Abstract:

The common opinion states that people who grew up in the institutional care instead of in their own families possess lower capabilities to reach higher levels of education, integrate into society, find and maintain employment, and start their own families. The project “Integration of children from foster care into society and their adaptation to the labor market” aims to verify these assumptions and to identify factors that help children to integrate successfully. This article presents the above-mentioned project, its structure, methodology and partial results. It highlights the cooperation between research institutions, public sector, and non-profit associations in all project phases – setting the research methods based on literature analysis and discussions with experts, collecting qualitative and quantitative data from the whole Czech Republic, implementing research results into children’s education and training, and disseminating results among relevant stakeholders. The article also notes a complementary project, which is under the evaluation process at the time of the conference. This second project focuses on the system of education, training, and support for people working with children in foster care, such as children’s homes employees, tutors and mentors, social workers, and volunteers cooperating through non-profit sector.

Keywords:

Institutional care, foster care, integration into society, labor market, cooperation between research intitutions and public sector.