The service is designed to support young people from 18 years of age who are leaving our care and are transitioning to living independently.
Being an enterprising council is about finding the best way to provide services fit for the 21st century.
For some services that could mean getting other organisations to run them on our behalf and for others it could mean delivering them ourselves – like our care leavers’ support service.
In November 2018, we decided to bring this service – which had been delivered by an outside organisation for more than 14 years – back in-house.
New laws have been introduced which place a duty on local councils to extend support to care leavers up to 25 years of age instead of 21. Therefore, we decided it was time to review the service to see how we could best provide this support.
During the review, it became clear that in order to respond to the new duties – and from feedback provided from care leavers – a new approach was needed to make sure we met our statutory duties as corporate parents and provide the best possible future for the young people in our care.
From 30 June 2019, we will deliver the care leavers’ support service including:
- closer working arrangements between social workers and personal advisors for care leavers
- more focus on transition planning to better prepare care leavers for adulthood
- more emphasis on managing budgets from an earlier age to help care leavers manage their finances
- more work to get care leavers into education, employment and training
- monitoring of their health and emotional well-being through the child health team
We will involve care leavers in the detailed design of the new approach.