Looking back on Week 5

Thank you for all your participation during Week 5 of your course. It has been really interesting to read your comments and the helpful information you have shared. As we have seen, an important part of this course is the opportunity to learn from each other.

This week we continued to look at different forms of suitable and unsuitable care for unaccompanied and separated children on the move. This included examples of kinship care and ways to safeguard children whilst living with extended family members.

We considered the question – what is guardianship? And we were able to see how a system of guardianship being developed in Sicily is providing additional safeguards to children in different forms of alternative care.

A very important topic was alternatives to detention. It is essential we work together to end the practice of children being placed in detention due to their migration status. We hope the information about the campaign to stop this practice in Mexico and provide alternatives to detention was helpful.

Finally we thought about the risks children face when they abandon their care placement and some steps that might help prevent this.

We do encourage you to read some of the additional reading materials that are provided at the bottom of some of the course pages. This will help provide a more in-depth understanding of some of the topics we have only been able to give a short explanation about.

At the end of this week we hope you feel comfortable engaging in the following issues:

• Formal and informal kinship care
• Ideas for developing guardianship programmes
• Why children should never be placed in detention as a consequence of their migration status
• Ways to prevent children from abandoning their care placement

A document with links to all of the resources that have been used this week is available for you in the ‘Downloads’ section below.

In the next step you will be able to test what you have learnt this week. For your information, this quiz is only available in English. Remember, you can attempt the quiz as many times as you like until you get the correct answers.