leavingcare.org

Projects

  

NCAS manages a range of projects that assist local authorities and other providers.

Current projects | Completed projects

Current projects

Completed projects 

 

Current projects

 From Care2Work - National employability project   

From Care2Work, our national employability enitiative, announced in the social mobility White Paper ‘New Opportunities: Fair Chances for the Future’and will be implemented over two years from April 2009.  

From Care2Work aims to support young people in accessing employability opportunities with national employers by working closely with their corporate parents, local authorities.

For more information go to the From Care2Work project page. 

NCAS participation model

The NCAS participation team have created a participation model that can be implemented on a local, regional and national level.  The model addresses how and why some participation activities/models/forums fall by the wayside and be disempowering for young people.  The model focuses on sustainability, learning opportunities for young people, support from the Corporate Parents, tangible and realistic work plans and the importance of partnership between local authorities and Government Offices.

For more information go to the participation model page. 

National Leaving Care Benchmarking Forum

NCAS manages the National Leaving Care Benchmarking Forum. This network of local authority leaving care services helps members to improve the services young people receive by a process of mutual learning and development.

 

For more information about the Benchmarking Forum click here or contact us on ncas@catch-22.org.uk

 

Yorkshire & Humber regional forum facilitation

Working with all of the Yorkshire and Humber local authority and Government Office for Yorkshire and Humber NCAS employs a regional leaving care development co-ordinator.

For more information on this project contact ncas@catch-22.org.uk


 To view the material and documents produced by this project click here

Innovation for employment

 ‘Innovation for employment’ is an employability project working across five partner countries: the United Kingdom, Poland, Ireland, Romania and Hungary.

The project focuses on two areas. Firstly, we will develop a model of social and emotional wellbeing training for care leavers that we will pilot across all the partner countries. Secondly, each partner country will develop their own model of employability. The model will meet the specific needs of the young people in their country and will focus on empowerment.

The pilot is running until October 2010. Outcomes from the work - including the models - will be disseminated across all the partner countries and through pan-European research and practice networks.

For more information on this project please  go to the Innovation for employment pages.

Right2B cared4 pilot evaluation

NCAS will be working with Loughborough University to asses the extent to which the Right2BCared4 pilots have helped care leavers achieve better outcomes. In October 2007 Government funded 11 local authorities to carry out these three year pilots which will involve approximately 1,100 young people. 

We will be assessing the costs and effectiveness of processes adopted in the Right2BCared4 pilot sites. We will be analysing the views and experiences of care leavers to explore the nature, extent and quality of care and their views on the stability and suitability of their final placements and satisfaction with outcomes.


A key element of the project is that it will involve peer researchers: young people aged over 18 who have spent time in local authority care will play an important part in designing publicity for the study, recruiting young people and conducting surveys and interviews. This will encourage young people whom the Right2BCared4 project is intended to benefit to openly discuss their experiences and perspectives and enable us to access this hard to-reach group more effectively. The peer researchers themselves will also gain valuable skills and knowledge from the process.

Care Matters update - Oxfordshire R2BC4 and peer research - January 2010

  

Evaluation of Staying Put: 18+ Family Placement pilot programme

NCAS will be working with the Centre for Child and  Family Research, Loughborough University, to assess the extent to which the Staying Put pilots are helping care leavers achieve better outcomes.

The Staying Put pilot, which began in 11 local authorities in July 2008, is targeted at young people who have established relationships with foster carers and offers this group the opportunity to remain with their carers until they reach 21.  The key objectives of the pilot are to:

 

  • Enable young people to build on and nurture their attachments to their carers, so that they can move to independence at their own pace and be supported to make the transition to adulthood in a more gradual way just like other young people who can rely on their own families for this support;
  • Provide the stability and support necessary for young people to achieve in education, training and employment; and
  • Give weight to young people’s views about the timing of moves to greater independence from their final care placement.

 

The evaluation aims to assess the extent to which Staying Put meets the objectives and to ascertain the costs and benefits of the pilot compared to standard leaving care provision and that offered under Right2BCared 4. In each of the 11 Staying Put pilot sites the approaches that areas have adopted to implement the initiative will be mapped and focus groups conducted with the Staying Put lead to explore the challenges and issues they have encountered in the early stages of the pilot.  Management information system (MIS) data on two cohorts of young people will also be collected to facilitate analysis of similarities and differences in outcomes for young people who have Stayed Put compared to those who chose not to remain with their foster carers beyond 18 and those who did not have the option to do so (pre-pilot cohort).

The successful peer research methodology employed for the Right2BCared4 evaluation will also be adopted for this evaluation.  In six pilot sites former care leavers, trained as peer researchers, will interview young people to explore the views and experiences of those who Stayed Put, those who opted to move to independence and those whose foster carers felt unable to maintain placements for them once they reached 18.  The perspectives of their personal advisors and foster carers will also be sought. A bottom up costing methodology will be employed to examine the costs of the pilot compared to standard provision and Right2BCared4 and set these against outcomes.  The costs of rolling out the programme will also be explored

 

The study is due for completion in September 2011.


   Big lottery funded research project on corporate parenting

A new research-led project, funded by the Big Lottery, will seek the unique perspective of young people in and from care to understand why they tend to have poorer outcomes than their peers. Managed by Catch22 and conducted by the National Care Advisory Service, the four-year study will describe the experiences and outcomes of this group of young people.

The study will directly involve young people who have experience of being in care and of ‘corporate parenting’ who will undertake parts of the research. They will explore how eighteen local authorities in the 9 English regions are developing services in line with corporate parenting principles and will identify the key elements needed in order to be a good ‘corporate parent.

For more information go to the corporate parenting research page

 

Four agency supported lodgings project

For more information click here  (PDF file)

A database of supported lodgings schemes across England is being developed - the latest version is available here:http://www.fostering.net/resources/reports/supported-lodgings-database Please contact judy.walsh@fostering.net to add details of your scheme.

 

Completed projects

Accommodation Advice project

This one year project aimed to identify and promote policy and practice to improve the availability, quality and choice of accommodation for young people. The project developed a range of briefings and resources, including the good practice guide Journeys to home: care leavers' successful transition to independent accommodation to help identify the steps to providing suitable accommodation at each stage of a young person's journey to adult life. Read more about the accommodation project and look at the free resources available.

Life's 2 Short Project

NLCAS worked in partnership with Connexions West Yorkshire to improve outcomes for care leavers in Bradford, Calderdale, Kirklees, Leeds and Wakefield. The project helped each authority to develop new ideas that would help young people increase their educational attainments and job prospects. Young people worked alongside us to identify and develop these new ideas. They evaluated good practice in the five authorities and elsewhere.  

To find out more about this project please click here 

LILAC

NLCAS worked in partnership with A National Voice and the Fostering Network on LILAC. The project developed a kitemark that local authorities and other agencies can be awarded for the successful involvement of young people in the planning and review of their care and in the development of services.

A group of young people have developed the assessment system and are now piloting the process prior to making it available to all local authorities and other agencies.

A national voice are taking forward LILAC and rolling out the model across the country. For more about A National Voice go to www.anationalvoice.org or the LILAC webpages

For more about the Fostering Network go to www.fostering.net