Home Children
child migration scheme under which more than 100,000 children were sent from the United Kingdom to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa
Home Children was a British child migration scheme operating from the 1600s to the 1970s, under which more than 150,000 children were sent from the United Kingdom to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Rhodesia and South Africa.
The practice of sending poor or orphaned children to British colonies began in 1618, but gained momentum in the late 19th century. Emigration programmes were organised by philanthropic organisations, were intended to provide education and training, and were presented as a humanitarian effort. However, most of the children were not orphans, there were few safeguards, and many of the children faced exploitation and abuse as cheap labour on colonial farms or in domestic service.
Child emigration from Britain was largely suspended beginning in the 1930s, but was not completely terminated until the 1970s. The emigration schemes received criticism at the time, but research beginning in the 1980s exposed the full scale of the abuse and the hardships of the relocated children.
In 2009, the Australian government issued a formal apology to the Home Children. This was followed by a UK apology and a £6 million compensation fund in 2010. Canada declined a formal apology, instead designating 2010 as the ‘Year of the British Home Child’. Today, an estimated one in ten Canadians is a descendant of a Home Child.
The public source identifies “Home Children” as child migration scheme under which more than 100,000 children were sent from the United Kingdom to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Home, Children and child.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5888282. The Library of Congress control number is sh97005598. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1618, 2009 and 2010.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Home Children” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.