Having grown up in the care system for more than half of her childhood, Kory identifies the milestones of her youth differently from most. Age nine was particularly hard: her time living in the homes of three different foster families was defined by anxiety, arguments and, ultimately, abandonment.
But it was also in that same year her fourth placement became permanent. She was fostered by two sisters that lived together in Dulwich, south London. Originally hailing from Jamaica, their respective biological children had long flown the nest. The household dynamic was stable, though imperfect; but shortly after her eighteenth birthday, things changed, and the world Kory knew fell apart again. “It kinda just felt like they stopped trying,” Kory says of her foster parents of nine years, who asked her to leave after a string of “petty” disagreements. “When you turn 18, as a care leaver, that’s it. No one has any responsibility to you; to understand you, even through the hard times.”
She is not the only one. Though the individual circumstances may differ, for many children who grow up in social care, the end result is often the same: falling off what is referred to as the “Care Cliff” when they turn 18. As a government review published this week outlines, this can lead to “catastrophic consequences”.
The catastrophe comes in the form of the harrowing number of premature deaths among care leavers – which is at a rate three-to-four times higher than that of the general population. Last year, 112 deaths of 18-24-year-olds who had grown up in children’s social care in England were reported to the Department for Education (DfE). Due to reporting inconsistencies, it is widely accepted that the true number is likely higher. The most commonly recorded cause of death was suicide. Eighteen-year-olds, those to have most recently exited care, accounted for the largest single age-bracket of deaths.
When a child who lives in care reaches adulthood, everything changes. The government review – “You really are on your own”: A study of the early deaths of young people who were in care – notes a “dramatic drop in support” from the councils who were legally bound to supply them with essentials, like accommodation, as an adolescent. Upon passing the care threshold – levels of support drop incrementally from ages 18, 21 and altogether at 25 – they receive “inconsistent and, at times, inadequate help from both children’s and adult’s services”.
The subsequent deaths “of some of our most vulnerable young people in the country” following these falls in support are a “national tragedy”, the report concludes.
When I put it to her, Kory, now 22, wasn’t surprised by the statistics around care leavers. “It feels like there’s no way to survive in [our] world,” she tells me when we meet outside a coffee shop in Lewisham, south London, on a sunny afternoon. “Support,” she adds, citing her current struggles in council-run temporary accommodation, “feels so out of reach.”
Kory, is tall, standing at nearly six-foot – people note that she could model. She dreams of a career in acting. Sporting freshly braided afro-hair, French-tipped nails and bolt-yellow Onitsuka Tiger trainers, she projects a strong and youthful self-assurance. But her exterior appearance, she says, completely juxtaposes how she feels inside: “I’m riddled with anxiety.” This, she attributes to her experiences in social care.
Aged eight, she came to Britain from Nigeria, where she lived in “an orphanage-type situation”, to join her biological sister who was studying at a university in London. A string of ill-fitting living arrangements – university accommodation; with her sister’s friends and partners – saw them become homeless. “She got overwhelmed,” Kory says of her sister, who was in her mid-20s at the time. “And [one day], I guess in her panic, she decided to just leave me somewhere and go away.” That “somewhere” was outside Primark on the main high-street in Peckham, a few miles away from where we speak. “And that was that for me.” It was the last time she ever saw her sibling.
Over 80,000 children in England are in social care. (It is a devolved issue, meaning that governments in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland each set its own laws, statutory guidance and reform timetables.) Many working in the sector suggest that its current design and function often further harms already vulnerable kids.
A child welfare advocate, who has been involved in the sector for four decades, describes it as a “Wizard of Oz system”. While it has the appearance of being somewhat functional, “pull back the curtain, and you will find that the heart of a good care system – loving, safe, secure and permanent homes for children – [doesn’t] exist enough here”. There are many, they add, “fantastic” carers and professionals working to keep the sector alfoat; yet the system is not “receiving the really serious political focus” it needs.
It’s a system that has multiple, overlapping issues. The ideal, from a national and local government perspective, is to have children in care live with foster families rather than traditional care homes. But while the number of children in foster care (around 56,000) has remained consistent since 2020, there is a decline in those willing to take them on. The amount of households (currently 42,000) looking after children has steadily decreased since 2021. And while the workforce has grown in the past year, there is a lot of unmet need in the system. The majority of children (60 per cent) deal with more than one social worker in a year; nearly a quarter (24 per cent) have three or more – a partial reflection of the high levels of turnover in the sector, which many attribute to strained pay and conditions.
The factor that perhaps most influences a child’s experience of the care system is geography. Many describe it as a “Postcode Lottery”. Strained local government finances can, depending on where a child is from, greatly affect their care experience – and ultimately one’s preparedness (or otherwise) to deal with the “Care Cliff” at 18. “Each local authority has [their own] offer” regarding post-18 care, another sector expert explained. Varying applications of statutory duties among councils means that, “you could have two friends living in two different boroughs of London, getting entirely different levels of support – and they live ten minutes from each other”.
Josh MacAlister, the Minister for Children and Families, is tasked with righting the wrongs of the child social care system. We meet in late-August at the DfE offices in central London, the day prior to the government report’s publication.
The MP for Whitehaven and Workington was previously a teacher before setting up a social-worker training programme. He was only elected to parliament in 2024, but, in the context of state-sanctioned interventions surrounding care, he has form. In 2021, MacAlister was commissioned by the DfE to conduct a review into the “needs, experiences and outcomes of the children supported by social care”.
He tells me that while the Tory government “accepted” the basis of his recommendations, they never showed any real inclination to deliver upon them. “They’d spent their energy and didn’t make the decisions to invest.” This new government review – which MacAlister commissioned in April – is, he argues, Labour “making up for lost time”.
MacAlister is clearly passionate about this issue; his proactiveness was consistently praised during my conversations with care leavers and those working in the sector. “I want to use every opportunity to make good stuff happen,” he tells me. Along with the review’s findings is £25m of funding for the expansion of specialist housing-arrangements for care-experienced people across the country. Over the spending review, £2.4bn is being put forward to fund various child support programmes.
But there is one area within children’s social care that some argue MacAlister and his government are not tackling as hard. The explosion in recent years of children’s homes that are run for-profit and backed by private-equity firms has raised great moral and practical concern. Council cutbacks have seen the work that was directly done by local authorities be outsourced. These account for a staggering 85 per cent of all children’s homes in England.
A Financial Times investigation found that the average charge to the state from a private provider for the care of one child is £384,020 per year – more than five-times what Eton College charges for yearly tuition. It’s a “highly lucrative trade in highly vulnerable young people”, the Guardian columnist George Monbiot argues. Children in parts of the country with housing shortages are sometimes moved by their local authority to profiteering homes based hundreds of miles away; the cheaper property prices in these locales being key a reason for their presence. A number of harrowing maintenance, safety and wellbeing concerns have been reported about these homes which, one Oxford University study notes, “consistently underperform [the quality of] public and third sector provision”.
Labour has legislated to potentially cap the profits made by these homes, but nothing is concrete. MacAlister tells me he is “very open-minded to look at going further on profit-making”. The Plaid Cymru government in Wales, which was elected in May, has already banned any new for-profit children’s homes from opening. Why can’t Labour do the same? Again, MacAlister says he is “open-minded”, but argues, “the best bet to tackle profiteering right now is to rapidly expand public – and not for-profit – foster care numbers. And that’s exactly what we’re doing.”
Having spoke to a number of care leavers in recent months, there were many stories of loss and trauma. But there were also countless examples of strength, progress and success. Much of which happened despite – not because of – the care system they lived through.
“I really do relate to that,” says Ashley John-Baptiste, the care-experienced broadcaster who co-authored the review – alongside the social worker Clare Chamberlin – in my meeting with MacAlister. “I did [everything] in spite of, not because of, my local authority.”
It’s a similar situation for Tia, who grew up in the south east of England. Her childhood in care featured several harrowing traumas: moving from her local area and changing schools; a period of self-harming triggered by abuse prior to and whilst in the system; as well as horrific sexual abuse from her foster parent. She now does charitable advocacy for care leavers, works in a crucial public sector job and plans to go to university, again, aged 25. “I still struggle,” she tells me. “I can’t necessarily change the things that have happened to me, but through working with [the charity] Become and sharing my story, I can hopefully shape the system to be better.”
Over the years, there have been a number of reviews into the state of children’s social care. Yet despite the calls for evidence, testimony from its overworked and undervalued workforce and grieving families, cultural and systemic change feels a long way off. Demand for more funding; greater contact hours with support staff; better mental health provision; housing priority; a clamp-down on exploiters and a raising of standards across the board have been made before and will again this time round.
With this latest review into care leaver deaths, the government wants to trigger a “national conversation” on the plight of those who’ve been in the care system. For the people who have been and are currently going through it, the time for conversation is over. Now, finally, they want national action.
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