and relevance of their activities, in that although she was sporadically provided with a ‘voice’, this did little to bridge the divide between their world of privilege and the non-privileged world of the subject of their attentions. The article argues that this divide is perpetuated long after people leave care as adults, and that a mere ‘voice’ is not enough–what is needed is agency, in the design and execution of research. This can be achieved through extended education, depending in turn on an inclusive culture shift within institutions of higher learning. The article utilises the author's personal experience as a brief case study.
Inclusive archives and recordkeeping : Towards a critical manifesto
- Authors: Evans, Joanne , Wilson, Jacqueline
- Date: 2018
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: International Journal of Heritage Studies Vol. 24, no. 8 (2018), p. 857-860
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- Description: Archival practices must now reflect both advances in information technology, and the ethos of inclusivity that assures that the subjects of records have full opportunity to participate in the memory-making process, and to ‘own’ the resulting records. This themed section presents four articles demonstrating various ways in which this is being done or could potentially be done, and why it is needed. The articles model new and innovative modes of archiving, closely collaborative approaches to ensuring that the ‘personal’ is included in the record, and ways in which the norms of historical practice, heritage and social memory can be transformed by new ways of thinking about and defining archival practices. © 2018,
The tacit semantics of ‘Loud Fences’ : Tracing the connections between activism, heritage and new histories
- Authors: Wilson, Jacqueline , Golding, Frank
- Date: 2018
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: International Journal of Heritage Studies Vol. 24, no. 8 (2018), p. 861-873
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- Description: In 2015, in response to harrowing accounts of child sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic clergy in the town of Ballarat, a campaign of public support was launched in the form of coloured ribbons attached to the fences of institutions where the abuse had occurred. The “Loud Fence” campaign has become a global form of protest and commemoration. Institutions’ reactions were varied; some removed the ribbons, to find them promptly replaced, with attendant publicity. Thus was established a silent dialogue that encapsulated the contested nature of the ribbons’ symbolism, and exemplified, too, the campaign’s disparate implied audiences. The paper discusses the meanings of the Loud Fences in relation to divided community sensibilities and intangible heritage, as a performative mode of activism and of heritage-making. It considers ways in which the campaign challenges institutional cultures that stand as extant remnants of colonialism and as edifices of iconic institutional power. The Loud Fences campaign is characterised as a grass-roots quest, initially intended to show solidarity with disenfranchised victims of abuse, that has come to be seen as giving them a symbolic “voice” in the face of institutional denial. The paper touches upon the ways in which such campaigns, based on visual symbols and contested, yet unspoken, “dialogue”, can be historicised. © 2017,
Weapons of affect : The imperative for transdisciplinary information systems design
- Authors: Rolan, Gregory , Evans, Joanne , Bone, Jane , Lewis, Antonina , Golding, Frank , Wilson, Jacqueline , McKemmish, Sue , Mendes, Philip , Reeves, Keir
- Date: 2018
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology Vol. 55, no. 1 (2018), p. 420-429
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- Description: Much has been written about ethical and human-centred Information Systems (IS) design, most recently regarding the deleterious outcomes and negative affect of some machine learning applications that embed and perpetuate unethical or even inhumane automation. Terms such as ‘harm’, ‘damage’, and surprisingly, ‘weapon’ have entered the language of this discourse. However, these characteristics are not unique to applications of data science but have long manifested in IS that can also can exhibit opacity and establish tight vicious cycles. These, when coupled with a lack of governance feedback, can perpetuate injustice that has community or sector-wide reach. In this paper, we explore how IS design that sets out with the best of intentions or at least, conceived as a ‘neutral’ system for managing transactional information, can emerge as ‘tools that punish’. We argue that there are crucial principles to be taken from Recordkeeping Informatics, concerned as it is with the entanglement of information and people across space and through time on multi-generational timescales. In particular we discuss how transdisciplinary and critical approaches are necessary to cover more of the design space and surface issues, rights, stakeholders, and, most importantly, values that may be otherwise hidden from a here-and-now, transactional viewpoint.
In search of academic legitimacy : The current state of scholarship on graffiti and street art
- Authors: Ross, Jeffrey , Bengtsen, Peter , Lennon, John , Phillips, Susan , Wilson, Jacqueline
- Date: 2017
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Social Science Journal Vol. 54, no. 4 (2017), p. 411-419
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- Description: Much has changed since the 1960s when the first scholarship on contemporary graffiti appeared. The current paper is an attempt to outline and contextualize a number of recurrent challenges facing researchers of graffiti and street art, as well as developments that have taken place in this scholarly field. The aim of creating this outline is to assist in increasing the amount, and improving the quality, of future scholarship on graffiti and street art. We recognize, however, that although many of the challenges have at one time seemed insurmountable, over time they have lessened as graffiti and street art have grown as art movements, and because a small cadre of tenacious scholars focusing on graffiti and street art has published and taught in this area. An increasing, though limited, number of academic venues focused on graffiti and street art scholarship has slowly emerged. We also recognize that with increased scholarship that has laid the foundation, new avenues to explore graffiti and street art have become apparent. © 2017 Western Social Science Association
Introduction : Prison tourism in context
- Authors: Wilson, Jacqueline , Hodgkinson, Sarah , Piche, Justin , Walby, Kevin
- Date: 2017
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Tourism (Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology series) Chapter 1 p. 1-12
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- Description: The advent of a Handbook of Prison Tourism, and one of such depth and scope as this volume, is testimony to the extraordinary rise in scholarly interest in a field that barely a decade ago supported only a handful of researchers. It is testimony too, not only to the global ubiquity of former sites of imprisonment as tourist attractions, but also to the centrality of prisons, and the concept of incarceration as a dominant mode of administering justice that spans cultures and nations. In modern liberal democracies based on and notionally wedded to principles of individual liberty as core legal and societal precepts, it is unsurprising that imprisonment is regarded by many as a fair and just response to individuals’ transgression against society. In an age when many believe in the principle that “the punishment should fit the crime,” the imposition of a prison sentence for a variety of offenses rarely raises questions.
Representing political oppression : The Stasi Prison as an edifice of cultural memory in modern Berlin
- Authors: Wilson, Jacqueline , Boyle, Ian
- Date: 2017
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Tourism (Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology series) Chapter 24 p. 497-515
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- Description: In June of 2015 during a stay in Berlin we visited, on successive days, the Stasi Museum and the Stasi Prison, in former East Berlin. The Stasi Prison operated as a remand and interrogation facility continually from immediately after World War II until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dismantling of the communist regime in East Germany. Virtually all of the many thousands of citizens who populated the Prison during those four decades were political prisoners, and as such the representation of their experience in the site provides important insights into the nature of the regime and its impact on daily life. The Stasi Museum is in the former headquarters of the East German Ministry for State Security in the Berlin suburb of Lichtenberg, and provides a highly engaging representation of the Ministry’s history, bureaucratic structure and activities (see Stasi Museum 2016). It also furnished us with valuable social and historical background for visiting the Stasi Prison the following day. The account we give in this chapter, however, focuses entirely on our experience of the Prison. The tour we did there was guided by a German national but was conducted in English.
Visual criminology and cultural memory : The aestheticization of boat people
- Authors: Wilson, Jacqueline
- Date: 2017
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology Chapter 31 p. 404-415
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- Description: As criminologists Jeff Ferrell and Cécile Van de Voorde (2010: 40) have said, “the photodocumentary tradition embodies a tension that has long bedevilled criminology and other “social sciences”: that between objective inquiry and subjective analysis.” Documentary photographers, they argue, while employing a device “designed to capture the visual reality of an event”, nevertheless are very much mediators of that reality, “us[ing] their photographic skills to interpret and communicate these events, and so force the viewers … into visual confrontations with horror, violence, injustice and death.” But, as the following discussion will show, those “confrontations” can all too easily be compromised and even negated, both by those very same skills and by the motivation of others to exploit them.
Latent scrutiny : Personal archives as perpetual mementos of the official gaze
- Authors: Wilson, Jacqueline , Golding, Frank
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Archival Science Vol. 16, no. 1 (2016), p. 93-109
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- Description: This article examines the significance, in the lives of those who experienced out-of-home care as children, of the archived records of their institutionalisation. The affective ramifications of accessing the records as adults are discussed, with especial focus on the records' capacity to revive past suffering. Drawing on the work of Bruner (Crit Inq Autumn 1-21,1991, Consumption and everyday life, Sage, London, 1997) and MacIntyre (After virtue: a study in moral theory, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1981), a 'narrative' model of the self is utilised to account for the negative effect of systemic flaws in the records' original composition. Such flaws, it is argued, have the potential to disrupt the individual's sense of self. Both the authors, who experienced out-of-home care as children, present their own experiences of accessing the records, as case studies. The records' manifold inaccuracies and inadequacies are interpreted in the light of prevailing welfare practices, in particular a highly damaging judgemental paradigm of gendered and moralistic assumptions of the inferior character of those in care. The authors conclude by arguing that research into the archives should involve the direct participation, as 'insider researchers', of those who experienced the matters contained in the records. Such participation is essential if the process of revealing and interpreting the archives is to maintain the dignity of the records' subject individuals, and ensure the integrity of the research. © 2015, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.
Muddling upwards : The unexpected, unpredictable and strange on the path from care to high achievement in Victoria, Australia
- Authors: Wilson, Jacqueline , Golding, Frank
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Young People Transitioning from Out-of-Home Care: International Research, Policy and Practice Chapter 7 p. 135-154
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- Description: Education is a key avenue to personal, social and economic success; and its lack can lead to lifelong deprivation and social exclusion. The chapter focuses on the specific educational challenges that confront children in out-of-home care (OHC), and those who have been discharged from Care as young adults. A very small percentage of care leavers complete education, and some of the core reasons for this are discussed. The two authors, themselves care leavers, provide emblematic case studies by recounting their own experiences. They conclude that many of the obstacles they had to surmount were, and are, common to care leavers of their generations and also those currently in OHC. The chapter closes with a brief summary of policy reforms necessary to ensure educational equity for care leavers. © The Author(s) 2016.