Jugendhilfe und sozialer Wandel - Leistungen und Strukturen (Phasen I - VI)
Europe-wide Comparative Study
The results of our Europe-wide comparative study that was part of the last data collection cycles showed that interesting insights beneficial to German professional debates can be gained from exchanges with different European countries.
The ratification of the UN-convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities pressured German politicians to push their objective of mainstreaming children and youth with disabilities into the normal educational and care-giving system in Germany. Therefore, a practical approach would be to systematically examine the strategies and experience within the systems of other EU-member states who are already mainstreaming young people with disabilities. In this way we hope to gain insight into how to organize inclusive services in Germany.
Because they allow all children at a young age to experience “being different” in educational every-day life settings, the examination of nurseries and day care centres in EU-member states will play a decisive role in structuring mainstreaming children with special needs in Germany.
The professional exchange with experts from other EU-countries will provide a new perspective on the further advancement of nurseries and day care centres for children and youth in Germany and subsequently will be the basis for recommendations.
In the Europe-wide comparative study of the last data collection cycle we tried to move from discussing concepts to discussing strategies of action regarding parental work in the context of residential care services. By comparing methods and approaches of fostering and stabilizing the family system, it was our goal to extract and analyze experiences with parental work in other European countries. We examined which experiences made in other European countries provide valuable insights in order to advance parental work in residential care as part of the German youth welfare system.
As part of one of our earlier data collection cycles—due to the lack of systematic knowledge about service approaches for children and youth in countries of the European Union—we developed two case examples that could happen likewise in any other European country and that would meet eligibility criteria for a socio-educational service in Germany. Based on the two cases a number of questions were sent to experts in different European countries in order to have them describe what kind of help and assistance service would be provided in their respective country. The results became part of the first Europe-wide Child and Youth Report, commissioned by the EU and published in English and German language.