Against all odds? Exploring and explaining positive outcomes for young adults formerly in public care - a three country comparison

The project grew out of a concern to build knowledge about positive experiences and pathways through care. When we concentrate solely on the known likelihood for poor outcomes, we risk adding to the stigmatization that care experienced people face. As well we risk lowering professional and personal expectations, thus contributing to a perception of care as a last resort that is bad for children. NAVIGATING PRECARIOUS MOMENTS Looking at the experiences of young people in and from care invites the notion of scaffolding through precarious moments. This may relate directly to aspects of care systems (e.g., when a change of school coincides with a placement move). In addition, transitions that are not specific to being in (or leaving) care such as a relationship ending, or a change of university course, may become precarious for care leavers because they may have to rely on formal systems in the absence of family resources. Thus, it is crucial to address the ways in which care experience intersects with non-care specific transitions. Norway, Denmark and England differ in after-care legislations and systems, but they also differ in normative pathways through early adulthood. More than four times as many young adults in the UK are living in their parental homes in their twenties compared with Denmark, and almost twice as many as in Norway. This makes British young adults potentially more vulnerable when they cannot live in their parental homes. Housing insecurity and fear of homelessness were indeed issues for some participants in England, but not in Denmark or Norway. Correspondingly, both debt and poverty were highlighted by some Young adults in England, while Norwegian and Danish participants rather spoke about having little money at times. On the other hand, individual descriptions of living with a sense of precarity were often similar between countries, and often related to disruptive childhood experiences and painful disruptions in while they grew up and after. Some potentially precarious moments, like finishing university, can be planned for; others, such as the end of a relationship, are by nature unpredictable, and can turn the world upside down. Thus, flexibility was a key word in the young adults' successful engagements with both formal and informal helping systems. When systems proved inflexible, the consequences might be serious and lead to setbacks. EDUCATION 'ON-TIME' AND 'OUT OF TIME' Across all three countries, it was clear that extra time was significant for educational success, giving the young adults sufficient flexibility and space to master the educational challenges while at the same time managing other aspects of complex lives, like mental health, disability or family issues. A flexible system helped the young adults navigate education without major delays, even as lack of flexible support, or sometimes simply low expectations from professionals, was associated with delay and disruption. Greater flexibility in the education systems of the two Nordic countries compared to England, allowed for more opportunities for young people to adapt and change pathways through education. A critical difference was demonstrated between real life experiences of care experienced adults, and the evidence recorded in administrative data sets. In England, young people who have been looked after up to the age of 21 are included, but only if normative time-frames for completing high school exams or higher education are present. This creates a misleading and negative impression, underestimating the proportion of care leavers who achieve these key educational milestones, but also obscuring the support needs of those who follow educational pathways 'out-of-time' with their peers. In Norway, statistics are available that describe completion of high school up to the age of 24, thus including those who use extra time, and when the same individuals are followed even longer, the proportion completing high school rise even higher. GOOD QUALITY AFTERCARE SERVICES ARE ESSENTIAL If child welfare services are intended to substitute for family to ensure the child's welfare and development, this implies a clear ethical responsibility which extends beyond childhood for those who have been in care. Analyses of the Norwegian sample show that again, sufficient flexibility was paramount. Just a minority thought that they had been offered services that were both timely and relevant, while a majority described various types of mismatch between their needs and the services they were offered by their caseworkers. When they still did well, or overcame setbacks, this had to do with support from others they had a positive relation with, like former foster parents or professionals they knew from stays in residential care, and who refused to let contact with the young person lapse.

Prosjektets resultater er formidlet gjennom vitenskapelige og populærvitenskapelige publikasjoner, medieoppslag, seminarer og foredrag for fagfolk og brukere. Resultatene brukes også i en lærebok om ettervern som er under arbeid, med utdanningsinstitusjonene og praktikere som målgrupper(ved Backe-Hansen). Prosjektet har hatt stor betydning for forskerne fordi det er skapt ny kunnskap som forskerne har kunnet lære av, også på grunn av den tverrfaglige sammensetningen av forskergruppa (jurist, psykologer, sosiologer). Videre er det etablert et nytt forskningssamarbeid mellom NOVA og University of Sussex som be videreført, i hvert fall på kort sikt, i form av en professor II stilling på NOVA for professor Janet Boddy.

Why do some care leavers end up doing well as young adults, against all odds? What does "doing well" mean to young women and men, with majority and minority backgrounds? Across Europe, care leavers are at risk of poor outcomes relative to the general population, on indicators like education, mental and physical health, homelessness, unemployment, dependence on social assistance, and crime. To support this vulnerable group into adulthood, it is not sufficient to focus on risk factors. We need to learn more from the experiences and developmental pathways of those who do well. Research about positive outcomes among these young adults is still relatively scarce and there is an urgent need to address this critical knowledge gap: Better understanding of pathways and developments leading to positive outcomes would illuminate good practice, and inform the development of policy and services for young people in care and care leavers. We do not know enough about the potential protective value of care and after care services. A one-sided focus on negative outcomes may lead to the erroneous assumption that placement in care is inevitably bad for children's life chances. If we are to understand the potential of care systems to contribute to good outcomes for t hese young adults we need to move beyond a problematising lens. This is theoretically important because notions of risk and "outcome" in the care literature remain insufficiently conceptualized in relation to wider theoretical understandings of young people's transitions into adult worlds, addressing individual lifeworlds and biographical temporalities, including critical moments in the intersections of past, present and future in their lives. We will contribute in all these respects by generating new, comparative knowledge about conditions for, and variations and patterns in successful transition processes among young adults formerly in public care at different points in time during young adulthood.