Today, NYAS (National Youth Advocacy Service), has launched a new report exploring what the UK and Welsh Government are doing to support care-experienced young mothers, and their children across England and Wales.
The latest report in NYAS’ ‘Across the Border’ series highlights some of the disparities in support for care-experienced young mothers across England and Wales, as well as the discrimination these women can face from services. The report raises calls for policy changes across England and Wales to better meet the needs of care-experienced young mothers.
Care-experienced young mothers are disproportionately more likely to have their children taken into care compared to their non-care-experienced peers. Sometimes this can occur for no reason except that the mother herself lived in care as a child. This previous history of care can be used as a factor for why social services think they might not be a good parent, due to the assumption that history repeats itself. Making sure care-experienced young mothers can access support services during and after their pregnancies is therefore vital.
In Wales, NYAS Cymru’s ‘Project Unity’ provides intensive and trauma-informed support to care-experienced young mothers and works to keep families together, wherever possible. Since starting in 2020, Project Unity has supported over 500 young women, and the service is currently funded by Welsh Government until 2025. In contrast, there is currently no national service like Project Unity in England which means support for care-experienced young mothers remains limited. Care-experienced young mothers in England that NYAS engaged with as part of this research told us:
There was just no right answer... it felt like nothing I was doing was ever good enough and sometimes it was like I was set up to fail.
Care-experienced young mother in England
NYAS believes that no care-experienced young mother should experience discrimination or disproportionately negative assumptions about their parenting just because they spent their childhoods in care. We want to see care-experienced young mothers being supported and empowered to overcome the barriers they face by helping them to speak out against stigmatisation in a system that often silences them.
This report is part of NYAS’ research series ‘Across the Border’, which calls for improved government collaboration across England and Wales. This research encourages nations to learn from each other‘s laws and policies that affect care-experienced young people.
