ABSTRACT
Northern Ireland is the smallest of the three major UK jurisdictions with a population of just one and a half million compared to Scotland’s five million and the fifty million in England and Wales. Child care became the responsibility of these Boards acting on behalf of the Northern Ireland Department of Health and Social Services (DHSS) and delivering services through management units at district level. In the late 1980s the DHSS Regional Plan for 1987 to 1992 included two objectives directly relating to leaving care: ‘the development of programmes to prepare young people for leaving care’ and ‘the provision of support to young people who have left care’. The Black Report emphasised prevention and meeting children and young people’s needs through resourcing families and other formal and informal child care institutions and networks. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
