It’s a truism boarding on cliche that social care is all about relationships – but sometimes things are cliches because they are true.
In recent times growing numbers of young people are choosing to remain in their family homes and with their parents into their twenties and increasingly even thirties due to a range of financial and employment pressures.
Whilst the majority can rely on their family ties for support, young people leaving care are known to be at higher risk of homelessness than their peers without care experience. The reasons for this are varied and complex, but it is unambiguously because of poor public policy and a lack of intervention from the state.
One policy with the potential to reduce this risk however is Staying Put, which allows young people leaving care to remain with their foster carers, if both parties agree, from the age of 18 to 21.
The scheme is targeted at young people who have ‘established familial relationships’ with their foster carers. Just like other young people who can rely on their own families for support the key objectives of the scheme are to build on and nurture attachments. This allows them time to move to independence at their own pace and be supported to make the transition to adulthood in a more gradual way. It also provides the stability needed to pursue education, training and employment opportunities.
We were commissioned by the Cabinet Office, and the Centre for Homelessness Impact (the what works centre for homelessness), to investigate the impacts of children’s social care interventions on later housing outcomes for care leavers.
In the case of Staying Put, we used publicly available data on the number of young care leavers in each local authority who were owed a homelessness prevention or relief duty in each year, to evaluate the programme’s impact. By looking at changes over time in those places that made more use of Staying Put arrangements we compared both to their own historic outcomes, and compared to other, statistically similar local authorities.
Early evaluations of Staying Put showed considerable promise. Our findings show a significant effect of staying put in reducing the likelihood that young care leavers experience the risk of homelessness itself. So far, the policy has led to an estimated 14% reduction in these figures, but there is still work to do.
Young people who stayed put were more than twice as likely to be in full time education at 19 compared to those that did not (55% and 22% respectively). In addition, a slightly higher percentage of those who stayed put were in full time training and employment at 19 compared to those that did not (25% and 22% respectively).
If all local authorities were to move to the levels of Staying Put arrangements, of the top 25% of local authorities, our research shows that an extra 300 young care leavers a year could be prevented from experiencing either the risk of homelessness or homelessness itself.
If all eligible young people were able to stay put, this would rise to more than 1000 young people per year. As a new government begins work on a programme, after a manifesto that pledged to get Britain ‘back on track to ending homelessness’, Staying Put is a low cost, and readily available intervention that can make a significant dent in this agenda.
We have a responsibility to safeguard these young people from homelessness - something that we would bend every sinew to avoid for our biological children and should not tolerate where the parenting relationship is legal and societal.
Supporting the mental health and wellbeing of care leavers
In this series of five linked podcasts we speak to care leavers, practitioners and a researcher about support for care leavers’ mental health and wellbeing.