Care leavers need time and space, akin to their peers, to successfully transition from care. They need ongoing support, in many cases until well into adulthood, that goes beyond the universal services that are available to most young people. Because not all care leavers are the same, those supports need to be tailored to meet different needs. Some care leavers will suffer poor outcomes due to accumulated social and emotional disadvantages, while others will make effective use of aftercare supports to successfully transition out of care.
There is increasing evidence that care leavers who stay in care longer achieve better outcomes. Young people should be moving out of care when they are well prepared and ready to leave, with preparation and planning for that transition starting early and with the full involvement of the young person. Stable care should be part of a holistic package of formal and informal supports determined by a comprehensive and individualised assessment of a care leavers’ needs. Supports should be based on a strong legislative mandate and sufficiently detailed policy and procedures. Indeed, countries with well-developed aftercare legislation have been found not only more likely to offer aftercare services but also a broader range of services.
There has been progress in recent years. There has been significant policy reform across many countries based on a better understanding of the needs of specific groups of care leavers. This has led to improvements in supports for young people leaving care and as noted earlier, in the Norwegian context at least, given the group receiving aftercare supports tends to be particularly vulnerable it may be that supports are even more effective than they initially appear. As can be seen from the good practice examples countries have provided for this report, some countries are taking increasingly innovative and evidence‑informed approaches. However, there is still considerably more that can be done as too many care leavers continue to experience poor outcomes, which becomes less and less acceptable as we learn more about what works.
The evidence base is growing and our knowledge continues to advance. Resilience and life course perspectives offer a more nuanced way of thinking about how to prepare and support care leavers to transition from care that goes well beyond focusing solely on the “leaving” phase. However, significant gaps in our knowledge still remain, particularly about the effectiveness of supports. There is also a paucity of administrative data collected by authorities, evidenced by the quantum and quality of data provided by countries for this report. Important questions remain about the uptake of extended care and whether young people are choosing to, or are able to access what is on offer because data is not collected or not available.
The objective of this report has been to identify promising policies and practices in different countries to promote cross-jurisdictional learning. Countries can draw on the expertise, successes and lessons learned from other countries to potentially inform their own reforms. There are also common challenges where countries could work together on solutions, in particular improving definitions, data and the evidence‑base.
The following directions for reform (Box 4.1) are based on evidence both from the literature and from what countries are learning through their own experiences. Critically, the reform most likely to improve outcomes for young care leavers is to raise the legal care leaving age to 21, as some countries already have done. Providing young people with the time to transition to adulthood in a normative fashion, ensuring they are well prepared for leaving care and putting the right supports (in which they have had a say) in place, should provide young care leavers with the greatest chance of a successful, less bumpy transition to independence. Enshrining reforms in specific care leaving legislation will further increase the likelihood of success.
Finally, countries could work together to strengthen the international evidence base about what works to support care leavers successfully transition from care, including improving data quality and availability and encouraging more cross-country research on critical and common questions.