Care leavers’ transitions to independence

I moved around a lot, and then when I was ... well, just before my 18th birthday, I got sectioned, and I came out of hospital and then I was with a carer again that I’d known from when I was younger, and because they were... obviously, because it was coming up to my 18th birthday, I lived with them, and then I was going away to uni, so there was a bit of discussion about what would happen, whether I’d be put on Staying Put with them. But in the end, that wasn’t able to happen because they had another young person living with them and then they were also part of... we’ve got a scheme in [local authority] called [name], and they were part of that scheme, which required them to have at least one spare bedroom, and then because they also had children who were living with them, like older children who were living with them,  it essentially the carers sat both me and the other lad down and said, “Between the two of you, we kind of need to decide like who’s going to be moving on.”

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.

Ninna: Yes. So, I feel like I’m really liking being 18... well 19 now, and I’m really liking being treated like an adult, and also, ’cause when I was looked after, I feel like there was so many... like everything was impossible, like there was so many things you had to go through to do just like one activity, so many people had to agree, ’cause there was just a… I don’t know how to explain.

Carer: Yeah, all those... ‘cause there was a quite a big team around Ninna—

Ninna: Yeah.

Carer: —and it felt like every single person in that team had to be there at some meeting to be able to make a decision about anything—

Ninna: Yeah.

Carer: —and it was just... you know, it was just endless,—

Ninna: Yeah.

Carer: —you know, kind of just to get a decision made.  Whereas, you know, in a household, a parent would make that decision quite quickly,—

Ninna: Yeah.

Carer: — and it would be like: “Yes, you can do that,” or, “no you can’t,” and it would kind of be a quick answer, and then you either do it or you get over the fact that you’re not allowed to, you know?

Mm.

Carer: It... it’s... it was massive, wasn’t it?

Ninna: Yeah. But like today, I’m going to go to football, and [PA Name] doesn’t know about thing,—

Carer: No.

Ninna: —but she doesn’t care because I’m an adult and I can say I want to go and play football, so I can do that, so it’s lovely.

My experience of care, so I first went in when I was five. Originally, me and my siblings we were all separated. However, my two siblings were put together and I was left on my own in a foster placement. So, we were all put with foster families. I was quite lucky, I’d say, but I don’t think the word should be lucky. My experience was really positive. I lived with a couple, and they have their child who was at university and so I never really saw him. I had my own room. The family next door actually adopted and the family across the road also fostered. So, I was around other children in my situation which was really nice. They were my age. My foster carers were lovely. I mean, I described it as the best experience of my life. It was really sort of like normal family experience of going to restaurants and got taken to parks. I got to do clubs like dancing. So, it was really sort of that childhood experience I needed. And sort of, it was quite difficult moving away from that foster family back transitioning into my home life. I think that was quite difficult leaving the foster family and going back to my father. I wasn’t really that close to my father. It was more my grandpa who I was very close with. And I remember and so I’ve actually read my care files, which is interesting seeing it from the perspective now from when I was a child and how I sort of reacted. I remember being quite angry that I was taken away. I sort of wanted to live with my grandpa, but also not leave care. So, it was quite difficult. I had some sort of contact with my foster carers, my social worker when I transitioned out of care, but eventually had to cut off and that was quite traumatic for me because I had the stability of having these foster carers. And then it felt like it was kind of taken away. It felt like a punishment. So, you know, like care was a really positive experience for me. The social workers they were in and out of our lives. There were sort of issues being at home. My mother had severe mental health issues. My father was slightly abusive and we reported that and that’s when social intervention came back in. So, whilst we never were really in care past the age of nine. We did have a lot of social work interventions, so yeah.

Well, I mean I’ve been with them for quite a while, I’ve been with them pretty much all of my care experience, so, But I mean there was a time where, when I first came to live with them, that I immediately said I didn’t wanna stay here and was gonna try to run away and leave again. But I was told “no”, and I ended up just staying because it made me realise there wasn’t really a point and like it wasn’t good for me to jump from one place to the next all the time, and it wasn’t bad here, so it’s, it’s been nice being here. My carers have got young children, so it was nice seeing them grow up and being part of the family as well, ’cause I’m all they’ve ever known really. So, it’s, it’s, yeah, it’s stable. I now fit into the family, which is nice to know. Like it’s stable in a way that means that I can kind of shut off everything else that’s going on familywise a lot of the time and just be here and in my room, and just focus on my own path, I guess.

Yeah, cause I agreed to stay there at first ’cause: 1. he wasn't living with us, and 2. I didn’t know the extent of everything, like I didn’t know she was supporting him like that.  erm I said, “Look,” I said, “if you want to still see him and that, then you do that, but erm I don’t wanna see him,” and she was like, “That’s fine, that’s fine,” but then over time she was like, “Oh, he got his MOT done today; he did this; he did that,” and it’s like, I... “You never said this before, but you’re saying it now.”

And she started like emailing me and saying, oh, Megan needs erm counselling to deal with what she went through, because every time I talk about this person or something like that, she clams up and starts like going: “No, listen...” and she won’t talk to me about him, and my PA turned around and went: “She’s already told you want nothing to do with him, she has every right to feel that way and if you can’t do it, then you shouldn’t be fostering,” basically, so...

It just... people just slip up in conversations.  So basically she’d done that, and then when I’d moved in with the new foster carers, they were like, “Oh, ’cause you’re nearly 18, go out and buy some clothes because after 18 you’ll have to pay for them all yourself, give me the receipt and I’ll get it reimbursed and send you the money back.”

So I was like, “Wait.”  So if that’s how it’s worked the whole time... but by the time you find out, it’s too late to use it in an argument, ’cause I go back with these arguments in my head, and I’m like I could have like been like: you don’t pay for my clothes, but... do you know what I mean?

So they were like, “Yeah,” du-du-du.  So basically, I’d gone to my social worker and I said, “They’ve not buying me school tights,” I said, I said, “this doesn’t seem right to me,” and she was like, “No, they should be buying you school tights.”  And then it was after a move that she told me everything, and she went: “Yeah, you should have been getting like £20 pocket money a week, but instead you were getting £10 because they was taking £40 off a month to use your bus pass” and I kept arguing with them over it.

Yes. So, I was in foster care for about [number of] years. So, when I was [age] years old I moved into care, and I left when I was 18, so I spent quite a while in there, but... yeah.

So, you moved in with your dad: was that in your pathway plan, or...?—

Oh, they didn’t want that happening – they hated my dad – absolutely hated him. And they wanted to send me... my carers would slag him off daily, which was normal as well. My social worker didn’t like him, didn’t keep up with him, didn’t like tell him about anything. He would turn up... you know, he was the only one that would turn up to every single meeting, to every single like performance, you know, and he’s been there from the start, so yeah, that even though I was saying, “I want to move in with my dad,” they were like, “We don’t think that’s a good idea,” and I’m like, “Well, it’s my choice, and not yours,” you know?

So, when I was obviously a foster child, there was... because of my past before, I’d went into care, a lot of like people within who were dealing with me, were concerned that something bad would happen because I was vulnerable at the time. So, because of that, it was... school was... I’m not exaggerating on this, it was like a maximum-security prison: I couldn’t go the toilet on my own, I couldn’t go to lunch on my own, I couldn’t... like I had to have a teacher take us everywhere and I had to come back to this like unit that was in the school, and it was just horrible. I dealt with that for about three or four years while I was in school, but yeah, that was... And obviously when I was older, I started noticing the differences between obviously being in a mainstream school, and a lot of the kids had quite a bit of freedom, within reason, and then there was me. It was, huh, like having a warden by my side just 24/7 and I just... it was a horrible experience, it really was.

I left on my terms. I wasn’t supposed to leave because I was supposed to be in care until I was 18 and my foster carers had put provisions in place for me to go to a new school and… so it was becoming more permanent. But I kind of… I should start off by saying that I was, I was only really supposed to be in care for a short time. But for some reason when I was in care my foster carers, they just seemed really keen on making my placement with them permanent and that really freaked me out because when I went in care, I was never really supposed to be in care for a long time. And so, I just, I went downstairs one day. I was supposed to go to school and I just… I told my foster carer that I wanted to go home. I just said that I really missing my home, and that I don’t want to be here anymore and she was really supportive of that and she gave me the money for the bus and that’s how it ended really.

It wasn’t too...it’s not too far from my hometown. It’s like a 20-minute drive, but I have to... so it’s like the town over, it’s not too far, but obviously I don’t drive, so I do get the bus. Depending on the bus, it can take, like, between 20 and 30 minutes to get there. I think that was because we were... ’cause I got put in care with my younger brother, who’s a year... well, 11 months younger than me. So, we were 16 and 17 at the time. And the first person to accept us lived in the town over, so we got put with her because we signed under section 20, so they needed to find us a house, like, basically in that day, so she accepted us. It wasn’t too far, but it was still very, very tiring because it took me about an hour to get to school each day and it was just not having a car, was really tiring.

So, I spent my whole childhood in foster care. And so, when I was turning 18 it was actually during Covid, and, huh, being a teenager I did some things I shouldn’t have been doing, which resulted in me needing to move out of the placement that I was in, but I think it was more like a general consensus that none of us really wanted me to live there anymore, huh, as toxic as that sounds.

So, I was there from the age of... I wanna say 13. Yeah, no... no, sorry, it wouldn’t have been 13, I would have been a bit older than that, I would have been 14, I reckon, yeah, I was there for about four years, I think. I really liked living there at the start, I think, so there was a lot of changes in that house. So, they had an adopted son who was seven, but he was terminally ill and he passed away when I was 16 and that kind of like really broke the foundations of our family structure I’d say. And then some... so one of the girls I was living with, who was fostered, her biological siblings moved in and that really changed the dynamic of the family and I felt... I think I felt very left out and I really struggled to feel like I belonged in that house, and I think because of that came a lot of conflict. Again, I was young, maybe made decisions which I shouldn’t have, and because of that, especially being cooped up in Covid, and it helped none of us, right? So, I think that just conflict became very apparent. And yeah, I think I wasn’t really associating with the family structure of it, so I was kind of an outsider. And it wasn’t a case of like, oh, they hated me and didn’t want me there, or I hated them, and I didn’t wanna be there, but it’s... we all knew that it would be for everyone’s best interest for me to move out, which I’m actually very happy that it happened. Looking back now, at the time, it was a bit of a kick in the teeth, but I think it’s really helped me to like mature and grow as a person.