Help at Hand is the Children’s Commissioner’s advice and assistance service for children who are in care, leaving care, working with social services or living away from home.
2024 has been a big year for Help at Hand supporting care leavers. Between September 2023 and August 2024, the team received 1,001 referrals and was able to make a positive impact in 92% of the 313 cases where a representation was made.
The team was able to help care leavers between the age of 18 and 25 navigate the system about issues spanning from housing (including out of area), council tax exemptions (also for out of area), access to apprenticeship and higher education bursaries, accessing a guarantor when at university or beyond leaving their accommodation when in care, access to advocacy services if living out of area, etc.
Our team also launched a series of sessions in November designed to help professionals from leaving care teams and advocates across the country to accurately spot issues affecting care leavers from the time when they are approaching 16 and 17 years of age, without having to wait when it is too late to assess and provide tailored support post 18.
So far, we have delivered two sessions online to London and surrounding professionals (with an attendance of 75 people) and to local authorities in the Southeast of England with an attendance of 60 professionals.
In 2025, we will deliver four more sessions to professionals across the rest of England in Southwest, North West, Midlands and North East.
The training was informed by the issues that care leavers and their advocates contact Help at Hand about, and their struggle to find resolution to these problems from their corporate parent professionals even with or without the help of advocates.
The training was aimed at personal advisors (personal advisors are employed by local authorities to provide advice and support to care leavers) and advocates, but so far it has also reached heads of services and directors.
These sessions draw on our experience of listening to the experiences that care leavers face and we share our expertise to help them get what they are entitled to.
These sessions have also provided an opportunity to share more details about our recent publication of the “Handbook for Higher Education Institutions’ professionals.”
The Handbook was co-created by our office and the Children’s Commissioner’s Care Experienced Advisory Board (CEAB) over the past few years, with the assistance of Help at Hand.
The care experienced young people who were on the advisory board were particularly proud of the finished handbook as it aims to help, through 33 recommendations (Supporting care experienced students: A handbook for professionals working in higher education | Children’s Commissioner for England), Higher Educations Institutions (universities, further education colleges and apprenticeships providers) and professionals to ensure they provide the best help and support to care leavers as they go in to higher education.
Here are some kind of examples of feedback we have received post training sessions:
“This has been very useful. I look forward to receiving the slides. Many thanks”
“Thank you. Brilliant, informative training session.”
“Thank you, this training was very useful for me as a new PA”
Thank you – really useful and informative training
Thanks, enjoyed the session and exploring additional supports for our Care Leavers
“Thanks for the session, really useful” – asst director of leaving care team
“This has been SO helpful, thank you so much”
“Thank you, as someone new to the role, I have found this very useful.”
“Thank you, I have found this really interesting and informative!”
It is interesting to note that post training, we have experienced a spike in contacts from professionals in leaving care teams around access to bursaries for their care leavers, requests from Personal Advisors who are supporting care leavers in prison or with immigration issues, and more requests around access to guarantors for care leavers willing to rent from their second year on university.
If you are a care leaver having any issue with your council tax exemption, or with accessing your care leavers bursary from the LA or your university, or your apprenticeship bursary, and if you are struggling with accessing a guarantor whether you are in University or only with private renting, and you need Help at Hand assistance, please call 0800 528 0731 or email [email protected]
