Care leavers’ transitions to independence

Like initially it was only supposed to be for one night and because obviously something bad happened, and then I was there for months and there wasn’t really a lot of like transparency about what was happening. Like, they didn’t really inform me, they didn’t keep me informed about that, really. It… yeah, it just seemed that I was there for longer and longer and longer and I feel like a lot was going on behind the scenes, but then it just wasn’t really reaching me, and it was through my foster care-,it seemed that my foster carer was just making that all these decisions and… [intake of breath] like to change my school and it made me feel really uncomfortable because I… yeah, I was not really kept in the loop with a lot of this that was happening.

Sometimes it could be my decision. But a lot of the time it has been a decision made on my behalf, and also with social services, I’ve not had a PA since I was 21; they closed my case at 21. So, I’ve not had any support from social care at all, and I’ve only just recently got hold of a duty number so I can get support, but I think I’ve left that too late. So, I’ve only got a year until they will cut me off completely.

He said he was retiring, [erm] he was quite an old fella, but he said he was retiring and that my case was going to be closed at 21. But I only recently found out that I could have said no to that. Apparently, I could have said no to my case being closed, but I just said yes ’cause I felt poor.

Oh, OK. So—

I felt like a... and so I just... I literally just agreed with it and my case was closed.

OK. But there was the option to say no, I guess?

I wasn’t aware at the time; I thought they were just closing my case. Like I thought it was just procedure at 21 to close my case. I didn’t really know much about it, and  I didn’t think I was gonna get a change of PA or anything, so I just agreed to it.

When I first came in, I was held in a police station and they... When I went to claim asylums at the police station, they didn’t accept my age. And they also didn’t want to listen to me. 

So after I waited, first, they didn’t want to accept me. They said, we can’t, we can’t let you claim asylum. You just have to go back. We don’t, we don’t want you to stay here. 

But after a long while, when they took my fingerprints, they said, we found your fingerprint in France, and you’re not the age that you’re claiming to be. And I know why that was, because when I was in the border of France, the UK force has taken my fingerprints. And when I told them I was 17, they have registered it 18 on the PC. So I told them to correct it, but they didn’t want to listen. They just gave me an ID that says I’m 17 years old, but on the computer, it was still 18.  And because of that, they didn’t want to believe my age when I came here. And I explained what has happened. But they didn’t want to listen to me. 

So they said I have, they have taken my fingerprints in France three months earlier. And they said it was after three months that I came to the UK, and after they’ve taken my fingerprint, my fingerprint, they said you’d have to wait for a car to come and collect you. It would take about 40 minutes to one hour. This is after I’ve explained that I’m underage and what has happened when they took my fingerprint back in France. And then they said for me to wait for 40 minutes to one hour and a car would come and collect me. But that didn’t happen all night, and in the morning they just let me go. So I had to walk, trying to find a train station so I could go somewhere. So as I was walking I found a train station and I walked into there.

I was sat basically saying like, “Ah, erm I need help,” I said, “can you not see that I’ve gone to the doctor’s?” ’cause the doctor said that she’d ring me back, so then she’d never rang me back and like...

I’d left it like two days, so I rang them and they were like, “Oh, she’s on her break, ’cause she’ll ring you back after her break, I promise straightaway,” ’cause I’d already told her that she didn’t ring me back – she never rang me back – and by then I was drained, so I was like, ‘no, like, they’re not bothering me, no,’ so I went to the supported lodgings carer, I was like, “The home treatment team don’t come on time,” I said, “I haven’t got regular appointments with the doctor’s,” I said, “they don’t even ring me back,” I said, “I am ask...” I said, “I’m begging for help,” I was like, “I’m begging for it, and I’m not getting it,” I said, so you can’t even... like ’cause they were like blaming me, I was like, “you’re pushing the blame onto me,” I said, “but you’ve seen me physically go out and try,” and they were like, “Right, we’ll get you help from the doctor’s and ring them again,” I’m like, “I need it now, I need this help now.”  And that was the appointment.

I basically opened up to my PA and he’d said... I said, “Look, I’m really ill, like I’ve... I’ve not eaten in three days,” you know.

And then that was when I started having the meetings with my PA and I’d say... said to PA like, “I’m ill,” like... and I was basically shouting... like I never shout, but I was shouting and I was like, “I need fu...” I said, “I can’t do this anymore,”

I said, “I can’t do it, I have like... I cannot carry on,” I said, “every day is so hard,” du-du-du. And my PA’s right, and he was like, “Right, right, go to your boyfriend’s he said, “’cause if you stay here tonight, this placement’s gonna breakdown.” “So, I’m not going to my boyfriend’s like you always send me to him that’s all you ever do,” I said, “that is not fixing anything,”

So, prior to my birthday and moving out, I didn’t have a say in where I went, or saw it, and that’s not something I got a choice of because of the legal obligation which the care system didn’t have to me. But usually, obviously, if you do fully qualify, depending on your individual situation, everyone gets to see where they’re going, so in my case I didn’t. No, it was literally: pack up, “See you [Daisy], good luck, good luck for the future, good luck, bye-bye,” I didn’t see anything prior.

When I turned 18, with the supported accommodation, I was told this is a place you can go if you want to, but I was also told this is the only option: “This is the only place we have, so you can choose to go here if you want, you can say no, but there’s nowhere else for you to go.” So, it wasn’t really a choice, but it was a choice at the same time.

I struggled with mental health during that time. I think my support worker wasn’t really helpful. The support was kind of just either, “keep your spirits up you’ll be fine,” mostly. I appreciate the support that was there. It just, there was no real understanding. Support workers have no lived experience of what it was like and so it made it quite difficult. I found sort of the counsellors and the team at CAMHS, and the safeguarding leads, they have no lived experience what it was like and it was really difficult to resonate and really get that support. And it was only when I found my counsellor at college, who had actually lived in a foyer like I did when they were younger, and also homeless. I thought, oh I finally feel heard. It was really nice and that was the first sort of time I really felt supported. So, yeah.

Did they try to understand?

They did what their text-books and their degrees that taught them to. Stuff like, you have intervention strategies or your phrases that you say like, ‘I am here for you. I understand it must be difficult.’ And it’s like you don’t. And l’d hear this phrase twenty times a day, it doesn’t mean anything. You are not listening to me. It kind of felt like you were hitting a brick wall when you needed support, sometimes. So, yeah. 

More young people are getting involved. More young people are speaking up and speaking out, and they’re not as afraid to express their opinions.

OK. So, there are more people who are able to. So, do you feel like their voices are being listened to as well?

Yeah. Yeah, I think... I’d say they are, yeah.

OK. And how do you feel about the change that... is there a change that you’ve been seeing, or is it more gradual?

It’s more gradual, but again, I can compare it to when I first became a care leaver. And when I first became a care leaver, people wouldn’t say anything because if you spoke up you were a troublemaker, like think you could be voicing a genuine like opin... like it’s something that to you is completely validated, but to a professional you’re just, “Are you causing trouble again?”

Oh, OK.

Whereas now, it is very much a case of young people being listened to and young people are having more of a say, and young people are contributing to the changes that are going on.

So, did you not, like, get on with your... whoever it was, social worker, personal advisor?

No, it was... it wasn’t really that. It was more for... more of a case of I wasn’t really a fan of meetings. I was a very ADHD kinda kid.

So, I never wanted to sit down, I just always had to be up and moving; however, that wasn’t very helpful because every time I would... would, say, stand up and walk around, and whatnot, they’d get upset and angry, and obviously I can’t control what I do and don’t do. I can’t control that I walk around.

So, to stop them all screaming at me, I just decided: ‘enough is enough, I’m in charge of my own life, I’m gonna go do... I’m gonna cancel this and I’m gonna do it my way,’ which I did.

So, I was not taken seriously every time I’d... you know, like whether it was trying to ask questions, or, you know, asking to do like certain things like: “Can you show us how to do a washing machine?” There was always an excuse as to why they couldn’t do it, which is wrong because they should have been doing it. Yeah, at that point I just went to my dad after sneaking out of his, even though I shouldn’t have been, huh. But yeah, so I just went to my dad ’cause I... I just wasn’t being listened to by my social worker at the time.

As soon as you have that personality disorder label, nothing you say gets listened to, absolutely nothing. You just get labelled as someone who’s expected to say and complain about things, and nothing you say is taken seriously from that point. It’s such a stigmatised diagnosis and they use it as a way to really just throw people away, and so often the people that are actually being diagnosed with it, don’t have it. A lot of people who are diagnosed with it, end up being diagnosed with things like autism, PTSD, complex PTSD, bipolar.

My leaving care worker was going to her manager and saying like, you know: “This is not a good environment, this placement is not suitable,” but she wasn’t being listened to. There were a lot of phone calls between me and her where she was apologising to me because she felt like she was letting me down because she couldn’t get me out of there either. So not only did you have me, but you had my leaving care worker saying that this wasn’t suitable, but the manager was just like, ‘no, not... not gonna hear it.’ ’cause she kept saying, well, my mental health had deteriorated even further.So she was saying I needed to be there longer because of that, but I was trying to explain to her, and so was my leaving care worker, that could they not understand that my mental health was deteriorating because of that place.

So, you and other people who had been in that placement got that decommissioned?

Yeah, yeah, we got it decommissioned.

Would you be able to say a little bit about that, or is that something you’d—?

Yeah, no, mostly like what we kinda did is we all just kinda banded together as one voice. So, because I knew young people that were still living there. ’cause when I got moved to a new semi-independent placement and it wasn’t far from that place, so a girl that I had grown up with, before foster care, had come into care and had been placed at [name of placement]. So we were talking and she was telling me all the same stuff was happening. And I’m very much the kind of person where I couldn’t move on from what had happened, knowing it was still happening to other people.

Yeah.

So, with her help, I found out who was still living there and spoke to other young people that I knew that were living there that had been placed there. ’cause the young people that were there when I was there, I didn’t get on with, but as new people got moved in, some of them I knew. So, we all kinda came together and were all experiencing the same stuff at that place, or had experienced it. So we all started filing reports to social services, and eventually a lot of other professionals started to back us up, like the drugs and alcohol worker that had visited the placement backed up our reports based on what she’d seen when she’d been there, and other young people told me that their leaving care workers were also backing up. So, I think eventually it just got to the point where so many of us had linked up with each other and had found that we were all having the same experiences that they couldn’t silence all of us, so they had to take action.