ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses why entry to new school or work at the beginning of the placement might be a critical transition. It illustrates ways of working that have proved helpful to adolescents in foster care. The book summarizes the processes of intervention that appear to be helpful to adolescents around the transition to school or work at the beginning of the placement. The transition to new school or work is approached by the majority of the adolescents in care from repeated experience of educational failure, and more generally with an internal working model of self in action in a chaotic world over which they have little control. The transition into the placement and then almost immediately the process of negotiating entry to new school or work could be regarded as a junction which carries the potential for an adolescent’s pathway to shift for better or worse.
