Issue - meetings

To update members on young people who are defined as NEET (not in education, employment or training), and on support provided to identify employment and training opportunities for care leavers.

As requested the Committee received an update report on the number of young people leaving care who were defined as NEET (not in education, employment or training), details of employment links established by the leaving care and asylum service and the support provided by the service to young people to young people to help with finding employment and training.

The meeting noted that there were 482 young people who were in education, training or employment and 127 who were NEET’s (not in education, employment or training). A detailed breakdown of the ethnicity of the young NEET people was given together with suggested barriers to employment.

The Leaving Care and Asylum service offered a variety of support to help young people obtain employment, training or education. In particular they worked in partnership with a range of other agencies and organisations. These links needed to be further developed in order to meet the needs of the young people and it was noted that there were areas for further development.

The committee was interested in finding out about the emotional support received by LAC who were leaving care and living alone. Discussion was focussed around what support the local authority currently provides with  feelings of isolation and what support is provided after normal working hours to care leavers. There was work being completed  by  the leaving care team  on negotiating  contracts for providers of accommodation ,to ensure out of hours support is available to care leavers.  Further suggestions put forward from the committee for supporting care leavers  were: calling upon older care leavers who may want to provide advice and support to new care leavers , also utilising care leaver events to allow connections  to be made and experiences to be shared. The committee also discussed the pros and cons of placing care leavers with similar peers and concluded that there should be more development work on dealing with the issues of isolation.

RESOLVED:

1.      The report be noted

2.      Agreed that paragraph 19.2 concerning the offer of apprenticeships/ employment opportunities for care leavers is revisited.