Today (Tuesday 5 November
2013) is the start of an exciting journey for Staffordshire County Council and
its partners, as we begin to look at how we can together improve the guidance
and support young people receive when they become ready to leave our care. Later
today Staffordshire County Council will launch its New Belongings Project,
which seeks to re-address the support provided to our care leavers.
Together, all Staffordshire
County Council employees have a responsibility to help towards improving the
lives and futures of the children and young people the authority looks after.
It is everyone’s job to do what we can for looked after children, young people
and care leavers, just as we would for our own children and family. We
call this our 'corporate parent' responsibility. Here in Staffordshire we take
these responsibilities seriously using the benchmark of “would this be good
enough for our own children”?
It is quite a challenging
time for our care leavers; however, many of our young people do survive and
succeed. Through the New Belongings project we will be able to learn from these
successes and refocus what we do in the areas that matter, to ensure our young
people get the best start in life.
In Staffordshire we already
have so much to be proud of but we must do more and that’s why we will be
looking to improve young people’s accommodation, improve opportunities to learn
practical independence skills and encourage more of our care leavers to go onto
university. We will continue to build on
the outstanding Families First Foundations 2 Employment project, which provides a young person
with a supported work experience placement. And we will continue to improve the
information available to our young people building on the success of the
recently launched care leavers information pack Any Other Business.
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