Listening to children and young people

These quotations give very different pictures of children’s involvement in moves in foster care. Elsie’s experience in 1924, as related by her adult self Janet Hitchman, was not untypical of that period. The interviews from which the second and third quotations are drawn took place in 1996, and by then it was much more common for children to be consulted about their placements. However, as the quote from the nine-year-old suggests, it was still by no means universal.