‘Care Leavers Challenge’. This means living on a budget of £57.90 for the week – which is what an 18 to 21-yearold has on Job Seeker’s Allowance. Basically, after deducting a recommended amount for unavoidable costs such as heating, the Challenge leaves me approx. £15 for the week for food, clothes, cleaning, personal hygiene, travel, saving, leisure and everything else that living involves. I am aware that I will never really be able to appreciate the difficulties facing our county’s Care Leavers. I have almost half-a-century’s experience of looking after myself (including a time when we were very poor), with a comfortable home and supportive family.
Care Leavers have few family contacts, and a young life which has been disrupted, sometimes disastrously. Almost two-thirds of the County’s looked-after children have special educational needs. THE AIM Durham County Council is a ‘corporate parent’ to its looked-after children, and we as a Council and a community have a duty of care to the children for whom we have assumed parental responsibility. That includes making sure that we have properly prepared them, and that we properly support them, when they leave care and start to build an independent life.
Acknowledging this, in October last year, the Council set up a Task Group to further consider the level of support that Care Leavers need. The aim of the ‘Care Leavers Challenge’, therefore, is to raise awareness of the difficulties care leavers face on a daily basis and to get more people talking about this “so that it leads to change”. You will be able to follow my progress on my blog at bit.ly/ JDClare and hopefully add your own thoughts as I go along. The insights we collect during the week will then be fed into the Council’s strategies, and hopefully, we will be able to make a change for the better. Cllr John D Clare
