Skip main navigation

New offer! Get 30% off your first 2 months of Unlimited Monthly. Start your subscription for just £29.99 £19.99. New subscribers only. T&Cs apply

Find out more

Looking back on Week 5

Summary of the Week 5 materials and course topics
0.6
Hello. Here you are at the stage of almost completing the fifth week of your course. Congratulations for all the hard work you’ve put into participating in this course so far. I do hope you’re still finding it interesting and helpful. I am really pleased to see from your comments that what you’re learning is really useful to you and really helping you in your role and the everyday work you do in supporting unaccompanied and separated children on the move. This week, we covered the really concerning issue of placing unaccompanied and separated children in detention simply due to their migration status– a practise that must stop.
39.9
It’s also been extremely interesting to read your answers as to whether the quality of alternative care is a factor that influences whether unaccompanied, separated children leave or remain in their care placement. And very helpful to hear about effective responses in some of your countries. Many of you also posted comments in response to what happened to Aden. We saw him taking advantage of a riot in the detention centre to try and escape. But was he successful? I do hope you enjoyed the sixth and final week of your course. Thank you.

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.

This article is from the free online

Caring for Children Moving Alone: Protecting Unaccompanied and Separated Children

Created by
FutureLearn - Learning For Life

Reach your personal and professional goals

Unlock access to hundreds of expert online courses and degrees from top universities and educators to gain accredited qualifications and professional CV-building certificates.

Join over 18 million learners to launch, switch or build upon your career, all at your own pace, across a wide range of topic areas.

Start Learning now