Every young person deserves the best start in life – so why are children in care being forgotten?

We need to invest to harness this lost generation of talent

Turn back the clock and imagine you’ve just turned 18 again. How did you mark the milestone? A surprise family birthday party? An evening out with friends?

Now imagine you wake up on your 18th birthday and instead of cards, banners and birthday songs, you’re asked to leave your home and never return.

That is the reality that the majority of young people growing up in the UK care system face when they turn 18. One day considered a child in care, the next expected to fend for themselves, find a place to live, get a job, and start paying bills. Alone and vulnerable.

This is something that no teenager should face and, as a mother of two, I find it deeply distressing. Even more so given the fact that care leavers are currently more likely to become homeless than go to university.

For a lot of care-experienced young people, these inequalities intensify at school, with few given access or encouragement towards education and training opportunities, or the right environment to study in. As a result, it’s estimated that only a third leave primary school with the expected proficiency in reading, maths and writing. Just six per cent of young people who’ve been in care go on to further education.

Latest figures show that around 12,000 young people from care-experienced backgrounds in the UK are currently in no form of education, employment or training. This is resulting in generations of talent being forgotten and overlooked in the national conversation – purely because of where they started in life. That is simply unacceptable.

Sadly, the challenges don’t stop with employment either. We’ve been given accounts from care-experienced partners (what we call our employees) about young people dreading going home after work due to unsafe and unregulated living situations – further highlighting the complex and profound injustices many young people face when they leave the care system.

So, what are we doing to help? First, we want to raise awareness among the public and work with others to find better ways to support care leavers. Second, we are committed to finding practical solutions that help more young people from care get into meaningful employment.

This is why we are launching our Building Happier Futures employment programme to bring more care experienced people from more parts of the UK into our business. This forms part of our long-term ambition to become the employer of choice for young people who are care experienced – an aspiration that I believe is of utmost importance during a cost of living crisis, and at a time when so many businesses are facing significant recruitment challenges.

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We hope our efforts will make a difference, but we’d like to see even wider change. To that end, we have a keen interest in how the government will respond to the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care at the end of the year.

We recognise the economic hardship our country currently faces. But during such times, inequalities are often exacerbated, and those that suffer most often suffer even more. That makes it more critical than ever to work with others – including the government and our charity partners – to invest in improving the lives of children and young people who’ve been in care.

We don’t pretend to have all the answers. Neither are we naive enough to think we can solve this alone. That’s why I’d urge any and all businesses that can get involved to do so.

I hope everyone agrees that every young person deserves the very best start in life. To do that, we need to invest in all of them, not just some of them. If we do that, and harness this lost generation of talent, we will help build a happier future not just for the 108,000 young people currently in the care system, but for our whole society.

Dame Sharon White is chair of the John Lewis Partnership