Beyond 'Finding a Job': Building the village care leavers need to thrive

The Invisible Barriers to Work

It’s National Care Leavers Month, a time to celebrate incredible young people all over the country, while urgently shining a light on the fragmented systems that continue to fail them. For young people with care experience, the path to finding and maintaining work is often blocked by a wall of systemic disadvantage. Through our action research in Hull, we have seen that so often, this comes down to missing or weak social architecture; by this we mean the essential support networks that are assumed to exist, yet can be absent in the upbringing of young people in care. This support can range from being as simple as; borrowing an interview outfit, receiving a good luck text on your first day, getting a lift to an early shift, or getting help navigating a tricky situation at work — to more complex barriers such as having a stable housing situation and sufficient resources to heat, feed, and clothe yourself. 

We’re seeing this systemic failure manifesting nationally across three interconnected barriers:

• A Perception Gap: Less opportunities for exposure to the real world of work, thereby hindering care-experienced young people’s ability to develop informed aspirations and understand potential pathways available. Employer perceptions are also commonly misaligned with a lack of trauma-informed understanding.
• A Work Readiness Gap: Fewer opportunities to develop essential soft and transferable skills needed to thrive in the workplace.
• A Support Networks Gap: A lack of informal and formal support from small acts of encouragement to stable housing that others rely on to gain and sustain employment.

Our Role in Hull: Action Research for Systems Change

We are working with Cordis Bright as an Action Research Partner on the Youth Futures Foundation’s Connected Futures Programme. We work in partnership with The Warren Youth Project, a youth-led organisation offering free support, guidance, training, education, counselling, and creative activities to young people in Hull, and the brilliant young leaders of The Recruitables. Young people across the partnership are using their expertise to ensure solutions are relevant and appropriate, even as we navigate the inherent challenges of cross-sector change.

As a partnership we are moving beyond short-term fixes to focus on systemic change. This means bringing together professionals from different organisations across the area, and people with lived experience of care, together to create foundational shifts in how care leavers are supported into work, using the Six Conditions for Systems Change model:

Our work has involved mapping the factors that influence care leavers’ journeys to employment, to identify where support could be better. We have worked directly with care-experienced young people to understand existing gaps in provision, and developed a shared Theory of Change to articulate the shifts that they want to see. 

The Partnership has now created a longlist of feasible and potentially high impact ideas for change. Local professionals are socialising these ideas with key stakeholders and care leavers as part of a light-touch testing phase. We are using a mix of workshops, drop-in sessions and coaching to support colleagues to move their ideas from being conceptual into real-world testing, and to gather honest, rapid, and actionable feedback to give them the best chance of success.

Building the Village: Threads of Support

Our action research is uncovering that building a ‘village’ around care leavers is necessary for these proposed systemic changes to be successful. This requires interventions across a broad range of areas from relationships and culture, to national policy shifts, and the reallocation of resources.

Many of the interventions the Partnership are testing intentionally replace missing support networks and are inherently relational, for example:

This work is not easy, and one of the biggest challenges we have observed is how fragmented different professional groups are. This leads to siloed thinking, some disconnected and repetitive processes, and challenges around communication. 

A dedicated working group has been set up and meets fortnightly to drive this work, share learnings and troubleshoot together. The space itself is already showing signs of positive relational change.

‘Rising as Me’: Hope for a Connected Future

I have often heard care leavers be referred to as ‘strong’ or ‘resilient’ which, although intended to be recognition or praise, can imply that young people should simply endure systemic failure. Instead, the theme of National Care Leavers Month, ‘Rising as Me: Overcoming challenges, transforming, and finding your identity’, requires acknowledging the immense potential, vision, and clarity of young people, whilst calling for the often-missing systemic support that allows these qualities to flourish.

While system change is challenging and complex, the commitment shown by The Recruitables and local partners in Hull provides tangible hope. By clearly defining a vision and roadmap for change, we aim to equip professionals across Hull with the purpose, stability, and inspiration it needs to drive the transformation of young people's futures.