The Department for Education recently published its implementation strategy in response to the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, setting out six missions to improve the outcomes for young people leaving care. These missions include extending corporate parenting responsibilities, strengthening relationships, tackling mental and physical health disparities and ensuring that care leavers have access to safe and suitable housing.

The Government’s implementation strategy also comes two months after Ofsted announced it was introducing a requirement in its inspection framework for care leavers, with the expectation that authorities will show how young people will ‘influence the services they receive’.

This increased focus on listening to young people is to be welcomed and as part of the national drive for improvement, local authorities will be looking carefully at how they boost outcomes as well as ensuring that young people’s views and experiences feed directly into the process.

The New Belongings programme, run by Coram Voice, supports local authorities to engage with their young people to develop creative and innovative solutions for local care leavers and it may provide some answers and a way forward for councils to respond to these challenges at a local level.

Over the last three years, the New Belongings programme has been working with eight local authorities (with support from Esmee Fairbairn and Segelman Trusts) to help them work together with the young people to develop solutions to the difficulties their care leavers face. Co-production, developing services based on the views and lived experience of young people, is central New Belongings and is founded on the principle that those who are affected by a service are best placed to help design it.

A new report published today, The Story of New Belongings, features case studies from the eight local authorities (North Tyneside, North Yorkshire, Oldham, Stockport, Coventry, Hertfordshire, Wandsworth, and Dorset) and the innovative service improvements they made in partnership with young people.

At the start of the project, the local authorities gathered baseline evidence on the subjective wellbeing of their young people using the Your Life Beyond Care Survey. In completing the survey, the young people sent a powerful message to their local authorities with a third (32%) of young people reporting that they did not feel safe where they lived, a similar figure (34%) reporting high levels of anxiety and one in five (20%) said they struggled to cope financially.

The authorities used this information together with the young people’s priorities for change to develop their action plans. Senior officers, elected member and partner agencies made a commitment to hear the messages from their care leavers about what made their lives good and what they felt needed to change.

In Stockport, when young people were asked about why they didn’t feel safe in their homes, the young people suggested introducing Ring door bells, allowing them to see who was at the door before answering. The scheme cost roughly £100 per person to implement and has now been rolled out to over 30 young people. It also links directly to the government’s Mission 5 to increase 'the number of care leavers in safe, suitable accommodation'.

North Yorkshire developed the ‘Always Here’ scheme to extend support to young people beyond the age of 25 in recognition that some care leavers wanted to keep in touch with their workers to share their successes in life or have someone to talk to when they experienced difficulties. The solution tackles the sudden ‘care cliff’ that many care leavers face and links to the government’s Mission 1 to ensure that young people have ‘strong and loving relationships in place’.

The London Borough of Wandsworth introduced specialist personal advisors with a background in mental health to bring a therapeutic approach to their work with young people experiencing acute difficulties. Linking directly with the government’s Mission 6 to reduce the mental and physical health disparities, this new service helped young people access adult care support and also supported young people with gang affiliation.

At a time of greater recognition of the challenges care leavers face and a new impetus for change, New Belongings provides a useful structured model for local authorities to identify the issues that really matter to young people and to work in partnership with them to develop the local solutions that will make a difference. Through the programme local authorities also have rich evidence to share with Ofsted to demonstrate how young people have influenced the services offered as part of the new inspections framework. They will also have a head start in addressing the challenges that the Department for Education has set out in its six Missions to improve the outcomes for care leavers.

Ian Stewart-Watson is the New Belongings programme manager. For further information on the programme, he can be contacted at: [email protected]