In this project I wanted to explore the care system. As a care experienced person, this is an important topic for me to research as those with care experience are less likely to enter higher education than their peers, and are as a population, overrepresented in the criminal system and the homeless population. By using thematic analysis on a recently released book, ‘Free Loaves on Fridays’  I was able to learn more about the challenges children and adults face in the care system, but also balance this with a quantitative exploration and produce graphs and statistics on adults who have been in the foster system in England.

Finding out more was an experimental and iterative process but I was lucky to find data sources that helped me choose my research method. As a first year student, interviews on a topic that may be very personal and sensitive to some was out of my scope. I chose to do thematic analysis and data analysis to construct a holistic exploration of this issue.

There isn’t a wealth of quantitative data on care leavers and care experience but the data that is there was really helpful for my research. Data on adults who have been in care has only begun to be collected more in depth by the government and I used this for my research. ‘Free Loaves on Friday: The Care System As Told By People Who Actually Get It’ is a collection of essays, stories and poems from 100 care-experienced people about the care system. I did thematic analysis on the poems in this book which were both insightful and moving to read.

It was good to draw on the discipline of social work during this project, and I was able to attend a lecture on ‘Welfare Inequalities in Social Work’ which helped me develop a greater understanding of the care system and the challenges and complex systems that social workers navigate when working with families.

At the time of writing this my product will hopefully be a short film introducing a public audience to the care system as well as my research as I don’t think it’s a social topic often discussed. My conclusion was that there is still change needed in the care system to ensure children and adults are living happier lives, that there are improvements that could be made to data collection on people who are care experienced and that some of the issues faced by people 30+ years ago are being faced by some today. How someone experiences the care system is defined by lots of different factors, but that shouldn’t be the case and young people should be receiving consistent positive support.

‘Care-experience’ is a difficult thing to paint with research. One thing that really moved me but was also sobering and shocking was reading poems by children and adults expressing the same feelings of helplessness and struggle.