ABSTRACT
Group care agencies, education or training programs, continue to provide services to many of the nation’s most vulnerable children and are significant providers of out-of-home care services for the child welfare system. The most frequently and persistently noted structural factor contributing to abuse and neglect of children and their placement in foster care is poverty. A central assumption of programs based on the traditional model is that children, once placed in out-of-home care, will quickly forget their biological birth parents and become psychologically attached to their new adult caregivers. There is a large group of programs known as home-based services, family-based services or family centred services which aim to prevent the placement of children in out-of-home care and which claim to be family preservation programs. The absence of an empirically founded taxonomy of service programs, especially group care programs, is a major deficiency. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
