Leaving Care and Extended Families

Young people in their teens are particularly vulnerable when leaving care or accommodation. This is recognised in the Children Act 1989 for England and Wales, which seeks to improve the situation for care leavers by encouraging partnership between the young people themselves, their birth families and carers. Using findings from a study sample of 87 young men and women aged 16–17, Peter Marsh examines some of the ways in which these three groups are, and could be, more positively involved in the decisions and events leading up to leaving care, and, in particular, how extended families might be encouraged to lend more support.