Turning 18 is tough for anyone, but for care leavers in England, it's less a birthday and more a 'cliff edge' where the social worker and support staff vanish into thin air. Hannah, 22, from Hertfordshire, knows this all too well: after aging out of the system, she suddenly found herself without the reassuring adult presence she'd relied on. But she managed to use a family-finding service to reconnect with an auntie and some old school friends - because apparently, the state can help you track down people you lost touch with, if it feels like it.
On Thursday, the government announced it would launch a national Who Do You Think You Are?-style service for care leavers, backed by £8.4m of funding. A specially trained coordinator will dig through social care records, old school reports, and public birth and marriage registries to reunite young people with family and friends, complete with a support plan. Because nothing says 'we care' like a bureaucratic genealogy project.
Josh MacAlister, the children's minister, admitted the care system often breaks relationships rather than builds them. 'The anxiety of professionals around children and young people means we'll make short-term decisions that rupture relationships in order to create safety for a short period of time,' he said. 'But that very act is the thing that means, long-term, the young person is at risk because they don't have a tribe.' He added that the shockingly high rates of young people in care who die young, have poor mental health, or poor educational and employment outcomes are a direct result of this.
Last month, government data showed more than 100 young people died after leaving care in England in the past year - a figure MacAlister called 'a stain on our society.' The new family-finding programme aims to reduce those deaths by ensuring care leavers have a support network when they exit the system. 'A lot of the care-leaver deaths that I've looked at involve very isolated, very lonely young people,' he said. 'We have an escalator in the system that pushes young people towards independence, when actually what they need is interdependence.'
Existing family-finding schemes in some local authority areas have shown promising results: participating young people gained an average of nearly two additional meaningful relationships, and more than a third reconnected with immediate family members. MacAlister has called for every care leaver to have at least two people who love them - a metric he admits is hard to measure, but the absence of which leaves young people 'very, very vulnerable, particularly at 18.'