The coalition government published a charter for care leavers. It said that the charter was designed to raise expectation, aspiration, and understanding of what care leavers needed and what the government and local authorities should do to be good corporate parents.
Source: Charter for Care Leavers, Department for Education
Links: Charter | Letter | Speech | Action for Children press release | ADCS press release | Barnardos press release | Labour Party press release | LGA press release | BBC report | Guardian report
Date: 2012-Oct
A report by an all-party group of MPs made a series of recommendations for how the care system could do more to support the educational needs of looked-after children and care leavers. It proposed a 'pupil premium plus' – an additional £1,000 payment to support the costs of education for looked-after children.
Source: Education Matters in Care: A report by the independent cross-party inquiry into the educational attainment of looked after children in England, All Party Parliamentary Group for Looked After Children and Care Leavers
Links: Report
Date: 2012-Sep
A report for the children's rights watchdog in Northern Ireland said that young people with learning disabilities faced a flawed system when moving from children's services to adult services, characterized by inconsistencies, weaknesses, and gaps.
Source: Laura Lundy, Bronagh Byrne, and Paschal McKeown, Review of Transitions to Adult Services for Young People with Learning Disabilities, Northern Ireland Commissioner for Children and Young People
Links: Report | NICCY press release
Date: 2012-Sep
An inspectorate report compared the views of young people leaving care with those leaving residential education. Whichever setting they were leaving, young people were anxious about how they would cope when they lost the security, structure, and support that they had been used to. Although many had learned everyday domestic skills, young people, particularly those leaving care, said that they needed more training in practicalities such as cooking, washing, and cleaning.
Source: Learning Independence: Views of care leavers, students in residential further education and boarders in boarding schools on moving on to independent adult life, Children s Rights Director for England/Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills
Links: Report | OFSTED press release
Date: 2012-May
A report examined the use of performance tables relating to leaving care. It identified a series of limitations of the official performance tables, including: being based on limited cohorts; measuring a small number of young people in each authority; problems with inaccuracies in the data; differences in reporting; specific issues with young people with additional support needs; and lack of comparative data.
Source: Linda Briheim-Crookall, Does It Stack Up? Measuring performance in leaving care, National Care Advisory Service
Links: Report | NCAS press release
Date: 2012-Apr
An article examined evidence from a European Union-funded project designed to find out how more care-leavers could be encouraged to stay in school longer and enabled to access further and higher education. If children and young people in care were to enjoy equal opportunities with their peers, a much stronger focus was needed in all countries on their formal and informal education throughout their time in care and beyond. With low level educational qualifications or none, they were severely disadvantaged in the labour market, especially at a time of high youth unemployment. In addition, their lack of family support and weak social networks put them at great risk of social exclusion in adulthood. Targeted measures to promote social mobility via participation in higher levels of education should be an explicit aim of welfare authorities.
Source: Sonia Jackson and Claire Cameron, 'Leaving care: looking ahead and aiming higher', Children and Youth Services Review, Volume 34 Issue 6
Links: Abstract
Date: 2012-Apr
A report called for central government departments to develop a more coherent overall approach to the needs of care leavers. Departments should make a commitment to 'care-proof' all government policies by assessing the impact that they would have on looked-after children, care leavers, and those who supported them.
Source: Access All Areas: Action for all government departments to support young people s journey from care to adulthood, Catch22
Links: Report | Catch22 press release
Date: 2012-Apr
A survey for the children's services inspectorate found that 48 per cent of children leaving local authority care believed that this happened too early. 49 per cent said that they had been very badly prepared, and would have liked more support with practical issues – such as money management, and how to obtain and use documents such as passports and national insurance cards.
Source: After Care: Young people s views on leaving care, Children s Rights Director (Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills)
Links: Report | OFSTED press release | Barnardos press release | Labour Party press release | Guardian report | Public Finance report
Date: 2012-Mar
A report said that key government policies intended to support looked-after children's participation in further and higher education were failing to make an impact, because a fragmentary, localist approach was confusing to young people and the professionals who worked with them.
Source: Open Doors, Open Minds, Who Cares? Trust
Links: Report | WCT press release | Community Care report
Date: 2012-Mar