ABSTRACT
This chapter will focus on young people brought up in the public care and their experiences of the youth transitions as they leave it. It will, therefore, cover young people who live in and leave children’s homes and those who are brought up in foster families. The reasons why young people are placed in these are many and various. Some may be so placed because of bereavement, others because their natural parent(s) offer them for adoption, while others may be considered to be at risk or beyond the care and control of their parents. State policy has always been based on the assumption that most children and young people will be looked after and cared for within families. Yet it has also not been able to ignore the plight of those who fall outside, or are not adequately cared for within, their families. The 1990s have seen a series of scandals and increased public concern about the running of children’s homes (Levy & Kahan 1991, Williams & McCreadie 1992). Yet there is also room for concern about how young people leave care and how they are prepared for this, In a series of hard-hitting editorials, the Independent newspaper has accused the state of being “muddled and incompetent”, “hypocritical” and as deserving “the booby prize when it comes to caring for children” (17 July 1993, 13 November 1993). Garnett highlighted the issue in the introductory paragraph of a report written for the National Children’s Bureau. “In Britain each year some 10,000 young people of 16 and over are officially discharged to “independence” from the care and responsibility of local authority “parents”. For most of these young people this change will have been automatically effected upon reaching their 18th birthday, regardless of how willing and able they were to leave care and cope with independent adult life.”
