Why the Care Leaver Covenant can play a crucial role in helping local authorities to empower young people
Every corporate parent wants the best for their care leavers. The recent Independent Review of Children’s Social Care underscored the urgent need for more support. CCLA is engaging with Spectra, delivery partner for the Care Leaver Covenant, to drive even more collaboration with local authorities to ensure more young people leaving care are able to access the opportunities they deserve.
There are around 103,000 young people in care in the UK, with approximately 10,000 leaving care each year. While many will do very well, we know that young people leaving care are far less likely to attend university and more likely to be NEET (not in education, employment or training). Roughly 25% of the prison population and 33% of the homeless population are care-experienced.
The Care Leaver Covenant is a national inclusion programme that has been supporting care leavers aged 16-25, across England, to live independently. Our ambition is to grow a universal family of individuals and organisations across all sectors who create tangible support offers, with the purpose of extending the reach of corporate parents, and building a community of concerned and committed people to support those with care experience.
Councils have a crucial role to play as part of their legal duty to provide and publicise a ‘local offer’ to support and empower the young people in their communities. Their efforts can be enhanced through a collaborative partnership approach with the Care Leaver Covenant and our signatories. This means that young people can benefit beyond the budgetary or statutory limitations of what councils can do alone.
CCLA is one such advocate. Cllr Richard Kemp CBE, Chair of the Local Authorities’ Mutual Investment Trust (LAMIT), the third-largest shareholder of CCLA, explained: “When the LAMIT Board, which includes councillors from all parties, all over the UK, looked at issues of social concern to support, we unanimously decided to look at the challenges confronting care leavers.”
It was this collaborative approach that formed the focus of a recent roundtable discussion, sponsored by CCLA, at the LGA Annual Conference. Sharing their views with hundreds of councillors at the event, Cllr Kemp said they were ‘amazed’ at the way councils immediately wanted to help. “We hope to build up a consortium of leading charities and organisations to work with the Care Leaver Covenant and councils UK-wide to provide more support to this highly vulnerable group of young people,” he continued.
The Care Leaver Covenant engagement team was also on the CCLA stand at the conference, providing an opportunity to speak with decision-makers from more than 60 local and combined authorities, and other partners who work directly with care-experienced young people.
Cllr Jon Clarke, Cabinet Member for Darlington, Portfolio Holder for Children & Young People, told us they have seen a real change in opportunity creation for their care leavers by adopting the Covenant’s ‘Whole-Council Approach’, which recommends that councils use procurement processes to encourage care leaver support. Cllr. Clarke was encouraged by a prospective partnership between CCLA and Spectra, highlighting the importance of ensuring policy development is grounded in care-experienced voices.