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An achievement gap in K-12 education exists between children in foster care and their peers. Professionals have a shared responsibility to support the education of these children, but often face barriers to engaging in interprofessional collaboration. Interviews and focus groups (N = 22) were conducted with child welfare professionals, school professionals, and professional caregivers to explore the facilitators of interprofessional collaboration in their work together. Themes included: centering the best interests of the child, effective communication, opportunities and capacity to meaningfully engage, positive and trusting relationships, being knowledgeable about the child, policies, roles, and systems, and empathy toward other professionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unique service needs exist for expectant or parenting youth with foster care histories (EPY) and their families. Informed by Critical Ecological Systems Theory (CEST), this exploratory qualitative study presents findings from an inductive content analysis of in‐depth interviews and focus groups with EPY and service providers. The study included nine in‐depth face‐to‐face interviews with service providers (n = 5) and EPY (n = 4) as well as five focus groups with service providers (n = 23) and three with EPY (n = 7) to identify the characteristics of service providers, agencies and systems that may act as barriers to service utilization among EPY with a foster care history (n = 10) or juvenile justice history (n = 1). Service provider characteristics included negative attitudes towards EPY and/or those with child welfare experiences. Agency characteristics included a lack of workforce diversity, employee turnover, lack of training about diverse communities, restrictive enrolment processes and eligibility requirements, lack of childcare and transportation and limited accessibility of services. System characteristics included a lack of up‐to‐date information about existing services, territorialism, funding sources that do not prioritize interagency collaboration and a lack of communication/coordination among agencies. Implications include hiring and retaining a diverse workforce, providing training about diverse communities and implicit biases concerning young parents, developing navigation services specifically for EPY and developing processes for sharing data and communicating across systems that interact with EPY. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Child welfare, state educational, and local educational agencies are mandated to collaborate by (1) the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008 (FSA) and (2) the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 (ESSA). A focus of these collaborative partnerships is to promote the educational stability of children in foster care. This paper uses the theory of collaborative advantage to provide a framework for developing and maintaining educational stability collaborations mandated by FSA and ESSA., Children who have experienced abuse and neglect and been involved in the child welfare system suffer from largely negative educational outcomes compared to the general population, including some evidence of [...]