Care leavers’ transitions to independence

I think in general we should learn that anyway, but I think for foster kids, because there’s like almost a definite that we get that when we’re 18, we have to start paying bills, etc, I think it’s rather important.

When I first went into care, I wasn’t independent at all, but I mean, I was [age], so that, you know, take that how you will, but I couldn’t even do the minimal stuff such as like wash myself, etc, because my mum still kind of treated me like a young child. So, I mean to me, like ’cause when I, when I first went into care there was an expectation that I could just do that, which is fair enough, you would expect that of an [age] year old. However, I couldn’t, or I wasn’t used to focussing on doing it myself. So, for me, that was like a big, I guess, shock. Like small things like that, putting myself to bed, just things that I should have been able to do as a kid anyway, but for me, that was a lot bigger a step. So, I think, I, I just didn’t, I felt very alone in that sense, and so now I’m like used to that, like when there’s another big change in my life, I like to embrace it, rather than fear it, because I see it as another opportunity to make it my own thing, kind of, ’cause last time it wasn’t. Like, when I first went into care, that wasn’t my decision and I didn’t have a good experience of it and it was very much a shock. So now it’s like, if I prepare myself better, I feel like I’ll feel better about it, because I didn’t have any opportunities to prepare myself beforehand.

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.

In addition to my travel, the college, and everything, there was a service that I didn’t even know. They just moved me and after I signed the contract they told me I have to pay £24 service charge a week.

OK.  They didn’t tell you that before?

No. I went to see the house. They didn’t see me at all.  I signed the contract and then my PA... there was a misunderstanding between my PA. So someone instead of that, the PA that I have now, came and she told me I have to pay like £24 a week, and I was surprised because they will give me £67 and I have to travel. She also mentioned that I have to... if they give me half of the travel money, I still have to add more money for travel, for everything, and still I have to pay £24 as well for service charge.

That one was... that was like, I’m just moving out from my foster’s house, and everything, I’ve never been by myself; it was really challenging.

And I just can’t... I just can’t like do everything. When there will be something I want to buy, I feel like, because one... that night that I moved there, instead of... there was a woman who came instead of my PA, she told me: “You have to say, we have to say that...”  I’m really like stressing: “How am I going to do it?” Because all I am hearing is like expense, expense, expense. There was no way that I can get like income because I won’t... I won’t... I don’t have the idea to work.

Also, I want to study art, and because of the language barrier, I have to start from zero. So, the things that I need is like a long-term progress and I can’t just do [snaps fingers] it like this.

But the things and like in front of me were so challenging and to put them together was hard first.

So even budgeting things, you don’t know where to start, and there are a lots of things you have to work out, but you don’t know where to start.

There was a time I was like that. Which one to focus? Do I have to learn how to like do my er budgeting, everything like how to deal with the house and stuff? Or do I have to deal about like travelling, how to travel like in the best route, and-? Or how to be... everything was hard, but like it was like a total change for me at that time.

Yeah, when I was, like, nearly 17 and a half, ’cause I lived in a children’s home and they move everyone out at 17 and a half, they... in the children’s home they would encourage me to do things like cooking and they had some, like, courses, like, about budgeting and money and things like that. And they offered to let me move into... In the home, they had, like, a little flat downstairs, so it was kind of separate to the rest of the house, and they wanted me to move there to, like, prepare for being more independent, but I didn’t want to go into there anyway.

I think one of the things I found really hard was, like, doing a food shop, ’cause it sounds really easy, but I would never know how much to buy or what prices were reasonable, and things like that, and I feel like if I’d done more food shops before I went to living by myself it would have helped a lot.

They, like, told us how to compare prices, but I didn’t know how much things were really, so if something was more expensive, I wouldn’t really know what it was normally like anyway, if that makes sense?

I think they gave me a, it was like a sheet of paper to help budgeting. It was like, oh, a budgeting piece of paper. I didn’t really use it as such because they didn’t really... they kind of tried to sit down a little bit and be like: “OK, how much on average will you spend on food a week?” But I don’t know enough about how much I’m gonna spend on food to, like, actually do it, so I never really used it.

I know my PA did way more about budgeting and stuff like that with me than my social worker originally did. She also told me about cooking classes there were to help me with my independent skills and how some places offered some. At the time, I’m pretty confident in cooking, so I didn’t have to worry about it. It was just trying to balance budgeting and then school life and then work. ’cause at the time I was working as well. And I think it would just be better to compare. ’cause I feel with the social workers, they’re like: “Oh, how much are you gonna spend each week?” But I don’t even know how much normal people spend, so maybe being like: “Oh...” , them even just being like: “Oh, well, when I buy myself stuff, I normally try...” do this or this and this and give a, more of a personal input than just a generalised one. ’cause I think the generalised ones are a bit too general sometimes, and being like: “Oh, you need to buy fruit and veg,” but I don’t know how much fruit and veg I’m gonna eat in a week, I just eat what’s there really.

Ninna: But I think that’s quite sad because there was a lot of people in my home that they’re... because we had a school in the home so there was a classroom, but then they never really go out anywhere and make new friends and meet new people, so it’s just like you just get stuck in this home and you never meet anyone else and then you don’t have other people that can tell you about things and stuff like that.

Oh, OK.

Carer: Yeah.

So, there weren’t those kinds of opportunities to go out, or...?

Ninna: No. Well, I feel like that’s maybe something and people from... I don’t know, like maybe mentor young people, I don’t know, because, yeah, I feel like... yeah, I don’t know, I don’t know what I’m trying to say.

Carer: I think what you’re talking about is that if you go to school and go and live in a children’s home, then there’s no opportunity to learn about life and options and choices and that what other people are doing with their life, you know other young people of your age,—

Ninna: Yeah.

Carer: —because you don’t see them, and you might see them virtually, but you don’t see them, the real thing, so that is quite difficult, yeah, it’s really easy to not get information like that.

Ninna: Mm.

Carer: Mm.

Mm, and it’s quite a pivotal part of your life when you’re starting to approach, you know, adulthood and...

Ninna: Yeah.

Carer: And I think that when you went to college, you didn’t really know if you could make friends until then,—

Ninna: No.

Carer: —because—

Ninna: Well and no one else thought they could.

Carer: No. But... but because... well, you didn’t ’cause you were in a school that hardly... that almost nobody else went to anyway, ’cause it was in the children’s home,—

Ninna: Yeah.

Carer: —so you can’t practice—

Ninna: No.

Carer: —just that normal social stuff that you do. And I remember you sort of saying, “Oh, it’s really great, I’ve got friends,” and I was really pleased ’cause I was like, well, you don’t, you know, and in the children’s home you know, they’re not bringing bits of different lives—

Ninna: Don’t see anyone.

Carer: —and sharing them with you.

So, when I turned 16, things became like a bit different. So we were, with social, social services, I had this section of social services where it was called the [name of leaving care scheme], and that was basically giving you a social worker that would help you transition into independence and adulthood, and they’re supposed to take you through like the basics of how to budget, how to cook, how to set off the washing machine, how to pay rent. They didn’t do it my case, but that’s what should have happened in that case. Yeah, as, as far as now, I guess I’ve really had to learn everything myself.

So, thinking about when you’re 16, 17, getting ready to leave care, in an ideal scenario, what kind of preparation would have been useful for you at that point?

I think definitely running the household in general. So, like how to pay electricity, you know, maybe do some research on what potential suppliers I could use for the internet, for gas and electricity, how to pay rent; I pretty much didn’t learn that from them.

I think that maybe like, oh, this is kind of hard to explain as well, but something on a more personal level: so, I didn’t have many friends growing up, I was under a microscope the whole time, but I, I just didn’t have any true genuine friends, and I think maybe sitting down with us and maybe teaching us certain social skills, that might have improved, and I did have that throughout school, but it was for kids with autism and it wasn’t for somebody like me. So, it was a bit, it wasn’t personalised to me personally, so that’s why I struggled with that when I was younger. Like I’m completely fine with my social skills now, but, you know, I had a lot of trust issues and I put my trust in a lot of people who were just not genuine, and I wish I would have gotten some support on that as well ’cause they would have been able to help with that, yeah.

They would look at independent living skills. They would give us support when we applied for Universal Credit and Housing Benefits. They’d set up meetings at the Job Centre for us. If we needed to, they’d help us find sort of apprenticeships or college. But sort of, for me, I kind of was already at college and so it wasn’t as, as difficult in that aspect. They were there to provide support sort of transitioning and applying to university, but I found they weren’t really informed. So, the support we got wasn’t really adequate. I feel like given my experience, I was quite independent living already. So, the support they gave me wasn’t really useful it was kind of just, it was financial advice I needed to apply for benefits. Other than that, obviously I am grateful for the support they gave me, but I didn’t really find it useful. So, it kind of felt like I was living alone, wasn’t much support. What I really needed was that emotional support. I think that was the most difficult aspect of completely being alone once you sort of lost that family support. Lost that care support and no sort of structure in place. So, yeah.

Yeah, ’cause when I was in supported accommodation, I moved there and I had to learn bus routes, and stuff, overnight, and I was like: ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’ And then I moved again back up here and I obviously was like: ‘OK, this is different now.’ But the initial transfer into supported accommodation could have definitely been smoother.

The biggest issue when I left care was definitely the networking. ’cause I moved area, I lost a lot of contact with a lot of people and it would have been really nice if someone had gone: “Oh, yeah, there’s a youth group in your new area,” or this is, like, introducing me to local kind of groups, or anything, or even in advance, a plan that I could have gone to and, like, joined a club or something in the area; I had to do a lot of that myself which is quite hard when you don’t really know what you’re looking for because you’re new to the place. Or even, I feel like some professionals it would have been nicer to stay in touch with but then they left my old care home and it was like: ‘oh, OK, I don’t know how to contact you anymore.’

The way that I learnt was through uni. Like the first time I lived independently, I learnt that I couldn’t live independently, basically. I knew basics, like and it’s skills now that I’m still having to teach myself now, again, because I was never really taught, or when I started to get taught, it was probably a little bit too late. Because I had a carer that tried to help me when I was 17, but again when you’re being sectioned, you’re not really taking stuff in.

We had a workbook, like a, quite thick workbook – it was like this big, maybe – and it was like a... it was some... called something stupid like ‘progressing into adulthood’ or something. And they says that every week our, like, keyworker would go through bits of this workbook with us and it would teach us everything we needed to know about being a grown up.

It was useless. [chuckles] And I think the most it taught me was how to, like, apply for, like, council tax, or whatever.  And it taught me like that, I think, and about how you can, like, make sure you turn light switches on and off to save your energy bills. Like, it wasn’t the most descriptive and I ended up having to learn a lot of it by myself anyways. So, but I guess in their eyes, it ticked the box of: ‘we’ve taught you what to do and we’ve shown you how to be a grownup because we gave you something to read.’  You know, so... [chuckles] yeah.

The 15 hours I asked to be stopped because the support worker would turn up, she said, “I don’t really know what to do with you,” she goes: “shall we do a jigsaw?” I said, “What is your role?” and she said, “Oh, I’m supposed to be helping you with independent living skills, but you know everything. You do the Hoover, you do the washing, you do everything.” I says to her: “Do you know that I have been living on my own for a long, long time?” Even before I came into care, as a child, at the age of six, I used to be left in a home on my own for weeks at a time, and I used to get on with it.

Like at the end of the day I was... I was raised mature myself because of my experiences. So she was... I then had to say to her, and I feel bad even saying this out loud, but I said to her: “Look, I know you have to do 15 hours a week, but just all you come and do is play jigsaws and sit here, I’m happy for me to sign that you do 15 hours a week, but you don’t need to come.”

So [organisation] is a local charity in [County]. They kind of, they have an age bracket of kids that enter the care system from the age of 11 up until 25. They offer support groups to go out and do stuff, and socialise, cooking, budgeting, all sorts of trips to, just to kind of settle better into the care system. So obviously I joined [organisation] when I was 11, which was 13 years ago. We did tonnes of stuff with them, but I wouldn’t have settled in [County] if I didn’t join, if I didn’t do anything with them, so I owe quite a lot to [organisation], so, yeah.