Leaving Care

The Peer research was one of the major and most successful pieces of work within WMTD. WMTD wanted to find out from young people aged 16 and above what made the difference whilst in care and preparing to leave care. In order to do this though we wanted to empower care leavers to get these messages so we trained young people as Peer Researchers to do this study.

With the support of our research partner NCB we successfully conducted a 2 day training session on three separate occasions for young people and personal advisors. The training covered the roles and responsibilities of being a peer researcher; health and safety, confidentiality, interview techniques, interview and research protocol as well as having an opportunity to test out the questionnaire. In all we trained 33 young people as peer researchers within the participating 25 local authorities. Our initial target was for 250 interviews to be conducted, this was exceeded with 265 interviews being completed.The success of this study is testament to the hard work of the Peer Researchers, the support from the Personal Advisors and the Local Authorities and most importantly the 265 young people who gave up their time to be interviewed.Such has been the success of the Peer Research it has also been translated into French, Spanish and GermanHere you will find the full 90 page report, Executive summary, the focus group write up as well as some of the procedural documents that were used in the study.

Peer Research Report