Turning 18 is a big step for anyone, but for young people in the UK who’ve been in care, the milestone often means having to face adult life and its responsibilities alone. These young adults, known as care leavers, go through a dramatic change once they turn 18 ; the consistent, day to day support they once relied on from care services is beginning to disappear.
Before turning 18, the care system is actively involved in their lives, providing key support like housing, assistance with educational costs, financial help for everyday needs, and consistent contact with a social worker or Personal Advisor (PA). Once they become a care leaver, that robust safety net is often reduced to intermittent check-ins. The viewpoint of Black men leaving care within this predicament is largely absent from mainstream research. The predominant discourse surrounding Black care leavers often lacks empathy, focusing disproportionately on negative outcomes, such as criminal involvement, instead of exploring the underlying factors that tend to be related to their health and wellbeing.
To challenge this, the “Mapping the Margins“ project, funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and led by Dr Anita Mehay at City St George’s, University of London and Jabeer Butt OBE, Chief Executive of the Race Equality Foundation, aims to bridge this gap by hearing directly from those with lived experience.
To begin this process, this blog post introduces the project’s vital aim and shares the preliminary, essential insights gathered directly from two young Black care leavers, Deshawn and Fabrice, who are both co-investigators of the project.
The Abrupt Withdrawal of Support
The most immediate challenge Deshawn and Fabrice identified was the system’s sudden abandonment of care leavers when they hit 18.
Fabrice’s quote captures how this withdrawal of support felt:
‘It’s almost a case of you’re getting to the stage where, OK, you’re not our concern anymore in that way. So therefore, the support starts becoming less and less and less. So rather than the weekly calls, you might get a call every other month.’
Similarly, Deshawn, for instance, spoke about the particular challenges of leaving care right at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which severely impacted his access to what little formal support remained.
This demonstrates a systemic failure to offer a gradual transition to independence, leaving young people exposed and vulnerable. Care services disengagement with care leavers has forced them to navigate major challenges, like securing housing, navigating financial independence, or searching for employment, without a reliable safety net that they once had. This isolation and heavy burden often leads to significant mental and physical health challenges that young people are left to navigate entirely on their own (Barnardo’s, 2017).
The Contingency of Support: Relying on foster families
A crucial factor emerged for both men: their foster parents taking on the responsibilities the social care system backed away from, essentially becoming the supportive lifeline that enabled Deshawn and Fabrice to navigate their transition to adulthood.
They noted how their foster families often took on the responsibilities that the social care system should have handled. This immediately raised a concerning question: What if young people don’t have a supportive foster family?
Fabrice offered a sobering answer:
“I had friends who I was in care with at the same time… that had completely different outcomes to me, just based on the relationship they had with their foster carers.”
This reliance on the goodwill of individuals, rather than a reliable statutory duty, reveals a fundamental flaw in the care system. A young person’s success should not be a matter of luck or a positive relationship; the system has a legal obligation to provide consistent, stable support. When this duty is outsourced to foster families, it exposes the system’s failure in supporting young people and creates profound, unequal outcomes.
The Erosion of Trust
When the system’s duty is seen to be unreliable and is outsourced to foster families, it quickly leads to a profound lack of confidence and an erosion of trust between care leavers and local authorities.
Both Fabrice and Deshawn emphasized how difficult it was even to get in contact with local authorities. This breakdown was compounded by the high rotation rate of Personal Advisors (PAs) and social workers. Deshawn shared how he found it incredibly difficult to discuss sensitive topics given the awkwardness of repeatedly sharing deeply personal experiences with new, unfamiliar faces. This constant change, especially during annual “pathway plan” reviews, which are intended to build a supportive roadmap into adulthood, often led him to shut himself off from potential support.
This reveals a fundamental policy breakdown where good intentions lead to genuine harm. While ‘pathway plans’ are designed as a roadmap for adult responsibilities, and require deep, personal check-ins on mental and physical health, Deshawn found these vulnerable questions deeply invasive when asked by yet another new PA. The constant, forced cycle of retelling trauma and sensitive issues prevents the formation of genuine trust, reinforcing the feeling that the system is impersonal and unreliable. This lack of consistent human connection ultimately leaves young men feeling isolated when they may need reliable support the most.
Ethnicity and Identity
The system’s failure to build trust means it simultaneously fails to create the safe space needed to discuss sensitive and crucial topics, notably the complex relationship between racial identity and being a care leaver.
Following our discussions about service withdrawal, the conversation shifted to ethnicity. Both Deshawn and Fabrice noted that explicit discussions about race were rarely, if ever, initiated by professionals. On a personal level, they didn’t explicitly perceive their race as directly shaping their daily interactions with diverse care providers in London.
Deshawn offered a crucial insight into this silence, suggesting the topic is considered too sensitive:
“It’s that sort of elephant in the room that no one really wants to discuss… because these conversations haven’t been normalised, they’re like kind of looked at as maybe a little bit taboo.”
However, both men clearly acknowledged that at a broader, macro-structural level, Black care leavers are often associated with negative and stigmatizing narratives. A quick online search typically links “Black care leavers” with issues like high rates of school exclusion and criminal justice involvement, with a striking absence of empathetic exploration into their mental and physical well-being.
This structural context is a problem that is greatly ignored. By consistently failing to create the trust necessary for open conversation, the system effectively ensures that the topic of race remains taboo (as Deshawn noted). This silence leaves young men vulnerable to a wider public discourse that already frames their experience through a lens of challenge and deficit (e.g., crime and exclusion). By normalizing this deficit based thinking and neglecting to initiate conversations about racial identity, current research, policy and practice fails to truly grasp young Black care leaver’s complex social and mental journey, thereby continuing to overlook the severe issues they face in the UK.
Conclusion
The experiences shared by Deshawn and Fabrice are a clear and urgent mandate for systemic change. The challenges they navigate, from the lack of support when young people turn 18 and the subsequent reliance on foster families to the erosion of trust caused by constant PA turnover, demonstrate that the system is fundamentally failing its duty of care.
However, the cost of these systemic failures is dramatically amplified by the pervasive silence surrounding race. The system’s consistent failure to build trust means it never creates a safe space to discuss the complex link between a young person’s racial identity and their well-being. This forces young Black men to navigate overwhelming challenges while simultaneously battling negative stereotypes, leading to the emotional exhaustion and isolation that defines their transition. By neglecting to create safe spaces that young people can seek help, the care system actively reinforces the stigmatizing narratives that highlight only problems and shortcomings that already harm young Black care leavers.
The Mapping the Margins project is designed to break this silence and make the case that effective support cannot be achieved through tick box exercises or generic policies; it requires a shift toward listening and understanding the voices of young Black care leavers.
