The task of children’s homes in the education of Roma children

Abstract

In Hungary Act XXXI of 1997 introduced significant changes for the child protection system and since then the law itself has been altered several times. Looking back over the last twenty years, two major changes can be observed in the placement of children. The first is that in the post 1997 period the number of residential homes and the number of people living there increased significantly thanks to the transformation of the children's homes. These residential homes provide family-friendly environment for a small group of children. The second important change is the preference of foster care. 2002 was a milestone of this process, when more children were placed to foster parents than in children’s homes for the first time. (In 2002, 10,026 minors and young adults lived in children's homes and 10,576 of them with foster parents. KSH, 2018). By now this trend has been strengthened and more than half of the children removed from their families are accommodated at foster parents. The number of children involved in child protection has increased in recent years and according to research Roma children are overrepresented among them. The paper reviews the past research of Roma children in child protection services and examines the professional programs of children's homes and residential homes in order to study how they contribute to the development and preservation of the identity of children belonging to national and ethnic minorities