ABSTRACT
Youth policy, like any area of social policy, can be usefully understood as the interplay between needs generated in civil society and services provided by the state. In specifying the needs relevant to care leaving a useful organising concept is that of developmental stage. The way in which young people handle the issues can be very challenging for both themselves and the people around them. It is important to ensure that the experience of care leavers are understood as variations on pyscho-social themes common to all young people no matter how exceptionally troubled or troublesome the care leavers may appear. Attention to the wider social context, and in particular the peer population, when thinking about young people leaving care is encouraged by the notion of care career. If care career was the major conceptual advance for British child care research in the 1980s its successor for the 1990s is the idea of ‘outcome’.
