Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to help young care leavers who are not able to stay in foster care to make a successful transition to independence.

The Care Leaver Strategy, published in October 2013, recognises that care leavers require support on a wide range of issues that affect their lives. It sets out the support that will be provided to all care leavers in relation to staying in education, finding accommodation, accessing benefits, experiencing good physical and mental health and finding work. [1]

The Department for Education will publish shortly a report on the progress we have made against the commitments set out in the strategy. This builds on a significant programme of work to improve support for care leavers, which has resulted in important changes such as the development of the Care Leaver Charter and the introduction of Junior ISAs for all children in care.

As part of our continuing work to improve care leavers’ outcomes, the Department introduced a new duty on local authorities to support ‘staying put’ arrangements and have provided funding for local authorities to support this. For the first time, this will provide for children in foster placements to receive support to remain with their foster family until age 21, where this is what both parties want.

Similar arrangements do not currently apply to children in residential care. Further work is needed before introducing a legal duty on local authorities that would require them to extend staying put arrangements to all young people leaving residential care. We are consequently working with the sector to better understand what would be involved and have supported work through the Department’s Children’s Services Innovation Programme to identify how staying put arrangements might work for children in residential care.

We will continue to drive innovation in provision for care leavers, for example through funding projects like ‘New Belongings’, which has enabled 9 local authorities to develop a range of new and innovative approaches to supporting care leavers.

[1] www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/266484/Care_Leaver_Strategy.pdf