Local offer for care leavers

If you'd like to carry on living with your foster carer or foster family after your 18th birthday, you may be able to stay with them until you’re 21, or you finish education.  

This may be your kinship foster carer (a family member or other connected person) or foster family who may not your blood relatives.

This will be looked at as part of your first pathway plan, to make sure everyone agrees and it’s properly planned.

The staying put procedure will be applied, and your foster carer will continue to receive financial support to support you.  

Your social worker will put a living agreement together - this will include house rules, as completed by you and your staying put carer.  

The house rules will be reviewed every six months with your Pathway plan and may change as you'll be an adult.

When you move on from foster or residential care, you are likely to move into supported accommodation.  

We will look for the right supported housing for you, based on an assessment of your needs and how ready you are for independence.  

Some places have staff on site 24 hours a day to help if needed, and others have support staff that visit you.

Support staff will help you learn how to manage your money so you can pay your bills, help you understand what managing a tenancy is like, and support you to find opportunities such as volunteering, training or education.

If you're ready to move into your own place and live independently, your options are:

• private renting
• housing association 
• social housing

We’ll offer you short courses on increasing your independence skills – for example, the ASDAN course and tenancy training.

Some courses are accredited and will help you when you apply for housing.

We will help you move in and furnish your home, so you can make it your own.  

We’ll also provide practical and financial support - find out more about this in the ‘Your finances’ section.  

Looking after your own home and knowing what is included in a tenancy contract can be hard.  

We want you to succeed and stay in your home, and we can give you advice about:

• holding down a tenancy
• paying your rent and bills
• applying for all the benefits you’re entitled to
• learning to budget and manage your money (we can arrange for your housing benefit and/or rent to be paid directly to your landlord, if this helps)

Paying bills can take some getting used to, and things go wrong sometimes.  

If this happens, please contact your personal adviser as soon as possible so we can work together to put things right.

We’ll also help you to find housing in an emergency or crisis, and work with you to plan for your longer-term housing.

Private rented accommodation means renting your home from someone who owns a property – a landlord.  

They could be a person who owns one place, or a company who owns lots of properties.  

We’ll give you advice and guidance to help you understand: 

• what a tenancy is
• your rights and responsibilities when renting a home in the private sector

In certain circumstances, we'll pay your deposit and act as a guarantor.

If you’re over 18 and it’s part of your pathway plan. We can also support you by:

• paying a deposit when you take up a tenancy
• acting as a guarantor for the rent payments

We’ve agreed that care leavers with a housing need are a priority on our waiting lists for social housing – you’re awarded an additional 150 social need points.

Get support to apply from our housing options team