ABSTRACT
In the present study, we formulated and tested a basic model of the educational success of
young people in out-of-home care. We used data from 2007 to 2008 and 2008 to 2009 on
a sample of 1106 young people in care in Ontario, Canada. The youths were 1217 years of age; 56.24% were male and 43.76% female. The indicators of educational success in
both years were the youth’s average marks and the youth’s school performance in reading,
math, science and overall, as rated by his or her caregiver. Based on resilience theory and
on a model of the influence of maltreatment on educational achievement, our model
included four categories of predictors: control variables (youth gender and age and, in the
longitudinal analyses, the year 7 value of the year 8 dependent variable), three placement
types (foster, kinship care or group homes), three risk factors (previous repetition of a
grade in school, a health-related cognitive impairment index and a measure of
behavioural difficulties) and three protective factors (caregiver involvement in the
youth’s school, caregiver educational aspirations for the young person and the youth’s
total number of internal developmental assets). Cross-sectional and longitudinal
hierarchical regression analyses provided mixed support for the proposed model. The
youth’s gender, level of behavioural difficulties and number of developmental assets, and
the caregiver’s educational aspirations for the young person, emerged as the most
consistent predictors of educational success. The implications and limitations of the
findings were discussed.
