Many of these children are not orphans. Their parents have been deprived of their parental rights for a variety of social and economic reasons or have abandoned them.

Many disabled children are in orphanages because of the social stigma attached to disability or because of the economic situation, both of which make it difficult for parents to care for them.

The current system has not changed very much since the end of the Communist era although many professionals within it are working hard to change this and there is some visible progress. The experience of individual children may differ from the description below but only for the lucky few.

A child who enters the orphanage system at a young age will usually be cared for by the Department of Health in a Baby Home until they are 3 years old (or 4 if they are disabled). At the end of this time, they are assessed and are classified as either normal or "oligophrenic", which literally means small-brained.

Children classified as oligophrenic will receive only a minimum education, up to Grade 4 if they are lucky, and will subsequently be directed to manual jobs and denied basic rights, such as the ability to drive a car or to vote. Approximately 50% of the children leaving Baby Homes end up with this classification.

Some "oligophrenics" are further classified as "Imbecile" or "Idiot". These are the children with "serious" learning disabilities or physical disabilities. They are deemed "uneducable" and are sent to orphanages run by the Ministry of Labour and Social Development. Here they receive no education and minimal therapy. Conditions in these orphanages are very poor and most are closed to outsiders.

Widely documented research shows that many children growing up in the orphanage system are being denied one-to-one interaction, human touch, love and access to stimulating toys – all vital to healthy emotional and physical development. As a result many of the children lack self-esteem, a sense of identity, an ability to emotionally attach to others and any sense of security. This then hampers all aspects of their development and many will receive the label oligophrenic as a result of institutionalisation rather than any actual disability from birth.

“based on independent investigations… 30 to 60 percent of orphans diagnosed as oligophrenic may be wrongly ascribed…It is difficult to overstate the significance of this examination, which for some children is a matter of life or death.”

ThePromise has shown beyond doubt that Portage – a pre-school education system based on one-to-one positive interaction – has helped disabled children in Russia to fulfil their potential and to lead happier lives.

Portage was developed in Portage, USA, in the early 1970s as a home-visiting service for pre-school children with special needs. It has received wide international acclaim and is available throughout the UK, Europe and the US. It breaks down developmental steps into minute sub-sections devising games and activities around each small step to help the child learn. Initially the child's current development is observed and recorded using a checklist across five areas: social, language, self-help, cognitive and motor development. Each programme is tailored to meet the requirements of the individual child and activities are designed to boost the child's development in those areas where help is needed - from very early motor skills to the more complex task of using language.

ThePromise is being supported by Educationalist and Portage Specialist Mollie White, a member of the original team in the 1970s, who introduced Portage to the UK.

"I have been closely involved with this exciting project from the outset working with ThePromise to introduce Portage into Ryazan. I was certain that we would see change for every child involved, giving them a quality of life hitherto denied them. Evidence of progress, demonstrated by individual developmental gains, is recorded in our research, revealing the huge potential for change observed in every child. Their success is already challenging deep seated attitudes towards disability generating not only support for ThePromise's work but also valuable opportunities to promote the conditions leading to a sustainable service provision for disabled children and their families."

Ryazan is a large town with a population of 500,000, 180 km south east of Moscow. The town has one Baby Home. The 150 children at this Baby Home are fortunate in that it is run by a Director committed to improving the lives of the children with disabilities. However, she is seriously hampered in this vision by an appalling lack of resources. Each child is in a group of 15 - 17 children and at any one time there are normally two members of staff with each group who are fully occupied meeting the basic needs of the children in their group.

In September 2005, ThePromise established a pilot Portage project in the Ryazan Baby Home, recruiting a team of six women to work with 24 disabled children. In the space of six months many of the children involved showed significant signs of accelerated development, developed self-help skills, started walking and developed enhanced communication skills. Significant cognitive improvements in the children have been acknowledged by both the Director and workers at the home. Following the success of this pilot the programme was expanded in March 2006 to reach all 48 disabled children in the Baby Home with the wholehearted support of its Director, Tatiana Alexandrovna Gross:

Yelatma is a large traditional village with wooden cottages and horse drawn carts 200 km from Ryazan. Within Yelatma is an orphanage run by the Department of Social Development and Labour, which is closed to most outsiders. 47 severely disabled children aged four to eighteen live there and none of them attend school. The children's rooms are small and each contains ten cots or old, small, metal beds (halfway between a cot and a smaller version of an old fashioned hospital bed). The children stay in bed all day and are offered no therapy or stimulation. There is one nurse in charge of between ten and twelve severely disabled children.

The Director of the orphanage at Yelatma heard of the progress made by children at the Ryazan Baby Home and invited ThePromise to bring Portage to the orphanage. This was a tremendous breakthrough for ThePromise as outsiders are not usually invited into closed orphanages. A pilot project was established in June 2006 to bring Portage to a small group of children in the orphanage up to the age of eight. Again the children showed tremendous progress over a six-month period and the programme is now being extended so all children up to the age of eight (approximately 30 children) will receive Portage.

In September 2007 we ran a Portage Training Workshop to train seven additional Portage workers so that all children who could benefit from Portage in Yelatma are now receiving it, including those children who have moved to Yelatma from the Baby Home in Ryazan.

ThePromise believes that if more support was available in the home families would be less likely to hand their children to the State for care. In 2006, working with the Psychology and Defectology Department of Ryazan State University, ThePromise established a Community Portage Service in Ryazan. Portage is now part of the student's curriculum. Six, second and third year students started working as voluntary Portage workers within the community helping ten families.

In September 2007 we trained five new students who now support a further ten families. Ellya , mother of five-year-old Maxim who has Down's Syndrome is delighted with her son's progress:

ThePromise's primary function is to act as a catalyst for change, by setting standards in good practice, raising awareness of the rights and needs of disabled children, and creating sustainable models of development that are replicable in other Russian regions. Some of this may be achieved through service provision, but much of it will be achieved through lobbying and by supporting the creation of sustainable projects that are owned, managed and funded by local Russians.