ARU Final Report

50 Care leavers’ experiences of support during the Covid-19 pandemic • To encourage those children and young people to express their views, wishes and feelings. • To take into account the views, wishes and feelings of those children and young people. • To help those children and young people gain access to, and make the best use of, services provided by the local authority and its relevant partners. • To promote high aspirations, and seek to secure the best outcomes, for those children and young people. • For those children and young people to be safe, and for stability in their home lives, relationships and education or work. • To prepare those children and young people for adulthood and independent living. Given the clear need for the recommendations from our research to better support care leavers during the pandemic and beyond, as well as their relevance to the Corporate Parenting Principles, the care leavers themselves felt it was crucial that action should come from the research. Their call to action is reflected in two further recommendations: 7. To promote participatory approaches in research with care leavers to ensure their priorities and experiences are better reflected in research findings and inform action. 8. To invite those in corporate parent services and central government that are responsible for supporting care leavers, to make a promise setting out the action they intend to take to improve the support for care leavers during the pandemic and beyond. The participatory approach to this research gave the opportunity for care leavers to be involved throughout the research process, as part of the research team. Because of this, the research reflected their priorities in terms of experiences of support during the pandemic and generated findings that they feel are important for central and local government to understand. Furthermore, the care leavers in the research team have led the development of resources to share as an outcome of the research for central and local government, as well as care leavers themselves. They wanted to know what will happen as a result of this research,