Co-production of guidance by recent care leavers

June-December 2020

Funded by NIHR Applied Research Collaboration Kent, Surrey and Sussex (ARC KSS)

Many care leavers are likely to have found the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown particularly difficult and may struggle to re-engage as lockdown restrictions are eased. This rapid research gave direct voice to care leavers during a national health emergency.

In this project, we asked two key questions:

• What have been the impacts of the crisis on care leavers’ mental health and well-being, connectedness and every-day lives?
• As restrictions relax, what support do care leavers want to help them move on?

The first stage of the research was an online national survey in June 2020 about the impact of lockdown on mental well-being and functioning, and support needs going forward. In the second stage we ran online Care Leaver Expert Working Groups (CLEWGs) with care leavers in the Kent, Surrey and Sussex region. Care leavers who participated in this stage met first to explore the issues (using anonymised, summarised survey data) and to draft guidance, and then a second time, to finalise the following outputs: 

• guidance for services on how best to support care leavers across the post-lockdown transition
• guidance for care leavers on coping strategies, building resilience and accessing support

Dissemination: We ran a multi-agency stakeholder event/s with ARC KSS in November 2020 to disseminate findings alongside the care leavers who had participated in the CLEWGs. Service providers and other stakeholders in the KSS region made pledges with regards to how they would implement some of the guidance, and progress on these were reviewed in a further event in February 2021.

ALL OUTPUTS CAN BE ACCESSED HERE  

Research team: Valerie Dunn, researcher, Creative Research Collective; Helen Drew, Lecturer, School of Psychology, University of Sussex; Professor Robin Banerjee, Head of School of Psychology, University of Sussex, project advisor.

We collaborated with Become, the national charity for children in care and care leavers, and are very grateful for the time their advisors gave to help shape this project.  

If you would like more information you can contact us by email.   

You can also follow us on instagram: beyond_lockdown and twitter: @LockdownBeyond

The research team hope to develop this work, especially to understand the needs of specific groups of care leavers. 

This research was approved (ER/HELEND/7) by the Sciences and Technology Cross-Schools Research Ethics Committee (C-REC). If you have any ethical concerns, please contact the ethics chair (crecscitec@sussex.ac.uk). The University of Sussex has insurance in place to cover its legal liabilities in respect of this study.