Raising the care leaving age: a care leaver's perspective

I left care six years ago now. My placement broke down a few months after my 18th birthday as my relationship with my foster parents became increasingly strained.

I spent a few months sofa surfing before setting up my own accommodation with the financial support of my local authority. The support I received did not stretch much past rent and textbooks… I saw my leaving care worker on a bi-annual basis, and when I was made aware of the leaving care grant, it was communicated to me as being available up to a certain value that I could claim back for the costs of setting up a home. I spent only a fraction of it on cheap furniture (that broke) because I felt strongly discouraged from making full use of the funds available.

In Scotland you can now stay in care until you turn 21. I would have still been in education on my 21st birthday, so from my perspective all this would have done for me is postpone the disruption of my placement breakdown by a few years.

Staying Put would have helped me. I was a much more mature and better-adjusted individual at 21 than I was at 18. But I was still pretty far from being an adult by then.

From my experiences of talking to care leavers it seems that councils end up placing young people inappropriately in hostels and bed and breakfasts and/or homeless accommodation.

What’s worse is that despite these changes to the age at which we leave care, in many ways, it seems that things are getting worse not better. The findings of the recent National Audit Office report underlined this.

In some cases foster carers go above and beyond to fill in service gaps left by critically underfunded local authorities. Care leavers I’ve come into contact with who have received this kind of charitable support have all had more successful transitions.

But even if care leavers have a successful transition to independent living there is no guarantee of long-term stability without the guidance needed to stop us from making serious mistakes or suffering from poor mental health.

I’m in my mid-20s and I still don’t feel stable. Although that’s not surprising considering 37 per cent of people my age still live with their parents. These are people with average lives and families, not people with the baggage that comes with care experience. We’re the boomerang generation, but those of us from care more often than not have nowhere to go back to – which probably explains the shocking statistics on the relationship between care experience and homelessness. Desperate people are more willing to take risks, which is part of why so many of us are in prison.

According to the Office for National Statistics, 13.7 per cent of men and women aged 26 to 34 still live with their parents. So even if a majority of care-experienced people stay in care until they’re 25 (which is unlikely if the results of staying put are anything to go by), a significant portion of the care-experienced population are going to undergo problems with housing and finance regardless of the changes to age limits being made.

The debate on “when should someone leave care” detracts from the meat of the issue. Because there’s no such thing as leaving care. Not really. You don’t reach a certain arbitrary age where all the family support, connections and resources you never had suddenly spring back into your life. As a care leaver you’re going it alone whether you’re 18, 25 or 40.

What we really need is some kind of specialist support service we can access to help us with mental health, finance, temporary accommodation and career resources in much the same way that non care-experienced people can rely on their family members without age limitation. Your family will support you for life. Why should that be different if you’re a child of the state?

Cameron Forester, is a care leaver working for care-leaver charity The Rees Foundation