UK child migration to Australia 1945 1970 : a study in policy failure 1. Introduction: ‘A serious injustice to the individual’: British child migration to Australia as policy failure 2. ‘The risk involved is inappreciable… and the gain exceptional’: child migration to Australia and empire settlement policy 1919 39 3. Flawed progress: criticisms of residential institutions for child migrants in Australia and policy responses 1939 45 4. ‘Providing for children… deprived of a normal home life’: the Curtis report and the post war landscape of children’s out of home care 5. ‘Australia as the coming greatest foster father the world has ever known’: the post war resumption of child migration to Australia 1945 47 6. From regulation to moral persuasion: child migration policy and the Home Office Children’s Department 1948 54 7. ‘If we were untrammelled by precedent…’: pursuing gradual reform in child migration 1954 61 8. ‘Avoiding fruitless controversy’: UK child migration programmes and the anatomy of policy failure. This open access book offers an unprecedented analysis of child welfare schemes situating them in the wider context of post war policy debates about the care of children. Between 1945 and 1970 an estimated 3 500 children were sent from Britain to Australia unaccompanied by their parents through child migration schemes funded by the Australian and British Governments and delivered by churches religious orders and charities. Functioning in a wider history of the migration of unaccompanied children to overseas British colonies the post war schemes to Australia have become the focus of public attention through a series of public reports in Britain and Australia that have documented the harm they caused to many child migrants. Whilst addressing the wide range of organisations involved the book focuses particularly on knowledge assumptions and decisions within UK Government Departments and asks why these schemes continued to operate in the post war period despite often failing to adhere to standards of child care set out in the influential 1946 Curtis Report. Some factors – such as the tensions between British policy on child care and assisted migration – are unique to these schemes. However the book also examines other factors such as complex government systems fragmented lines of departmental responsibility and civil service cultures that may contribute to the failure of vulnerable people across a much wider range of policy contexts.