Sad news out of the UK for foster children this morning:

The shameful betrayal of more than 60,000 children caught in the state care system is exposed today in a damning new report.

It shows that just a quarter of children in care manage to leave school with as much as a single qualification.

And those who are brought up by the state have no more than a 100 to one chance of going to university.

Instead of education, the report found a care home system where the rule is that "the boys do crime, the girls do sex."

The report by leading writer Harriet Sergeant, serialised in the Daily Mail today, points to a system in which half of the 6,000 young people who leave state care every year to make their own lives are unemployed within two years. It found:

• A quarter of girls in care have been pregnant by the time they leave and half are single mothers within two years.

• Half of all prisoners under the age of 25 have been through the care system.

• A third of the homeless are people who were brought up in state care.

• Only 60 out of 6,000 young people leaving care each year goes to university. • The Government's target for young people as a whole is that half of them should go to university.

Boys do crime and girls do sex.

How sad.

This may be a case of children's rights gone mad:

The rights of children also mean discipline is absent and violence among residents common in children's homes.

It doesn't explain exactly what a 'rights culture" is, but it sure sounds scarey for the foster parents.

One worker told her: "Young people are very up on their rights." Rights culture, she found, has developed to the point where children in care homes have the right to refuse to go to the doctor or dentist. As a result, many of them have bad teeth.


Even social workers think this is "a crazy system".

Bottom line, these children try to get reunited with parents who can never regain custody, and therefore are never adopted.

The children just keep hoping against hope, and the system back them up.

It is the children's right.



And of course, there is always a shameful amount of money waste whereever there is a scandal or system out of control:

The report also investigates the chaos in children's homes, where untrained and frequently-changing staff keep uncertain watch on very troubled children, at a cost of up to £6,500 a week for each one - a sum which spent otherwise would be enough to pay for a place at Eton, a full-time personal mentor, and intensive psychotherapy.

The children are calling the shots.

Too bad.



Complete article here: