From the very beginning this Government’s watchwords have been ‘modernisation’ and ‘improvement’. And these have been our guides as we work to ensure that children taken into and leaving local authority care have the opportunity to realise their full potential.
Children in care deserve the same chance to get on in life as any other child but, unfortunately, this has never been the reality. Very few of these young people have ever enjoyed this opportunity to thrive and develop. The facts speak for themselves: children in care make up 25 percent of those sleeping rough on the streets of London. Young men previously in care make up 22 percent of the prison population – 39 percent of those are under 21. And less than one in three leaves care with a single GCSE pass, compared to 95 percent of children overall.
These grim statistics do not point to the failure of the child in care, but rather to a failure of the system of care and that is what, at long last, we have started to address.
We introduced Quality Protects in 1998 to transform services and improve outcomes. As a direct result of this programme, more children are being adopted from care, children in care are experiencing fewer moves and more young people are remaining in care past sixteen. Alan Milburn recently announced the extension of Quality Protects from three to five years and we have set ambitious targets to improve the life chances of children in and leaving care, for example by raising their educational attainment, reducing offending and maximising the role of adoption.
To strengthen the work of Quality Protects we introduced the Children (Leaving Care) Bill, which is just completing its passage through Parliament. At the heart of this Bill lies one simple, but powerful, idea: that children in care deserve the same chance to get on in life as any other child.
The Bill creates new duties so that councils will continue to provide proper support to young people whom they have looked after, even after they have left care. If they are sixteen or seventeen, the council will continue to be responsible for providing their accommodation and maintenance. It will go on helping them with employment till they are 21 and with education and training until they complete their programme. For the first time, young people leaving care will also have dedicated Young Person’s Advisers to keep in touch with them and to make sure that they are coping.
Taken together, these measures will lay the foundations for new opportunities for young people in care: to get a good education, to get a good job and to enjoy the same on-going support and help that other children receive as they become adults and move towards independence. But most importantly, the measures we are taking will, rightly, ensure that young people both in and leaving care have a stake in their own future.