Coram Voice launches new programme with local authorities to improve support for care leavers

24 Oct 19

Coram Voice has partnered with eight local authorities across the country to develop a model for improving support for care leavers through a new phase of the New Belongings programme.

Initially developed between 2013 and 2016 with funding from the Department for Education, the New Belongings programme creates and tests different practices to improve services and outcomes for care leavers, some of which have influenced national policy, including the introduction of ‘Personal Advisers to 25’ and Council Tax exemptions.

With funding from Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and Segelman Trust, Coram Voice, a charity part of the Coram group that supports children in and around the care system, is launching this new phase of the programme, using lessons from the previous phases, to support local authorities to develop their leaving care services with direct involvement from their care leavers.

Coram Voice will work in partnership with Coventry, Dorset, Hertfordshire, North Yorkshire, North Tyneside, Oldham, Stockport and Wandsworth councils over the next three years.

The charity will use its expertise from its successful Bright Spots programme which includes the Your Life Beyond Care survey, the first of its kind to measure the subjective wellbeing of young care leavers and developed with care leavers themselves. All participating local authorities in the New Belongings Programme will run the survey with their care leavers and do a self-assessment of their services to help them identify priorities for action.

Each participating local authority will have a care leavers’ forum and the New Belongings team will run workshops with them and local authority staff to develop the programme. Local authorities will also have the opportunity to come together through peer learning seminars to share practice and lessons learned.

In addition, the programme will employ eight care-experienced young people as consultants to enable the engagement of local care leavers. 

Linda Briheim-Crookall, Head of Policy and Practice Development at Coram Voice said: “The New Belongings programme gives us the opportunity to build on our existing Bright Spots programme and work more intensively with local authorities and their care leavers to develop services based on what care leavers themselves say is important. We are very excited to have care-experienced young people working with us to make sure this work is co-produced with the young people whose lives leaving care services are there to improve.” 

Thuy Ly-Chambers, newly appointed care-experienced consultant at Coram Voice said: “I would like to learn and enrich my understanding of the experiences that care-experienced young people may have. I’m excited to be part of the New Belongings programme where I can offer my insights and assist to implement change that may help other young people.”

Understanding why you are in care – crucial insights in new briefing from the Bright Spots team

23 Oct 19

Every child and young person who comes into care needs to know why and have opportunities to discuss the reasons this happened whenever they feel unclear. Our new Bright Spots Insight Paper ‘Understanding why you are in care’ explains why this is important to children and young people and shares ideas and resources for how to support them with this. 

From our Bright Spots work we know that this remains a key issue for children and young people throughout their time in care and beyond – only half of 4-7 year olds in care feel that the reasons why they are in care have been fully explained and a quarter of care leaver have not had an explanation or would like to know more. A lack of knowledge about the reasons for care was associated with feeling unsettled in placement and low subjective well-being for children in care.

Services have started to develop solutions to help children understand why they are in care, from expanding life story work to workshops for social workers on how to speak about difficult issues. Read more about them in the Bright Spots Insight Paper: Understanding why you are in care. 

We shared the learning from the insight paper at our peer learning seminar on the 14 October.  If you want to find out more about Bright Spots work and be kept up to date with future events sign up to our Bright Spots newsletter.

Coram Voice launches new animation ‘AdvoCat’ to encourage young children in care to get their voices heard

25 Sep 19

Say hello to AdvoCat, our new advocacy superhero aimed at encouraging young children in care to access independent advocacy to help them express their views when decisions are made about their lives.

AdvoCat, an animated superhero character, will feature in a series of new videos to explain in a fun and engaging way to children aged 11 and under what advocacy is and how it can help them to get their voices heard.

Though our work delivering the national advocacy advice line Always Heard and our work with other advocacy providers we know that the younger children are, the less likely they are to know about advocacy. We also know that many of the youngest children do not fully understand their situation, with findings from Coram Voice’s 2018 Bright Spots survey showing that only 51% of four to seven year olds felt that they had been given a full explanation as to why they were in care, compared to 82% of 11-18 year olds.

This is why we worked with a group of primary aged children to find out what would help them understand and engage with advocacy. Their solution was AdvoCat – the everyday superhero who helps children get their voices heard loud and clear!

We are pleased to launch AdvoCat as part of our new improved website, which we hope will raise awareness of the role of advocates and how they can help children navigate the care system and ensure that their views and rights are taken into account by decision makers.

You can watch the first AdvoCat video and read more about this exciting new development here 

 

Coram Voice Supports Refugee Week

14 Jun 19

Refugee Week takes place on 17-23 June and serves as a reminder that young refugees are among the most vulnerable children and young people in society. Even when Children’s Services take these young people into their care, sometimes important aspects of their support needs are overlooked, such as access to asylum and immigration legal advice, planning ahead to achieve settled immigration status, support to overcome past trauma, and accessing education and health services.

Refugee and migrant children are also sometimes moved across the country against their wishes once they have started to feel settled into the area they first arrived in.

There are great foster carers and social care professionals out there helping these young people, but sometimes things go wrong or young people need extra help to understand what is going on and to speak out. That’s where an advocate can help by working one to one with young people to help them to understand their rights and empower them to speak out about the things that are important to them.

Sadly, all too many young refugees miss out on the support they should have from Children’s Services when they are assessed to be over 18. Children are often under-supported during age assessment processes they do not understand and do not know that they have the right to challenge an adverse assessment.  Again that’s where advocates can help to ensure that assessments are conducted appropriately and children are supported to challenge Children’s Services when mistakes are made.

Coram Voice’s Always Heard service focuses on making sure that all young refugees needing support from Children’s Services are able to access independent advocacy. Because of language and cultural barriers, disputed care status and age, and the complexities of their circumstances these young people are often unable to access the advocacy support available to other children in care. Always Heard addresses this problem by guaranteeing that all young refugees in care, or needing support from Children’s Services, who contact us will get advocacy support.

Young refugees (and those working with them) can contact us free on:

Freephone: 0808 800 5792

Email: help@coramvoice.org.uk

Online: www.coramvoice.org.uk/alwaysheard

Text and Whatsapp: 07758670369

We have access to interpretation in over 240 languages from the LanguageLine service.

The Always Heard team has been working with Coram Children’s Legal Centre’s Migrant Children’s Project and other refugee support organisations to reach out to refugee and migrant children and make sure that they all have access to the advocacy support they need.

Coram Voice Responds to the Children’s Commissioner Report ‘Advocacy for Children’

13 Jun 19

Today, the Children’s Commissioner for England Anne Longfield published the ‘Advocacy for Children‘ report. This report intends to build on research conducted in 2016 into the provision of advocacy across England, which found substantial variation across local authorities. ‘Advocacy for Children’ was guided by an expert working group, including Brigid Robinson, Managing Director of Coram Voice, on behalf of the National Children’s Advocacy Consortium.

We are delighted that the Children’s Commissioner’s new report has recognised the essential role of advocacy for children and young people who the state cares for.

Through our Always Heard helpline, the national advice and advocacy safety net for children in and leaving care (England), we know that all too often children and young people cannot access the support they need. Last year, over 14,000 children and young people came to us for information about their rights. We supported over 6,400 to access their local advocacy services. Yet, we found that not all services were able to work with all children and young people who needed help and should be entitled to support. A quarter of local advocacy services do not work with the full age range of children in care and care leavers. In addition, 13% cannot provide services to the 37% of children who live outside of their local authority and over a third (35%) cannot provide interpreters for young people who are refugees or migrants. Read more about our findings here.

We welcome the extension of advocacy to every child and young person in the care of the state who needs it. Advocacy is a lifeline for children who are not feeling listened to by the system responsible for their care. One of our biggest concerns about advocacy not being available to all children is that the most vulnerable will not be heard when they are being abused or neglected. Last year, we made 327 safeguarding referrals in relation to the children and young people who came to Always Heard for support. There are likely to be many other children and young people whose voices have not yet been heard because the services are not in place to support them. In light of recent well-publicised failures to safeguard children, we welcome the call for better access to support when things go wrong.

30 years on from the creation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child there is still work to be done to protect the rights of children in the UK who are looked after by the state.  A children’s rights-based framework is only meaningful if children and young people are given the tools to challenge decisions when their rights are breached. We cannot expect them to be able to navigate the complex bureaucracies of our statutory services by themselves. This is why we need to implement the recommendations in the Children’s Commissioner Report.

Updating the national standards for advocacy is long overdue and more clarity on what local authorities’ legal duties are in relation to advocacy is essential to address this postcode lottery in provision. We look forward to working with the Children’s Commissioner and sector colleagues to make the recommendations of this report a reality.

Brigid Robinson, Managing Director of Coram Voice, said:

“We have been really pleased to be able to work with the Children’s Commissioner to inform this report. Young people we consulted for the advocacy report told us that lack of information was a key issue. The recommendations in today’s report are an important way of ensuring that advocacy services are not only available to all but that children know how to access them. We support the call for more transparency and believe that requiring each local authority to publish their advocacy offer, in much the same way that they have to publish their ‘care leaver offer’, would make it clearer to children and young people what advocacy is and how to get support if they need it.”