Real change for care-experienced young people
Become’s Director of Policy, Campaigns and Communications Clare Bracey explains how we want to strengthen the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.
The Government’s new Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fix the care system and deliver real change for care-experienced young people. Covering a wide range of new laws to improve the lives of children, the Bill includes extra support for children in care or those leaving care. The first reading took place in the House of Commons on 17 December 2024 and it’s now at the Committee stage.
Our Chief Executive, Katharine Sacks-Jones, gave evidence on 21 January to the Parliamentary committee scrutinising the Bill. You can watch Katharine’s’ evidence, along with Mark Russell, Chief executive of The Children’s Society and Lynn Perry MBE, Chief Executive of Barnardo’s on Parliament TV.
The number of children in care in England has been close to 84,000 over the past few years, the highest it’s ever been. And the outcomes for too many of them are getting worse. The Bill offers many positives, but we believe it could go further to improve the lives of all care-experienced children and young people.
The five changes we want to see
We are proposing legal changes called amendments to five areas of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.
1. Strengthening Staying Close support
Our End The Care Cliff campaign found that care-experienced young people are nine times more likely to experience homelessness than other young people. And homelessness rates for care leavers have increased by 54% in the past five years. We have been campaigning for the Staying Put and Staying Close schemes to be fully funded, opt-out legal entitlements for all young people in care up to 25—so young people can stay in their homes or be connected to support without facing a care cliff at 18.
The Bill will require local authorities to assess whether certain care leavers aged under 25 need Staying Close support and then provide this support if it is needed. But the way the Bill is currently drafted could limit the impact of this reform on many care leavers and lead to the rationing of support or a postcode lottery.
We’re calling for the range of support offered to be expanded. The voice of young people is currently missing from the Bill, so any assessment of support should also take into account what a young person is asking for.
2. Strengthening the Local Offer for Care Leavers
Through our Care Advice Line, care leavers tell us they are often not aware of the financial entitlements and support available to them from their local authority—such as council tax discounts, a higher education bursary—or even through welfare benefits. This lack of information can lead to them struggling to make ends meet.
The Bill will make local authorities publish information about how they are supporting care leavers, particularly around housing, which is a positive move. We’d like to see an additional focus on what support local authorities provide beyond what’s offered in their Care Leaver Local Offer, especially the financial support available, and for it to include services to help teach important money management skills.
3. Extending priority need under homelessness laws for all care leavers
Care leavers aged 18-20 are automatically assessed as being in ‘priority need’ under current homelessness laws. This means that local authorities are required to provide them with accommodation.
As part of the Bill, there is an amendment to make sure care leavers can’t be considered ‘intentionally homeless’, which is something we called for in our recent ‘Support Every Step of the Way’ report. But we think it should go further and that ‘priority need’ status should be extended to all care leavers up to the age of 25. This would strengthen the safety net for care leavers who experience homelessness.
4. Providing safeguards within Regional Co-operation Arrangements
The Bill introduces a process to combine the commissioning, analysis, and sufficiency practices of local authorities, by giving the Secretary of State the power to direct them to join together to make ‘Regional Co-operation Arrangements’. We’re concerned that this regional approach could lead to more children in care being moved far from their support networks and communities, even if they’re still within the region.
In 2024, more than a fifth of all children in care (22%) were living more than 20 miles from home. And this number has increased by 66% in the last 11 years. Almost half of all children in care (45%) live out of their local authority area.
Our Gone Too Far campaign highlights the negative impact that being moved far from their families, friends and schools can have on children’s relationships, wellbeing and development.
We would like to see a safeguard to mitigate against the risk of children being moved far from home.
5. Requiring a national plan for more homes in the right places
Each local authority is required to offer sufficient suitable accommodation in its area to meet the needs of children in care. But underfunding and cuts to early-intervention services, as well as an increase in the number of children in care, including those with complex needs, has left them struggling to provide the local homes that are needed. This has led to half of children in children’s homes or secure units now living more than 20 miles from home.
There are welcome measures in the Bill including better financial oversight, and the option for profit caps, but it does not provide any changes that will significantly boost capacity in the system.
There needs to be a national strategy to truly understand how many children in care are living in places that don’t meet their needs, what’s needed to address this, and a strategy setting out how national Government will support local authorities to deliver this.
What happens next?
Each of our amendments will need to be put forward by an MP. Amendments can be proposed during the Committee and Report stages, which will be running over the next couple of months. The amendments are then considered and voted on before the Bill is finalised through Royal Assent. Read about the different stages here.
One area that we were disappointed to see completely left out of the Bill is the expansion of corporate parenting responsibilities to other public bodies. We hope the Government will reconsider this—we will continue to push for this change.
Keep an eye on our social channels where we’ll be sharing the progress of the Bill through Parliament.