Elijah

Once they turn 18 the support is wildly different. And I think as well, a lot of young people need to know what support they can get post 21, because so many young people don’t know. The amount of young people I have had come across my TikTok page, especially when they’re on TikTok LIVE, and I mention the fact that you’re... that if you’re from…a relevant child, that your case should be open till 25, if you want it to be open: I’ve had young people say that they didn’t know that. I’ve had, even just in the last like couple of months, I’ve had at least three or four young people who’ve come onto my page between the ages of like 22 to 25 whose cases were closed at 21, and had no idea that they had the right to keep it open.

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.

Do you remember how old you were when you went... went into care?

Yeah, I was [age].

[age]?

Yeah.

Yeah. And you said you’d moved was it five times—

Yeah.

— in foster care. Then... so in your last placement, how long had you... been there when they started talking to you about leaving care, about the plans for leaving care?

I moved in there I think right before I turned 17, so it wasn’t long after I moved there the discussions around transferring me to Leaving Care happened,—

Right.

— and I lived in that foster home for about a year.

Uh-huh.

I hated that place with absolute passion; she was an evil lady.

So, she was only fostering because of not being able to get any other job to get another source of income. She had originally been fostering with her husband, and I think it was her husband that actually wanted to foster and she just kinda went along with it. So then when they separated, she felt like she just couldn’t get another job and just carried on fostering.

And she was very emotionally manipulative. Like she would almost pit the foster kids against each other. Because where she had like a four bedroomed house, she’d have multiple foster kids at once, and she would be saying things about other foster kids to the other foster kids in the house.

And she would do this thing where she would wind up and aggravate the foster kids, especially the younger ones, until they just exploded, and then would call like police and ambulances and say that they were out of control and needed mental health assessments when the only reason they’d gotten out of control was ’cause she’d pushed, and pushed, and pushed, and pushed until they blew up; I absolutely hated her. The only reason I even stayed there as long as I did was ’cause of the younger kids in the house; they came to me a lot and I didn’t wanna leave them with her.

I don’t remember everything, but I do know that I still have a copy of one of my old plans. It was from the Looked After Child Review right before I moved to leaving care, and they mentioned a pathway planning in that, but it was very unclear what their kind of goals were really at that point, ’cause I was still in school, so they were trying to get me through school at that point because I had missed a lot of sixth form and my school was facing threats of closure, so it was really not a great situation. So, they were focusing on trying to get me through that, but then at the same time they were... some of the things they had in that were very interesting. Like they admitted in that review that they were pushing me to have contact with my family, despite me telling them that I didn’t want to. So, there was a lot of interesting things that they were using as like kind of goals to work towards, but it’s - I don’t really remember everything. I think their main point then, was getting me through school and then moving towards semi-independent. ’cause I’d asked to be on a Staying Put with a previous foster parent, but they wouldn’t do it, so I didn’t really know what was going on at the time, it was so poorly handled, where I didn’t really know what we were doing or where things were headed; everything just was kind of happening.

They think that you’ve become too dependent on the system, but a lot of time the system doesn’t, it’s not something you can rely on, or be dependent on, it’s full of instability and a lack of support. So, a lot of the time young people in care are just having to rely on themselves while not having the skills to be able to know what to do.

I mean really because of all my disabilities, they should have been, from the time that they were preparing to move to leaving care, they also should have been preparing to do referrals to adult social care to have that in place from the time I was 18 as well. Because of the level of support that I need, I’ve never been able to live fully independently, so they should have been preparing for that and should have been getting that support in place as well, and then having kind of that multi-agency planning with adult social care, and the leaving care team, to decide whether semi-independent would even be right, or whether adult social care placement would have been better, ’cause they can do things like Shared Lives and supported living.

I think what I’ve noticed a lot with the care system is they focus on hyper independence. They don’t focus on interdependence and teaching you to develop a support network and a community and being independent within the support that you have from that community. ’cause humans are not built to be solely independent as lone wolves: most people have a support network, and they don’t teach care kids how to build that up, they very much just push you to move into semi-independent, move into your own flat, do everything on your own, and they, they tell you that, that one day you’re gonna be on your own and you need to do all of this on your own ’cause one day the system’s not gonna be there, but rather than building up a network around you, they just tell you that if you can’t live as a lone wolf on your own, then you’re somehow institutionalised and failing at life.

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.

So, it’s difficult really on how to get that support to young people.  Some semi-independent placements are great at knowing what young people are entitled to. Like my very last place, they knew what you were entitled to and things, and they were amazing. But I think Children in Care Council’s a really important part of that, because what I learnt really came from Children in Care Council. And being taught about legislation on Children in Care Council was what helped me to learn how to understand legislation, so now I can know where to go to research things. And I found out a lot researching independently, but I wouldn’t have known where to even start if I hadn’t been on Children in Care Council. And so often semi-independent placements would come to me asking about  rights for young people and stuff, ’cause they knew that I either had the info, or knew where to get the info. So, I think Children in Care Councils are a really important part of that.

I was in a foster home when they started moving me onto the leaving care team, I was about 17, but it was really poorly managed because they never actually gave me a specific kind of date that that transfer was happening. So, for a while I didn’t know if I was still supposed to approach my Looked After Children Social Worker for things, or not, and it led to a bit of a disagreement between me and her because I wasn’t supposed to be going to her, but she hadn’t made that clear. ’cause with me being autistic, I needed to know exactly when those responsibilities were changing, and it just wasn’t made very clear; it was a very bad transition. And then when I moved out of that foster home when I was 18 and went into semi-independent, which again was really badly managed because it didn’t happen when it was supposed to, and I hadn’t been given any updates, so I actually looked up the company... well, like the charity that was running the semi-independent place – called through to their head office and asked them to give me the number for the place so that I could call them and then sort out what was going on and try and get an update on what was going on, so I basically arranged my own move there ’cause social services just screwed it up. When I spoke to them they were like: “Yeah, we’re... we’re fine for you to come whenever, they’ve just not arranged a date,” and so we sorted that out. But I’ve bounced around a lot. I’ve moved more since being on Leaving Care than when I was in care. I moved foster homes five times, but since being in Leaving Care, I’ve moved so many times: I’ve been in about seven different semi-independent placements. I’ve been in two different training flats, and then the whole moving to [city] for uni has been really badly managed as well. It’s taken two attempts to make that happen, and adult social care have been involved as well.

This placement was one of their block purchases, so it was only [placing authority], mostly [borough] young people that would be placed there. But what they don’t seem to understand when it comes to block purchase places is that a lot of the young people know each other because we’ve been in care together, or because of how small the borough is. We all knew each other before we even went into care, so a lot of our families knew each other, and that can create very interesting dynamics, but social services don’t really factor that in a lot of the time. So, at one point there was someone living there who I had grown up with and knew their family, so when their family would come round, I sometimes found it triggering being around their family, and that it was the social who didn’t really understand how to handle that a lot of the time because it is a very delicate situation, but they don’t seem to understand that. I think their response to it was just to try and stop everyone making friends, because they didn’t want people like, you know, tag teaming up against staff, or whatever, but you’re not gonna be able to stop people making friends when they’ve grown up with each other and already been friends most our lives.

Like when I moved in, there was someone living there that I’d known for years, and at one point there was about two or three people living there that I’d known way before I even came into care. But also the young people living there when I first moved there, all of them, from what I can remember, were dealing with some level of drug issues, and I’ve never been involved with drugs. So, I was the only one in the house who wasn’t on drugs, which can be a very interesting predicament to be in. Especially because at the time I was on co-dydramol for my hypermobility, so I was in a difficult position because the young people knew, a couple of them knew, that I was on pain medication, and had been in my room, so had seen that I was on co-dydramol. So, I actually had young people asking me to sell them my co-dydramol – never did – but they would ask me. And it made me feel really unsafe because then I was like, I needed to make sure that my room was always locked, and that I didn’t ever accidently leave my medication in the kitchen, or something.

And I don’t get up to much really other than uni, ’cause I’m very socially isolated. I don’t have any friends in [city], especially because I don’t have the support from adult social care in place right now because there’s been no proper transfer between [borough’s] adult social care and [city’s] adult social care team, so we’re still waiting on my Care Act Assessment to be done in [city], so I’m not getting the support I need at the moment, so I don’t have a lot of access to the community.

I mean in terms of living: I have no idea. ’cause obviously the council, their main kind of thing is getting you into like a flat or something, that’s what Housing try to do, but I don’t know if that’s gonna be appropriate without support from adult social care. Because of the level of hours of support that I have needed in the past, it’s more likely that they’d go down a supported living route, but that takes months, so I don’t really know what’s gonna happen with my housing and I worry that I’m gonna get shoved in a flat without the support that I need, and things. I’m currently in a studio flat without the support that I need, so...

I’ve bounced around a lot. I’ve moved more since being on Leaving Care than when I was in care. I moved foster homes five times, but since being in Leaving Care, I’ve moved so many times: I’ve been in about seven different semi-independent placements. I’ve been in two different training flats, and then the whole moving to [city] for uni has been really badly managed as well. It’s taken two attempts to make that happen and adult social care have been involved as well.

So if Staying Put wasn’t an option, we could have done Shared Lives if that was available at the time, but they didn’t do any of that. I wasn’t actually referred to adult social care until a couple of years ago when I finally referred myself and they contacted the local authority. But there’s never been any kind of factoring in of my disabilities. Despite being diagnosed with generalised hypermobility while being in foster care, I was never put with a foster parent that understood my medical needs or understood my disabilities. I was never in a placement that was even accessible for the issues that I have with my joints and things; my medical needs were never taken into consideration in care, let alone while preparing to leave care. And things like my autism and stuff wasn’t dealt with properly.

Especially because at the time I was on co-dydramol for my hypermobility, so I was in a difficult position because the young people knew, a couple of them knew, that I was on pain medication, and had been in my room, so had seen that I was on co-dydramol. So I actually had young people asking me to sell them my co-dydramol – never did – but they would ask me. And it made me feel really unsafe, because then I needed to make sure that my room was always locked and that I didn’t ever accidently leave my medication in the kitchen, or something.—

Yeah.

And the staff never... there was never anything in place with that, you know? And like, yeah, co-dydramol’s not a controlled substance, but still the staff never put any safely plans in place for how to manage my safety knowing that I had a medication that young people ...

But yeah, though they never factored in the fact that I had medication that young people on drugs would often seek out. There was a young person that told me in detail how he could use my medication to make [a drug], so it was just like: “Yeah, no, I’m not giving you my medication, dude – I need it.” So, it was things like that were just... were never dealt with very well, and there was no safeguarding in place to make sure that I was safe in that situation, and that the young people who were on drugs were safe as well. It was a very interesting situation. There was a lot of young people coming through with a lot of like significant drug issues, and there was one young person that actually got moved to a rehab facility and things. It was... it was chaos, it was absolute chaos. At one point there was a young person that took a bat to another young person’s door because they had stolen a PlayStation and things; it was insane.

Like, there were a lot of meetings in the runup to it, but there was never any specific time where I was explicitly told: “OK, from now on you contact your leaving care worker.” Because I was still under 18 when they did that transition, so I had a leaving care worker and a social worker from that leaving care team, but there was no point where they said, “OK, from now on you go to them and not like your Looked After Children’s worker.” So, for a while I didn’t know who I was supposed to go to, and it was very confusing, and they never really made that very clear.

So, she was trying to get me diagnosed with that, which I don’t actually have BPD, but because she believed I did, it was leading to some very interesting decisions being made at that point in time and she was pushing for me to be moved to a placement that was specialist in mental health because of how badly I was struggling with my mental health at that point in time. Which made sense to move me somewhere that had training in mental health, but none of my other disabilities are being taken into account. So... and then because this placement was in another borough: it was in [town], I got moved to a different mental health team. Still under the same NHS trust, but just a different mental health team.

So, if Staying Put wasn’t an option, we could have done Shared Lives if that was available at the time, but they... they didn’t do any of that. I wasn’t actually referred to adult social care until a couple of years ago when I finally referred myself and they contacted the local authority. But there’s never been any kind of factoring in of my disabilities. Despite being diagnosed with generalised hypermobility while being in foster care, I was never put with a foster parent that understood my medical needs, or understood my disabilities. I was never in a placement that was even accessible for the issues that I have with my joints and things; my medical needs were never taken into consideration in care, let alone while preparing to leave care. And things like my autism and stuff wasn’t dealt with properly. And technically it wasn’t officially diagnosed when I was in care, but it should have been because it was first mentioned when I was like 18 months old and the doctors had asked for me to be assessed when I got older, I think they were waiting till I was like five or six, and my parents never did it, but coming into care it was well documented that the doctors had been asking for that assessment most of my life, and social never did it; they never got me assessed. They finally did the paperwork when I was 17, but they screwed up the paperwork, so it didn’t actually get done till my psychiatrist referred me when I was about 18, so they... they’ve just never... they never took any of that into account.

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.

And I think what I’ve noticed a lot with the care system is they focus on hyper-independence. They don’t focus on interdependence and teaching you to develop a support network and a community and being independent within the support that you have from that community. ’cause humans are not built to be solely independent as lone wolves: most people have a support network, and they don’t teach care kids how to build that up, they very much just push you to move into semi-independent, move into your own flat, do everything on your own, and they... they tell you that, that one day you’re gonna be on your own and you need to do all of this on your own ’cause one day the system’s not gonna be there, but rather than building up a network around you, they just tell you that if you can’t live as a lone wolf on your own, then you’re somehow institutionalised and failing at life, and it’s insane. So... especially then when you’ve got things like autism and disabilities where you need more support in place, no one thought to do a referral to adult social care, no one thought to get additional support in place: they just label you as institutionalised, which is something that I’ve talked about a bit on my [social media] before because it drives me crazy how if you see a young person living at home who isn’t necessarily as independent as their parents would want them to be, people will usually ask their parents, you know: “What went wrong, you know, did they not teach them what they need to know?” or, you know: “is there a... a certain reason why they need additional support and things?” But then when you’re in care, the second you’re not independent – you’re institutionalised – you’ve become too reliant on the system, and we don’t say that to kids at home.

I mean really because of all my disabilities, they should have been... from the time that they were preparing to move to leaving care, they also should have been preparing to do referrals to adult social care to have that in place from the time I was 18 as well. Because of the level of support that I need, I’ve never been able to live fully independently, so they should have been preparing for that and should have been getting that support in place as well, and then having kind of that multi-agency planning with adult social care, and the leaving care team, to decide whether semi-independent would even be right, or whether adult social care placement would have been better, ’cause they can do things like Shared Lives and supported living.

It was difficult because everyone had very high needs for very different reasons. You know, there were a lot of young people that needed intensive drug and alcohol intervention, and needed a lot of mental health support as well – and weren’t getting it – and with them putting younger and younger people in semi-independent, we were getting more 16/17-year-olds being placed there, and they just weren’t getting the support that they needed either, so it... it was just an insane situation.

I had my friends staying with me for a couple of weeks while I had first been put into a training flat because my knee had gotten so bad that I could barely walk at all, and I was living up two flights of stairs, so I could barely get up and down the stairs to where I lived.

So I needed a lot of help at that point in time with everything because I couldn’t walk very far at all, and I’m now waiting to be assessed for arthritis in my knee, and it’s very likely that if it is, which we suspect is osteoarthritis, that if it is that, that was the firsts signs of it, and it was being completely ignored by social services. ’Cause things like my hypermobility and my asthma were all diagnosed while I was in foster care.

But also because of things like my autism and complex PTSD, I need support to attend things that I’m not used to, and I don’t have that right now. That I’ve not even had access properly to medical care really in the last few months because I’ve not had support to attend my medical appointments, so unless it could be done over the phone, I’ve not been able to do any of that. So, it’s like I had a telephone consultation about my asthma recently and they wanted me to come in so that they could double-check and make sure that I didn’t have like a chest infection, or anything, but I couldn’t go in because I didn’t have the support to do so.

Yeah. 

So young people would go there quite a lot. Sometimes we’d go there to see our leaving care workers, but sometimes you’d just go there for a chat. You know, like the receptionist that worked there, she’s absolutely adored by young people, like everyone loves her. She knows most of the young people. She’s been a receptionist there for I think at least a couple of decades, so she’s seen most of us grow up, and so she... sometimes people will just go to the office just to chat to her. 
 
Yeah. 
 
But also there was a leaving care manager who passed away, so there’s like a little memorial for him and there’s a memorial for a care leaver who died, so there’s like a little memorial garden, so sometimes people would go there to see that. But you can’t... you can’t go to any of that now. It’s gone from being very much like a safe place and a hub that people could go to, to now being something that’s completely off limits to us. 

But it was tricky because there was support put in place in terms of like shopping centres for people who were like elderly, or healthcare workers and things, but being a young person with a physical health issue, it made it difficult because I couldn’t get like the early access to the shops and things to get things before everyone else. So... and with my disabilities it was like, it was harder to be walking around a lot and standing and waiting in queues to get into shops and things. So that was something that was quite tricky that social services also didn’t really know how to manage.

I think it’s mostly just to not be afraid to ask for what you need, and that if you’re struggling to adjust, struggling with independence, and struggling with independent living skills and things, not to let the leaving care team, and things, make you feel bad about it, ’cause they... they often will try to and will try to make you think that you’re just not an adult or, you know, not mature enough, or that you’re institutionalised and will try and make you feel bad for not being able to cope. But most care kids have lived through things that most people could barely even imagine, and we’re dealing with so much, and just getting to that point of being able to leave care, is huge; surviving that system is huge. And I think that young people need to just know that they aren’t what social services say they are, and that just because they’re struggling, it doesn’t mean that they’re in some way incapable in the way social services will often make you think you are. I mean look at most kids who go on to go to university: there are parents that get calls from their kids who are students because they can’t work the damn washing machines at student halls, but so often in care, when you’re leaving care and you’re struggling with the same things, you’re painted as being institutionalised and things. So it’s just making sure that young people know that they’re not that and that they’re not what social services say that they are and that it’s... it’s OK to find it hard when you are going through that. Especially because so often not only are you struggling to adjust to independence, but you’re also experiencing the ‘care cliff’, is what we tend to call it, where the amount of support you get just drops off hugely at 18, and it drops off again when you turn 21. 

I think adult social care need to be more involved with the leaving care teams. They need to see what is going on in that system, because so often they... as much as children’s social care have no knowledge of adult social care, the same goes for them: adult social care do not understand just how broken children’s social care is, so they don’t understand the level of trauma that kids in care are coming into adult social care with, and why they may struggle more to adjust to things like supported living placements, when they’ve maybe been through trauma in supported living placements in care.  
 
Yeah 

So there needs to be more awareness for them understanding what the challenges for young people coming out of leaving care even are. But I think they also need to understand that because the system is so broken, that what is written about young people in care isn’t necessarily true, and what the professionals are saying about young people in care, is not inherently true. I think too often, social workers will trust what other social workers have said and then dismiss what the young person says if it doesn’t agree with what Leaving Care have said.