A fostering agency in Newton Aycliffe is providing homes for young people as they leave care. In Foster Care Fortnight, Steve Pratt reports on the success of the Rocsolid scheme.

KATIE was a young woman who’d been in foster care through the Reach Out Care agency for several years. She had an emotional age of a ten-year-old. It was a longterm placement with carers and she did well, but when that ended, as foster care funding ceases at 18, she was put into accommodation alongside people with physical disabilities.

There was no other resource appropriate for her needs, but its unsuitability led to a deterioration in her physical and emotional health.

She ended up offending and being put in a secure residential unit.

“Our social workers had built up such a relationship with her that they continued to keep in touch after she left. They went to see her and were heartbroken at what had happened,” says Dot Butler, a director of Reach Out Care, in Newton Aycliffe, County Durham.

“If she’d had the right accommodation and support, that need not have happened. It felt like all the good work was being undone.”

That was the trigger that made the Reach Out Care team determined to pursue plans to help people like Katie – not her real name – in the difficult years after leaving foster care.

The result was Rocsolid – Reach Out Care Supporting Others Living Independently – to provide a home for fostered young people when they reach 18 and to help them acclimatise to life on their own.

The Government decision not to extend the care age to 21 leaves many young people in limbo as they first try to make a life on their own. Many are left to fend for themselves in bed and breakfast or council accommodation.

Rocsolid aims to fill that gap, continuing the support they’ve had while in care. To further their aim, the Reach Out Care agency decided to convert a building adjoining their Newton Aycliffe premises into six self-contained apartments.

“As far as I’m aware we’re actually unique in this,” says Ms Butler. “I don’t know of anyone else doing what we’re doing in terms of being a fostering agency that has branched out into accommodation for care leavers and other vulnerable young people.”

Project manager Pam Birtle, a social worker for 32 years who became a foster carer 17 years ago, recalls that young people were involved in the decision-making on the project, such as helping choose the colour scheme and drawing up the house rules.

“In fact, they’ve been much stricter than we might have been,” she says. “The people living there have taken on ownership, they do have respect and commitment to the project. They put in the things they want to see to make them good citizens and good neighbours.”

They contribute to the utility charge in the mixed apartment block. Each referral is matched to the current group of young people to ensure they’re suitable and won’t upset the balance.

“We’re very flexible. A lot of projects are either single sex, or perhaps a coming out of a prison project. Ours is unique in that we take each individual referral as we do in fostering and judge it on its own merits.

“We don’t turn down young people because they don’t fit a certain set of criteria. So we’ve had pregnant women, a young woman with one child, another with two children. We’d take single dads, or couples.”

Although each flat has its own entrance and living area, staff are available 24 hours-a-day and each resident is given a key worker to support them.

They have to manage on £46 a week, of which £7.30 goes on the utility charge. “They have to feed, clothe themselves and pay for recreation from the remainder. I couldn’t do it, could you?

It’s a tall order what we’re trying to teach them but that’s the reality of what they have to work with,” says Ms Birtle.

There are plans to extend the number of flats and hopefully expand with a mother – or father – and baby unit on a separate site.

“In terms of doing a cost benefit analysis of a business how do you do one of a young person who came here and was completely useless at just about everything,” asks Ms Birtle.

“Six months later they’re still going out and binge drinking occasionally, still on the edge of drug-taking and crime, but they’ve actually altered in a lot of ways. They’re not going to be prime minister, but have a much better life chance as a result of the work that we’re doing.

How do you quantify that?”

She speaks from a position of experience.

She has eight children – “three homegrown, two adopted, three permanently fostered” as she puts it.

She opened her own foster agency at the end of the Nineties, but changes in the law made it impossible to foster and manage in the same organisation. The business she’d started for a tenner was worth half a million pounds, but she gave it away to become a charity in 2002, so she could still foster for it.

SHE’S passionate about the need for places like Rocsolid to help young people make the transition from care to society.

“By the time they’re 18 they’re going to have to leave their foster homes. It’s a crucial point in their lives. What we looked at was the need for a safe and secure place,” she says.

“Rocsolid gives them a secure foundation into the future with appropriate adults with skills to meet their needs, give them support and help the transition into independence successfully.”

Rocsolid operates alongside Reach Out Care fostering and support services which deal with mostly difficult-to-place young people, aged seven to 17, mainly from Stockton, Darlington and North Yorkshire.

Ms Birtle is only too aware of how changes in the world over the past 30 to 40 years have impacted on the needs of young people.

“Society is so complex, with the pressures on young people from the media, pornography, the internet, mobile phones. Their needs haven’t changed. What they need is love, security, commitment, nurture.

“The needs are the same but the world is different.

The extremes that foster carers are being asked to deal with have changed.”