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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 12–17 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.
Flynn et al. (Mon,) studied this question.