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benefit levels on the grounds of age. Finally, the Homelessness Act 2002 placed
on local authorities a duty to draw up interagency strategies to combat
homelessness in their area and to provide dedicated services for young people,
as a separate group with specific needs. This included issuing good practice
guidance so that arrangements would be made for “joint assessment between
social service and housing authorities, as part of a multi-agency assessment
necessary to inform the pathway plan of individual young people” (DCLG, 2006,
p.188).

Aims and Methods

The study aimed to evaluate how young people who left care accessed and used
a range of different services, including health, education, and housing, and to
compare the experiences of care leavers with other young people who had
‘difficulties’ but had not been in local authority care (the latter group were termed
young people in difficulty), and to identify features of young people’s lives that
facilitated service use. The study also aimed to evaluate how leaving care
practice was responding to these new changes in legislation, and to map the
service landscape for these young people. The emphasis of the study was on
documenting young people’s perceptions of services: whether they thought the
services they used had been helpful to them, in what ways they had been helpful
or unhelpful, their reasons for seeking assistance, and their reasons for rejecting

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