When our authority first started its Leaving Care team and services with the new legislation, in 2000, we had a Day Centre, some flats and bedsits, a team of 15 personal advisers working day and evenings, including some who ran the Supported Lodgings.
There was enough funding to pay rents, set up flats with furnishing and equipment, provide income payments for the under 18s to keep them off benefits, buy birthday and Christmas gifts, food parcels when they inevitably had cash issues, yearly clothing grants, interview clothing, college and uni grants, drop ins, meals, training, groups, incentives, etc.
We had a minimum standard for frequency of visits, but saw everyone a lot more often because they needed it. We employed some yp, too.
Nowadays, although I no longer work with care leavers, I see there have been so many cutbacks that most of these things have gone or been drastically reduced.
The team has been halved, they no longer work evenings, the Day Centre has gone, the yp have to bid for LA or Housing assoc properties which they can't sustain, so they get into arrears or disputes and get blacklisted, etc.
The setting up home grants are capped, there is more reliance on charities and the private sector re housing and support.
Yp at uni are expected to get loans and/or jobs, like anyone else. But they are not like anyone else, with parental support and reasonably stable backgrounds to go forward into a hard world.This is why so few care leavers get to uni, fewer still complete their courses.
The number of children in care, and therefore care leavers has increased and additionally each authority has a number of unaccompanied asylum seeking children and teens to care for, often arriving at short notice and traumatised.
But each local authority has been required to “save” millions of pounds every year.
This is a bullshit way of saying that the money to run services has been reduced year after year. This has been going on for at least ten years, and I have just heard that more “savings” are required over the next three years.
The principle behind the leaving care legislation was “would this be good enough for my child?”
It all seems a bit dismal now.
Sorry about the long post.... 