‘How the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill can be improved for care-experienced young people’

By Katharine Sacks-Jones, chief executive, Become

As social workers, playing a leading role in the lives of care-experienced young people, you know more than anyone the immense pressure the system is under.

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, introduced in December, clearly intends to improve children’s social care, through measures including better oversight and regulation about where children live and increased support for care leavers.

However, further scrutiny shows there are places where it could be strengthened, to significantly improve opportunities and experiences for care-experienced young people.

Last month, I gave evidence to the parliamentary committee looking at the bill, setting out what we welcome, and where it needs to go further for young people. After all, it’s only if their needs are being met that we know the system is working.

Strengthening Staying Close support

Statutory homelessness rates for care leavers aged 18-20 have increased by 54% in the past five years.

This has to change, which is why our End The Care Cliff campaign has been calling for the Staying Put and Staying Close schemes to be fully funded legal entitlements for all care leavers up to 25, unless they opt out.

It’s good news then that the bill says that local authorities must assess whether care leavers aged under 25 require Staying Close support and would then be under a duty to provide it to those in need.

But, as the criteria for assessment is not set out, we’re concerned this could lead to a rationing of support or a postcode lottery. We also want to see young people’s wishes and preferences taken into account in determining what support they might benefit from.

Going further on tackling care leaver homelessness

No young person should be facing homelessness, so it was especially welcome to see the government taking up a key ask of End the Care Cliff, by proposing an amendment to prevent care leavers from being found intentionally homeless. Now we’d like them to go further.

Currently, care leavers aged 18-20 are automatically assessed as being in ‘priority need’, which means local authorities are required to provide them with accommodation.

We think the bill should extend this to care leavers up to the age of 25, giving them a much-needed safety net.

The importance of financial support to care leavers

The bill will require local authorities to publish information about how they are supporting care leavers, particularly around housing, which we think is a positive move.

We frequently hear from young people on our Care Advice Line who are in acute financial crisis, so would like to see an additional focus on what financial support is available to young people leaving care.

Extending corporate parenting duties beyond councils

We’re disappointed that government proposals to extend corporate parenting duties to other public bodies are not currently included in the legislation, and hope they will reconsider bringing forward this important measure.

Preventing distant placements by regional commissioners

The bill gives the government new powers to direct neighbouring local authorities to commission care jointly, with the aim of improving their assessments of need and strategies for ensuring sufficient placements.

We want to make sure that these regional co-operation arrangements don’t lead to more children being moved far from their local area, even if it’s still within the region.

Our Gone Too Far campaign highlights the negative impact of moving children far from families, friends and schools. Far too many young people tell us how this is disrupting their education, affecting their mental health, breaking their connections and leaving them isolated.

This is why we’d like a safeguard in the bill to prevent distant moves when it’s not in children’s best interests.

Requiring a national sufficiency plan

Local authorities are required to offer sufficient, suitable accommodation for children in their care. Underfunding and an increase in the number of children in care have made this challenging.

This has created huge instability for children and led to an increasing number of children living far away.

Whilst the bill introduces a number of welcome measures, including better financial oversight and powers to bring in profit caps for private providers, it doesn’t mention how it will boost capacity.

There needs to be a national strategy to understand how many children in care are living in places that don’t meet their needs, what’s needed to address this and how government will support local authorities to deliver.

Being ambitious for care-experienced young people

We know from the work we do with professionals like you that only so much can be done with the resources available, which is why we need to see funding commitments flowing from this legislation too.

It’s time to be ambitious and deliver the changes care-experienced young people need.

Become supports children in care and young care leavers