Understanding the experiences of young people as they ‘leave care’: part one

Photo: tasks that our young people said they needed to learn when leaving care, during research

Turning 18 should be an exciting time, you may be starting university, working or training or perhaps you’re taking a gap year to travel. You may still be living at home with your family.

It’s a very different story for young people who have been taken into care. Turning 18 means their local authority is no longer responsible for accommodating them or covering their living costs.

For many, it means signing up to universal credit on their birthday, moving into a council property (if and when a suitable one is found), or struggling to find a landlord who will accept tenants in receipt of benefits.

It means a change of worker, changes to the support they receive (as many services no longer work with over 18’s) and saying goodbye to carers and staff who have been looking after them up to this point.

Those living with a foster family or in a children’s home at the age of 18 may be offered an arrangement called ‘staying put’ or ‘staying close’, which means their foster family or children’s home can continue to support them up to the age of 21. But the number of young people in ‘staying put’ arrangements is low and the number of those in ‘staying close’ arrangements are limited, as many are in pilot stages of development.

In addition, a lot of the support is dependent on a range of factors such as whether you’re working, studying, if you’ve been in care long enough, whether you were in care on or after your 16th birthday, whether your needs are great enough. The list goes on.

In short, becoming a care leaver (an adult who has been in the care of a local authority as a child) is another one of those ‘cliff edges’ we so often hear about in public services — a point at which everything changes because of an arbitrarily-set rule designed to help manage increasing demand for limited support.

Photo: some of the materials given to young people as they leave care

What is Barnardo’s doing about this?

At Barnardo’s we’re investing in improving outcomes for care-experienced young people. We’re working with a couple of local authorities to think about the fact that by the time care leavers — or care-experienced people, as we call them — are aged 19 to 21, they’re much less likely, compared to their non-care experienced peers, to be in a ‘positive destination’ — doing something they consider meaningful, so that they can look forward with hope and purpose.

Barnardo’s Children In and Leaving Care Core Priority Programme, set out in our Corporate Strategy, invests in transforming our services in a vital area for young people moving towards adulthood.

Official data, referenced in our Impact Report, shows that overall, care leavers are still much less likely than their non-care experienced peers to be in education, employment or training, more likely to be involved in the youth justice system, experience mental health and emotional challenges, or experience homelessness and social isolation.

Every year, around 10,000 young people leave the care system, and in total, there are over 40,000 care leavers aged 17–21 in the UK.

This is a programme of work that will span the next seven years, which affords us the opportunity to understand local context (policies, services, demographics), to genuinely work with young people and our partners to develop ideas and try things out, change things as we go, and measure some of those longer-term outcomes that are hardly visible within the first few months.

We see this research as the start of a design process which means that we’ll use the things we learn to make changes. We built on the many research findings already out there to define our own research questions, which we felt would lead to a deep enough understanding of the problem to begin having ideas about how to solve it.

Moving on

We called this bit of research ‘Moving On’; a 3-4 month piece of research to understand where the opportunities are for young people to have smoother and/or fewer transitions when moving on from care.

In this series of blog posts, we’ll describe the research we’ve done so far to understand how young people experience leaving care.

Photo: a tool we used in research to visualise the young person’s experience as they ‘move on’ from care

What did this research involve?

Because the focus for this research was all-encompassing (looking at everything from accommodation and entering work, through to finance management and relationships) we split it into two halves.

The first half looks at transition moments between 18–25 years old broadly to understand three things:

• What does the national and local policy dictate — what changes when a young person turns 16, 18, 21 and 25?
• What are young people’s experiences — how do young people cope, respond to and prepare for these changes?
• What are the experiences of professionals — how do professionals support young people at moments of transition?

The second half would be much more focused. It would look at a particular aspect of ‘moving on’ in order to understand that more deeply.

In the next blog post, I’ll share what we learnt from that first half and where it’s taken us.

Amy is a service designer in the Barnardo’s Digital & Technology team. To get the latest updates from the Barnardo’s Digital & Technology team, subscribe to blog.barnar.do on Medium, and follow #FutureBarnardos on Twitter.

We’re hiring! Read more about the team we’re building and our current roles available.