Building the evidence base for supporting late entrants to care: Part I
This is the first of three posts where I’ll be sharing things I’ve learned from research into the experiences of young people in care.
Why this work is so important
When a young person enters care, they are meant to be supported by the state (their Local Authority (LA) in England) to achieve their full potential. Being looked after by a “corporate parent” in this way should mean that any young person who is unable to live at home, for whatever reason, then gets all the support they need from their LA to succeed.
Despite this, there remains a statistical gap in the measured outcomes for care experienced and non-care experienced young people. For example, care leavers aged 19–21 are less likely to be in employment, education or training, than non-care leavers. This happens for a range of reasons, and is only one outcome measured in a snapshot, although it is by no means the only thing that we should measure success against. It is also deeply rooted in an imperfect system that means these inequalities exist.
Barnardo’s has invested significantly in trying to understand why the gap persists, and what we can do about it from both a practical and systemic point of view. This programme of work is called Care Journeys, and the ambition is to ensure that young people who are care experienced are as, or more likely to be in positive destinations — a much more holistic measure of doing and feeling well — compared to their non-care experienced peers.
The approach
Barnardo’s has partnered with the London Borough of Brent to test and learn using an agile service design methodology, grounded in research (“Discovery”) and prioritising the expertise of the care experienced young people themselves.
We understand that changes to the system are not going to go deep enough, nor be sustainable, if they are not based on a shared understanding of what needs to change and for who.
We want this work to be:
- Transformational
- High impact (achieving and measuring)
- The best use of our voluntary funds
- Collaborative with Brent and other partners
- Clear in its purpose
- A long term commitment
Committing to using research, we put together a team consisting of myself as the research lead, two project workers from Barnardo’s Care Journeys Brent, as well as interviews carried out by two service designers from the Innovation Lab in Barnardo’s. We were supported through excellent relationships built from the ground up, by our project workers, as well as from the Assistant Director for this work in Brent working alongside heads of teams.
Our priorities: late entrants to care
Brent were awarded an ‘outstanding’ rating by Ofsted three years ago for ‘the care and progress of children in care and care leavers’. They were sharply focussed on emerging priorities for their population of approximately 350 care leavers, and we worked closely with the management team of the care leavers’ service to examine these key areas.
One in particular stood out: the growing proportion of care leavers who had entered care for the first time at or after the age of 16: our “late entrants” to care. At the end of 2019 there were over 100 care leavers who were working with Brent, who had entered care for the first time at or after the age of 16.
I spent some time getting to know the research evidence about late entrants to care, including the traditional route of doing an evidence review — looking at journal databases, then branching out to other ‘grey literature’ such as reports and findings published by government and other charities. On finding very few studies that helped us understand this group of young people’s experiences and outcomes, I reached out to prominent academics in the field.
It was clear there was a large gap in the existing evidence.
We used what little intel we were able to gather at this stage to create a framework for the research questions we wanted to explore. As there were so many gaps in the evidence, a lot of this was led by hypotheses, i.e. “we think things might be like this for these young people”, so the next phase of gathering data was about being able to test these hypotheses. In doing this we set ourselves up with an informed framework for how we approached our Discovery research.
In part II of this three-part series of posts, I talk about the practicalities and lessons learned from getting a Discovery up and running, from recruiting participants to dealing with the impact of Covid on our research ambitions.
