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or rooms provided by social service departments in housing projects. These
types of lodgings provide ‘institutional support’ for young people through staff
living or working on the premises and working with tenants to enable them to find
and keep a place of their own, to develop practical living skills like budgeting,
shopping, cooking, and to access education, training and employment. Young
people often have a named housing support officer in housing projects or hostels
who identifies their support needs and aids them with developing skills to move
towards fully independent living. This includes building confidence in young
people, providing counseling and advice, signposting to relevant professional
services and helping young people gain a greater understanding of their housing
rights and obligations. Non-residential young people can also access the ‘floating
support’ provided by referrals from housing associations, local authorities,
resettlement teams and social services.

Most study participants were in accommodation provided by local councils
or housing associations. Table two shows that 39 per cent of care leavers and 20
percent of young people in difficulty were currently doing so, which is a similar
proportion to that found by Wade et al. (2006, p.201) for care leavers. Beyond
this, young people in difficulty were most commonly living in ‘rooms within a
housing project’ (34%), usually comprising a single room, with shared bathroom
and kitchen facilities, or flats within housing projects (24%) such as hostels,
foyers or YMCA, where they had their own kitchen and bathroom (and more
responsibility for keeping it clean, paying for fuel and so on).

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