Care leavers’ transitions to independence

I got a job quickly: yes, I had like a huge spreadsheet with hundreds of places and, you know, I was preparing my CV. I was... I had people around me who could also help me do that with the CV. I think... I quite like talking to people anyway, so it puts me in good stead. Like personally, I’ve always enjoyed interviews and things like that and… quite curious, so I think... I mean it... I think maybe like when I was much younger I was hugely... I still am very socially anxious, but if I was still struggling with that, in that way, I would have really struggled to go into an interview, and that would have been a real barrier for me. But luckily I’d kind of developed a way to cope with that by the time I was applying for jobs.

Ooh, about 14/15ish, yeah. And it’s called [youth] Council, so obviously like floods of young people in foster care or from like children’s homes and stuff, and we all come together once a fortnight and sort of discuss what is working well and what’s not working well, to change things that aren’t working well. For example, like one of the things that we’ve recently worked on was the Change the Language campaign, so obviously when we’re looking back at like when you get your records when you’re 18, a lot of the people didn’t like the way certain words and stuff were used, like ‘placement’ instead of ‘home’, and it was very like... it’s too professional and it’s not like personal to you. So obviously we did like a whole Change the Language campaign and we got social workers then want to change the way that they’d speak. And it’s gradually going across country now, like it is slowly going across country, but yeah, so obviously that was like one of the main things that were done, which obviously did massively help. But yeah,a lot of the stuff that I learnt from like for my plan to move was obviously either [youth] Council or my PA, or me just researching all the bits and bobs, yeah.

Again, like I had the skills. I knew roughly that I wanted to work in the sector that I work in, I knew what I had as my long-term goal, and I knew that I’d have to sort of climb up these little ladders, and I had the patience. And I mean some days you think, ‘oh god, it’s not working,’ you know? But I knew that... what it was gonna take if I’ve got this longer-term vision and I want to own a home one day and have a family one day, I’m gonna have to look after myself and figure out my own stuff and I’m gonna have to put in the work and sometimes do jobs that I don’t wanna do. Sometimes you end up having to work for free and it’s the most painful thing when all you’ve ever done is give yourself to other people and now you have to do it more because that’s the nature of like forging a career, unfortunately, although it is getting better; a lot of internships and things are now paid.

We still do have that like in amongst our generation, like a belief that, you know, stiff upper lip when you’ve got to go to work, and all of this stuff, but I think it’s getting better, and I think we’re starting to realise that the private and the public is actually relatively... you know, you can’t really always separate who you are from the thing that you do to pay bills. And that’s gonna be especially the case when you’re a care leaver because, I don’t know, like, I could be working or something and I’ll get a text from my mum, and then, you know, I might be worried about her, or something – obviously we all do that – but I guess it’s maybe a bit more complicated, I don’t know. But yeah, I think I’m still new to it, I’m still learning how to be in the workplace and how to even know what my needs are, you know, in a workplace setting, let alone how to ask for them.

Yeah, there are always gonna be hurdles that you face, or times when you don’t really know how to explain yourself, or when you’re not really sure if you should offer context, or if you’re oversharing, but you also need to offer context because, I don’t know, you need like... you need some time to... Like, so I have fibromyalgia, so I get like chronic pain, all of that, and it’s really hard to say, “I think I need to work from home today,” or, “I think I need to look after myself today,” because you just think... But, you know, and that’s on me as well for thinking that I can’t say it, but it also comes from my experiences of not always being able to have my needs met first, and that’s quite a deep-rooted thing that comes with the territory of being a care leaver.

I was reading something, it was actually about ADHD and autism and people who have those, but it was saying you’ve got all these things about work that you often have to overcome, which at home you don’t have to overcome, but they’re relatively invisible. So, for example you might like it the temperature you like, or the lighting that you like, or... or you feel like you’re having to mask a lot of the time, and to some extent, yes, your workplace could offer you a lot of concessions for all those things, but in another sense you also, you know, are having to deal with them yourself, or it can just be resolved by being in a different space to work.