Care Day 2025: Voices that care
Today is Care Day: a time to reflect on the experiences of children and young people who are looked after. This year’s theme is ‘Voices That Care’.
Many of our members – people with lived experience of the cycle of crisis and crime – are care-experienced, and many link both the factors that drew them into contact with social services, but also their journey in the care system itself, as having contributed to their entry into the revolving door.
In this blog, lived experience member Anthony reflects on his own care experience and on what it really means to have ‘voices that care’.
There is a pretty good case to be made for the fact that the care system has contributed to people across England and Wales being funnelled directly into the revolving door of the criminal justice system.
By the time those that are care experienced reach the age of 24 years old, 50% will have served a custodial sentence in either a young offenders institute or an adult prison whether on remand, awaiting sentencing or as a convicted prisoner.
Those who enter the care system as vulnerable, traumatised children often have complex mental health issues resulting from experiences which either caused them to be in the care system or which occurred whilst they were there – which are not always identified or treated, wIt is therefore not surprising that some children will fall further through the system’s safety net that is supposed to care for and offer protection to these children and young people.
Children who like me, spend time in local authority care face multi-faceted disadvantage with more layers of experience than could be peeled away from an onion. The layers for those with care experience are deep rooted. The next generation of children and young people in care deserve more and better: voices that truly care.
The care to prison pipeline
Sadly, the journey of being in care is not always the positive one you might see portrayed in the musical ‘Annie’ with love, care and nurture or engagement without financial limitations.
I’ve had contact with social services since I was about eight. As the difficulties I faced – problems at school, undiagnosed autism and ADHD, experience of domestic abuse and instability at home – built up, it sometimes felt like social services were acting as crisis management as I fell through the cracks of other services. By the time I was a teenager, I had several overnight or weekend emergency foster placements before eventually they decided to take me into care.
I was informed that if I refused, a court order would be applied for to force me into a secure children’s social care facility, which looking back felt as though it mirrored some aspects of life in custody.
I think it is quite interesting that when I look back 10 or 15 years or even longer, I can see how I was already criminalised in a way. I can see the eventual transitions to police, courts, probation and prison and the way I have cycled exhaustingly through the system. To me, my experience of the care system as a young person was like pre-institutionalisation.
Ending the ‘blame game’
When I met with the Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel De Souza alongside other lived experience members last year I found it interesting that literally everybody around the table that day spoke of the blame game faced by care experienced children.
We had felt that we were being blamed for adult responsibilities and told to take accountability for ourselves as children, having to have some really adult conversations about the logistics of being cared for and expected to have an ability to grasp the gravity of the care system at a young age. It was as though we were accountable for the mistakes adults were making around us and that we had suffered the consequences for this, years into the future.
The pressure of navigating intricate systems
Even when transitioning out of children’s and young people’s team into adult social services I don’t feel like any of my life has truly been mine.
Children’s and young people’s services do not suddenly stop or end at the age of 18. People often transition into the adult social care system, such as community mental health teams integrated into the NHS, employed by the council, with cases still open within the local authority social services department.
I currently have a social worker from such an adult CMHT, known as a care coordinator, with a social work background. This social worker previously worked in the children’s services before moving to a post in adult mental health. Technically, it’s still local authority social care which has just evolved into mental health services.
This is supposed to remove blockages along for the conveyor belt of care, which isn’t a bad thing, though in my experience this is tricky to manage both professionally and personally with individuals trying to navigate an intricate set of fragmented services which are not always as joined up as presented.
Interestingly most of my personal and professional achievements or milestones have generally been during periods of lower engagement with the institutional structures, demonstrating the entangled mess care experienced people find themselves in even later in life.
The power of lived experience to change the system
Just as there is good and bad, there are some truly remarkable professionals amongst social workers with high levels of integrity and intuition, who show they care when engaging traumatised children who, like me, will have no doubt had adverse childhood experiences.
I’ve had really good social workers throughout my time journeying through the care system – names of whom I still can recall today more than 20 years on. However, people do not make the system and although the policies put forward are from people, institutional frameworks create limitations. Coupled with underfunding and lack of resources, the very idea of care or safety for children can be undermined even at the most vulnerable times in their young lives.
Upon actually leaving care there should be more continuation of support, which should be consistently offered in a joined-up way at the lengths required to create functional people as adults.
It is fundamental to be able to address issues, making sure that if you work in the care system it is because you really are a voice that cares.
We need more accountability to support those who have lived, breathed, and experienced the pipeline from care experience to the revolving door – ending the preventable cycles of crisis and crime that too often result.
I found it so powerful when we made the case to the Care Commissioner for care experience becoming a protected characteristic under the Equality Act (2010).
More people who have been looked after need to be heard and feel able to speak about their experiences, and to be able to work in care and social services, for example as peer mentors, making sure cycles of disadvantage and the care to prison pipeline are ended for children and young people in the years ahead.
