Improving the lives of care-experienced young people

Six years on from introducing our work to improve the lives of care-experienced young people in Cornwall, this blog looks at how Carefree’s relationship-based model has enabled our organisation to survive and thrive during a period of growth and change.

In family terms, Carefree has grown up: whilst we are still ‘the bright idea of some kids in care and a foster carer’, we are now also the professional corporate partner to Cornwall Council and it’s the complex challenges of work between the voluntary sector and statutory agencies that I want to explore in this article.

Our peer support model

Carefree supports young people from 11 to 25 to learn to develop positive relationships. As care-experienced young people, they are likely to have experienced broken relationships in their birth family. When we started our work, the young people in the founding members’ group were clear that we would need to work hard at giving young people the confidence to come along and meet others. We used a peer befriending model right from the start, meaning young people met a peer, with a worker, who then encourages and enables them to join a week-long activity with a bigger group of 10 to 12 young people. More recently, our Personal Advisor team have also been using the skills of relationship-building, not as an end in itself but to enable young people to engage with wider ‘groups’, such as college, work and community resources.

Evaluating outcomes for young people

A partnership with Research in Practice led to a series of evaluations of our work which has enabled us to measure our work against the Secure Base Model.

Research in Practice identified that ‘Carefree might be seen as providing a psychological framework for people who would otherwise be socially isolated or lack stable relationships throughout their childhood’ (Preston, et al., 2018).

Growth of a diverse team

The most significant growth and change for Carefree happened when we started delivering part of Cornwall Council’s Leaving Care service. Personal Advisors and Supervisory Social Workers joined our team and overnight our team became quite different.

Suddenly there were workers who had statutory responsibilities: for ensuring suitability of accommodation; for undertaking eight weekly visits; for reviewing young people’s pathway plans. It’s turned out that we are very much the same – committed professionals (including a proportion with lived experience themselves) with a passion for improving the lives of care experienced young people.

Our practice as an organisation has grown immensely because of the range of professional practice within the growing Carefree team. Social workers and Personal Advisors have pitched in and supported group work, spending days that began with reviews of individual young people about their pathway plan and ended with a messy session lighting camp fires with a group of young people.

Youth workers have developed their skills of accurate and careful recording, and of holding a case load of young people they ‘keep in touch’ with. The organisation has also grown to include a careers and employment arm, enabling young people to get closer to work, and, more recently, a housing campaign that will work across all the areas of the organisation.

Influencing the wider sector

Our approach is to build positive relationships on behalf of the young people we serve, as well as enabling relationships with and between young people. We are now represented on Cornwall’s Corporate Parenting Board (sharing collective responsibility for providing the best possible care and safeguarding for young people), helping the elected members to keep care experienced young people in mind.

Our journey from ‘feisty, plucky little organisation that advocated for young people to the big people’ to being an established part of the Corporate Parent has also meant that we work hard on our relationships with our external partners. We have learnt that empathy works in all relationships and not just the young people we work with.

We advocate for care experienced young people and have an uncompromising focus on making sure their rights as children in care and care leavers are met. We also recognise that our professional partners are committed to doing their best for children and young people too. While we at Carefree welcome and value many aspects of the recently published Independent review of children’s social care, particularly its focus on positive relationships (and its use of the word ‘love’), we are also really sad that much of the media focus has been on ‘blaming’ practitioners, including social workers, for failings that are systemic and embedded in social unfairness.

Research in Practice has been one of the relationships that we have built, organisationally, that continues to stand us in good stead. Their evaluations of our work have referenced, as well as a relational focus and the offer of a secure base, our capacity for ‘tenacious engagement’ – with young people, with colleagues and with local and national partners. As a partner to Carefree, Research in Practice has enabled us to ‘come of age’ (we are now in our 18^th year!) helping us to understand the political, social and psychological theories of why what we do, sometimes apparently instinctively, works. Relationships are key.