Extended stay

The Children and Families Act, which came into force this spring, ushered in a groundbreaking move for the care system. All children in care who turn 18 can now “stay put” with their foster families until they are 21, provided both the young person and the foster carer are willing. Councils have £40m in ringfenced funding along with a new legal duty to put support arrangements in place.

The legal change has been widely welcomed for giving looked-after children much needed stability as they make the transition to adulthood and independence. After all, the average age at which young people in general leave the parental home is 24 and rising.

Janet Rich, trustee of the Care Leavers’ Foundation, urges councils to properly promote the new provision to both carers and children, so they make an informed choice about whether they want the placement to continue beyond the young person’s 18th birthday.

“This new provision will challenge foster carers,” says Rich. “They will have to ask themselves: is their commitment to open their arms to a new set of children, or will it be to the longevity and chance of a stable future for those to whom they are already committed. This will depend a lot on the relationship with their foster child.”

Robert Tapsfield, chief executive of the Fostering Network, says the government must monitor councils closely to ensure they promote effectively the benefits of care until 21. “This is a massive change for fostering and is likely to take a while to become embedded,” he says. While welcoming the extra funding, he warns that as councils get better at promoting the extended stay among carers and young people, costs will rise and further funding will be required for recruitment and fees. “We think the £40m is a reasonable figure, but in time there will be a need for additional funding.”

Culture shift

He adds that the cultural shift of providing foster care up to the age of 21 among carers, young people and children’s professionals cannot be underestimated.

Eleven councils piloted the so-called Staying Put arrangements, offering care until 21, between 2008 and 2011. These included City of York Council, which decided to continue offering care until 21 when the pilot ended.

York head of fostering, adoption and leaving care Howard Lovelady agrees the move requires a radical shift in thinking among all those involved. He says: “It is a big change to say to a carer of a child of 16 that this placement should go on until they are 21. It took time here in York, but the assumption now is that foster care is up to 21.”

The pilot councils found that a majority of carers and young people wanted their foster care placement to extend beyond 18.

But those looked-after children who did not want to remain in care cited either poor relationships with carers or the desire for independence.

Carers in the pilot areas who did not want to extend their placement cited a belief that leaving care at 18 would benefit their transition into adulthood. But the formal evaluation of the pilot found that young people who did stay put were twice as likely to be in full-time education at 19 than those who left care at 18.

York has brought about change by promoting the evidence that placement stability into adulthood improves young people’s outcomes, particularly around education. However, it remains a challenge to convince young people of the benefits of staying put. Despite the cultural assumption in the area that foster care now extends to 21, at present only half of York’s looked-after children choose to stay put when they reach 18.

Lovelady says: “Some want to make their own decisions – they don’t want to be told when they can come in at night, for example.”

However, in York, four-fifths of carers of young people up to the age of 21 were able to find extra room to take on another looked-after child. Chief among its additional costs has been recruiting extra carers to replace the loss of a placement through the age extension, which might give an indication of how other councils will need to spend the extra government funding.

The Fostering Network’s Tapsfield does not believe the extension will create “significant recruitment issues” immediately. He says he expects York’s experience of carers wanting to look after both a young person at 21 and take in an extra looked-after child to be mirrored elsewhere.

To safeguard the option of extended care, Janet Rich wants councils to consider flexible fostering options such as paying carers a retainer to keep placements open for young people who leave care at 18 but later regret the move. But Andrew Christie, chair of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services health, care and additional needs policy committee, foresees challenges in offering this flexibility. He says: “A foster carer may want to be a carer full time rather than just for some of the time, so it is not always possible to guarantee a place being available if they want to come back.”

To support councils and fostering agencies provide the extension to foster care, the National Children’s Bureau (NCB) is working with the Department for Education, the Fostering Network, councils and fostering providers to develop a good practice guide.
NCB director of evidence and impact Enver Solomon says: “It is important that young people know they have the opportunity to stay on and are equipped with the information to make that informed decision.”

Published in June, the guide will offer examples of care until 21 already taking place and advice on how to effectively promote this landmark change to carers and young
people alike.

One rule for foster care, another rule for residential care

While many young people in foster care have much to celebrate with the extension of care until 21, the same cannot be said for those in residential care.

In drafting the legislation, the government rejected calls for the staying-put provision to apply to residential care. It cited concerns over vulnerable adults and children living alongside each other, and how homes accommodating both children and adults would be inspected. Currently, Ofsted covers only services that are wholly or mainly for children.

But children’s minister Edward Timpson has since revealed that the Department for Education is open to reconsidering its stance. It is working with the National Children’s Bureau, the Who Cares? Trust and Catch22 to look at the feasibility of extending the reforms to residential care. The Every Child Leaving Care Matters campaign has argued that exclusion of residential care would create a two-tier care system.

NCB director of evidence and impact Enver Solomon wants to see residential care until 21 piloted and evaluated to assess how barriers around inspection and safeguarding might be overcome. “It is more complicated than foster care, but it is vital we look at this to ensure there isn’t a two-tier care system,” he says.

The feasibility work is examining a number of options such as the potential for residential care providers to offer accommodation for 18- to 21-year-olds on the same site as a children’s home, but in a separate building.

Janet Rich, trustee of the Care Leavers’ Foundation, questions the perception that accommodating care leavers of different ages together is necessarily a bad thing. “Perhaps those of different age groups can benefit from each other, with older children benefiting from being around younger children they feel responsible towards, and younger children benefiting from having big brothers and sisters to look up to,” she says. “Of course, that is idealised. But we appear to have stopped even asking whether it is a good thing to have children of different ages living with each other.”

One residential provider that already offers care up to 21 is St Christopher’s Fellowship. It runs residential, fostering and leaving care services across London, Bedfordshire and Sandwell.

Through its Cornock-Taylor site in west London, young people in care are offered a tiered route into independence – first in accommodation with intensive, 24-hour support, and then in semi-independent housing. This process typically lasts two years, but St Christopher’s director of strategy and development Sam Olsen says “there’s no limit”, adding: “The aim is that they move out of care when they are ready.”

But without the same legal requirement that is now attached to foster care, councils are hardly obliged to secure residential care for looked-after young people when they turn 18. “Some councils will recognise the value of this and commission the service, but others won’t,” Olsen says. “We had a young man with high needs and medical issues recently in one of our children’s homes. He was moved straight into a large hostel, then into a four-bedroom house with people he didn’t know, away from his borough and with just three hours support a week.”

Another option the DfE is looking at is step-down care, with those in residential care moving into foster placements when they turn 18. But Olsen says this is unlikely to work for those in residential care who have previously experienced multiple foster breakdowns. She says: “If the young person could cope with fostering, they would probably be in fostering anyway.”

Janet Rich likens the exclusion of extending residential care from 18 to 21 to “building a warship then not finishing it”. She adds: “The state has invested possibly around £500,000 in a child’s life in residential care. Why stop when they reach 18?”