ANNE MORRISON, Chair, Child Care in Practice

This edition of the journal includes a number of papers that were presented at the National Children’s Bureau second annual children’s conference on ‘Consulting with children and young people: building on what we know’. Paul Connelly’s paper ‘Researching young children’s perspectives on "the troubles" of Northern Ireland’ offers an alternative methodological approach for the study of children’s views on the troubles. Berni Kelly’s paper, ‘Young people’s views on communities and sectarianism in Northern Ireland’, discusses the findings from three National Children’s Bureau talk-shops that sought the opinions of young people on growing up in communities in Northern Ireland and their experiences of sectarianism. Kathy Keeley’s paper offers a unique method of obtaining young people’s views with her description of the setting up of the Fermanagh Shadow Youth Council, where young people are elected to represent the views of their age group on various issues raised by voters. Mark Hannan, Mary Foster and Roisin McLaughlin’s paper on the Looked After Children in Education research project describes the experiences of two young researchers of being educated while in care. The final conference paper is that of Clare Archbold and Clare Irvine, which presents the experiences of the Office of Law Reform in relation to consulting young people about law reform issues.

Yvonne Duane and her co-authors examine parents’ experiences of attending a programme for families of adolescent child sexual abuse perpetrators and the paper looks at the parents’ responses. Lesley Cullen and Julie Barlow explore parents’ experiences of caring for children with autism and examine whether attending a touch therapy programme was of value to these parents. John Sheldon’s paper, ‘"A word in your ear": a study of foster carers’ attitudes to recommending fostering to others’, examines the attitudes of a number of foster carers in relation to their experiences of fostering and whether as a result they would recommend fostering to others. Martin C. Calder will be very familiar to readers of Child Care in Practice and has contributed a number of very valuable papers over the years. His paper ‘A framework for conducting risk assessment’ is no exception and offers child care workers a very comprehensive framework for conducting risk assessments. The framework offers very practical guidelines for those working in child protection.