This special issue began its life in 2015 in a series of workshops funded by the University of Adelaide that ran under the theme ‘Dis/located Children: Children in/and Care’. The goal of the workshops was to take seriously the concept of ‘care’ as it applied to the lives of children. The workshops had a particular focus on childhoods that were in some sense beyond the normative, whether that was migrant or refugee children adapting to a new culture, children who lived outside the nuclear household, or children whose identities marked them as ‘different’. They were underpinned by developments in both childhood and emotions studies that seek to destabilise the ‘naturalness’ of both childhood and emotion by exploring the ways that both are contingent, shaped by culture, and situated in historical time (Davin, 1999; Rosenwein, 2010). Over four events, the workshops brought together over 40 scholars and practitioners from a variety of disciplines, including history, literature, gender studies, law, education, social work, and psychology. The articles brought together in this special issue reflect this diversity of disciplinary approach.

England's Catholic religious minority devised various strategies for its survival in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including the establishment of seminaries and convents in continental Europe, predominantly in France and the Spanish Netherlands. These institutions educated the next generation of English Catholic clergy, nuns and lay householders. Although convent schools were usually small, the nuns educated young girls within their religious cloisters. The pupils followed a modified monastic routine, while they were taught the skills appropriate for young gentlewomen, such as music and needlework. While many students were placed in convents with the intention that they would become nuns, not all girls followed this trajectory. Some left the cloister of their childhood to join other religious houses or to return to England to marry and raise a new generation of Catholics. Although we have few first-hand accounts of these girls’ experiences, it is possible to piece together a sense of their lives behind cloistered walls from chronicles, obituaries and letters. While the exiled monastic life for children was difficult, surviving evidence points to the vital role of convent care in Catholic families’ strategies, and the acknowledgement of their importance by the girls placed there, whether temporarily or permanently.

While a wide array of service providers and academic scholars apply the use of “care” in their work, the concept of “care” itself remains largely undefined. This has widespread implications for applied work with children and young people (CYP), particularly since institutions such as schools and non-governmental organisations are increasingly being expected to care for or about children. In this paper, we use thematic analysis to report on interviews with representatives from four service providers and organisations responsible for the care of children. In our analysis, we explore both how care is defined by these organisations, and the implications for practice when working with CYP.

Whilst teachers are increasingly being asked to provide ‘care’ for students in their classrooms, very little research has explored what care might look like for students with migrant or refugee backgrounds. This paper reports on the findings of a study conducted with children when they began school in Australia in the Intensive English Language Program (IELP), with a focus on how care might be provided and defined. Participants were 63 migrant or refugee children aged between 5 and 13 years of age (M = 7.40 years, SD = 2.39), and 14 IELP teachers. The aims of the broader study of which this paper forms one part were to explore experiences at school through a mixed-methods, participatory methodology. The current paper takes a deductive approach, and focuses specifically on the relationships between students and teachers as one dimension of care for students. We found that students had positive relationships with their teachers, and reported feeling safe at school. Teachers reported some challenges in relation to their relationships with students, particularly in the case of students with refugee backgrounds. We suggest that the concept of care for children with refugee and migrant backgrounds needs further work, particularly in mainstream education settings.

One in three Australian children attend school-age childcare. School Age Care (SAC) services have increased to meet the growing demand for children to have somewhere safe to go before and after school while their parents work. SAC services have continued to grow in size, but are still considered a “care” rather than “education” service. This literature review highlights some current features of Australian SAC childcare sector. Key features detailed include the growth in service usage and the particular organisation types that characterise the sector. Other themes identified relate to parent expectations, venues, workforce needs and children's wellbeing. This literature review advocates for more research about the SAC sector.

Young people placed in out-of-home care (OHC) through Child Protection in Victoria are formally discharged by the expiration of their care order at the age of 18 years or younger. In contrast, young people in Australia generally live in their family home with parents or carers well into their twenties. Whilst there are a range of leaving care and post-care services funded for care leavers, these supports tend to be temporary and discretionary in contrast to the ongoing support young people receive whilst in care or, in some cases, from family and social networks post care. Numerous studies have documented the developmental challenges experienced by young people leaving state care, and the often poor outcomes faced by this group. The Stand By Me (SBM) programme was developed in Victoria to replicate the ongoing support provided in the UK to care leavers by Personal Advisers who remain available to assist young people until 21 years of age. Evaluation of the SBM programme has shown that ongoing, holistic support, including housing support, has assisted 12 young people through the SBM pilot to access stable housing, address multiple and complex issues, and form trusting relationships with SBM workers that contribute to positive outcomes.

This paper examines how the education of children as literate subjects in schools and community settings is implicated in the politics of securing civil society. Foucault's concept of biopolitics is used to consider how young people are produced as securitised subjects. The emergence of the concept of human security as a technology for measuring human development is problematised using Bacchi's methodology. The analysis uses the Northern Territory intervention to question representations of young people as subjects of danger and as potentially dangerous subjects. This paper argues that the use of literacy by the apparatus of state and non-state governmentalities functions as a technology of risk mitigation and biopolitical government: a way of contingently positioning the freedoms of children as subjects to forms of rule. The paper concludes by suggesting that literacy has been deployed as a techne of an authoritarian form of liberalism in which the power to delimit entangles children in biopolitical strategies and sovereign intervention.

Between 1947 and 1953, Australia received over 170,000 Displaced People from Europe including widows and unmarried mothers. These refugees were expected to conform to the policies and expectations of the State, in particular the adherence to a 2-year work contract. This was an impossibility for many mothers who could not find work or accommodation outside of the government supplied migrant accommodation centres, and who, as a consequence, resorted to placing their children, either temporarily or permanently, in institutions or for adoption. Through an examination of archival documents, this paper examines the policies that resulted in migrant child placement and adoption and considers the role played by Department of Immigration social workers. It asks why, when migrant children were considered amongst the most desirable of new arrivals, were many fated to become orphans?

Over the last 25 years (1990–2015), the number of adoptions of children (and young persons) in Australia declined from 1,142 to 292 (25.5 %). Of the 292 adoptions that took place in 2014–15, 83 (28%) were inter country adoptions, with the remaining 209 (72 %) adoptions of Australian children. Very few of the adoptions of Australian children were in New South Wales. In amendments in 2014 to the New South Wales Children and Young Persons (Care and Protection) Act 1998 and the Adoptions Act 2000, a new emphasis on ‘open’ adoption was introduced. The focus of these amendments is on adoption of children who are in foster care where the New South Wales Children's Court has ruled that there is no realistic possibility of restoration of the child to parental care. This article is about the implementation of this new legislative emphasis on adoption. It does not examine the benefit or otherwise of adoption for children who cannot be safely restored to parental care as this issue has been extensively canvassed elsewhere. This article also highlights the US and English experience of adoption from care in order to place the New South Wales development in perspective. The article concludes with discussion of the issues adoption raises for the parents of a child who is being considered for adoption from care.

At various times in my career, I have focussed on mental health services for children and their basis in human rights principles. This year I returned to examining best practices and how they could be implemented in a particular place – the State of Illinois, in the United States, where I reside. I found myself reflecting on improvements in services over the last 40 years, but even more, on the significant challenges and gaps in our knowledge that remain. I want to focus this commentary on two topics I found most salient: Contradictions between principles and practice; and need for more research on how to provide services in the most restrictive settings – inpatient and residential.