New Belongings Project, The Care Leavers Foundation

Working with local authorities to ensure the voices of the care leavers
are heard and integrated into all services delivered to care leavers

The inspiration for the New Belongings project, first run in 2013 /14, came from the group of care leavers, supported by The Care Leavers' Foundation, that have regular meetings with the Minister for Children. The aim was for local authorities to improve their services for care leavers by applying the experience and expertise of care leavers themselves to drive change. We particularly want to engage with Care Leavers who have stopped getting a service before age 21 /25 and would have wanted to or still want assistance with entitlements and education or apprenticeships.


Local authorities that wanted to run New Belongings projects were asked to
demonstrate the support of their CEO and the Leader of the Council for the
project and how their pilot project would meet the principles of the Care Leavers
Charter and Access All Areas. Authorities were asked to allow the views and experiences of their local care leavers to drive the changes they were hoping to deliver and to work with the New Belongings team in doing that. In 2013 /14 New Belongings was limited to five pilot projects but the scope has been expanded in 2015 /16.

The approach to running the pilots was agreed between the local authorities and
the New Belongings team. The methodology was based on five steps giving a
common experience that would inspire bespoke local solutions to improving
services.

At the heart of the New Belongings team was the expertise of the care leaver
panel helping to drive change in pilot authorities. In the course of one year all nine pilot authorities, whether working individually or in clusters, made progress.

New Belongings 2013 /14 has shown that it is possible to establish effective approaches and services that can help to achieve this outcome and there are many examples from authorities in the New Belongings project. The starting and finishing point is that care leavers must be central to the decisions about services – decisions both about them as individuals and about overall services to care leavers. It is also important to include older care leavers, who may no longer be receiving services, in key discussions and to use their experience to help facilitate the views of younger care leavers.

The learning from the expanded project due to operate in 2015 /16 will be disseminated to encourage other local authorities to improve their leaving care services.