More Than a CV: Work Experience, Vocational Pathways, and What Residential Homes Owe Young People

The post-16 employment and education outcomes for looked-after children make uncomfortable reading. Government longitudinal data tracking young people who left care consistently show them underrepresented in sustained employment, overrepresented in NEET statistics, and less likely than peers to enter higher education or vocational programmes that lead to well-paid work. These are not marginal differences. They reflect a sustained, structural failure to support a group of young people toward meaningful economic participation in adult life — a failure that begins in the care system and extends well beyond it. For young people living in residential homes, where disrupted schooling, unmet learning needs, and placement instability are common features of a recent history, the distance between aspiration and realistic pathway can feel uncrossable. One of the things residential homes can do — and many do not — is begin, in practical ways, to close it.

The barriers that young people in residential care face in accessing work experience and vocational education are not simply a product of prior disadvantage. They are actively reproduced by the systems surrounding the placement. Work experience placements for school-age young people require coordination: between the home, the school or alternative provision, the placing authority's education lead, and often an employer who has no framework for working with a care-experienced young person and may never have done so. When a young person has moved mid-academic year, the work experience programme they were enrolled in at a previous school may have been abandoned without being reinstated. When a young person is in a specialist or alternative provision setting, the school's employer network may be thinner and less established. When a placement breaks down in the months before GCSEs, the qualifications needed to enter many vocational routes become harder to obtain. None of this is inevitable, but none of it is addressed by a pathway plan that records the aspiration to work in construction or healthcare without also recording who, specifically, is responsible for arranging the steps that make it possible.

The policy framework that exists to support care-experienced young people into employment is more substantial than many residential practitioners realise. The corporate parenting duty, extended by the Children and Social Work Act 2017 to all local authority departments and partner agencies, requires active support for care leavers entering employment and education. The apprenticeship care leavers' bursary — raised to £3,000 from August 2026 for apprentices starting a programme — provides a meaningful financial incentive for care-experienced young people to access apprenticeship routes, at a time when the Independent Review of Children's Social Care set a target of 3,500 new jobs and apprenticeships for care leavers annually. Virtual school heads, whose remit was extended to include post-16 looked-after children under the Children Act 1989, have a specific function in supporting the transition from school to further education and employment. These mechanisms are real. The problem is that they operate at a distance from the daily life of a residential home, and a young person who has not been supported, from within the home, to develop a realistic vocational identity is unlikely to activate them on their own initiative.

What it looks like, when a residential home takes vocational aspiration seriously, is mostly not dramatic. It is the member of staff who remembers that a young person once mentioned an interest in working with cars and follows it up — not once, at a review, but in a conversation on a Wednesday, and again a month later, and eventually by ringing a local garage to ask whether there is any possibility of a visit or a day's trial. It is the home that builds relationships with local employers not as a corporate social responsibility exercise but as a genuine extension of its network for the young people it cares for. It is the deputy manager who knows which colleges have specialist support workers for care-experienced students and passes that information on before a young person has to find it alone. It is the culture of a home in which future-thinking is normal — in which young people are regularly asked, with genuine interest rather than procedural obligation, about what they want their adult lives to look like, and in which those conversations are followed with concrete, small, practical steps. None of this requires additional resource. It requires that the home understand employment preparation as part of the care task rather than something that begins when a young person leaves.

The deeper significance of work, for young people whose care experience has often defined them in terms of deficit and vulnerability, is worth taking seriously on its own terms. The young person who secures a part-time job, or completes a work trial, or starts a vocational course they actually chose, has done something that most official documentation about them has not done: it has positioned them as someone competent, valued, and capable. For a young person whose file is full of incident records, risk assessments, and clinical assessments of need, the experience of being someone who is good at something — of being seen, by an employer, as a person whose contribution is wanted — can be genuinely reorienting. It begins to construct an identity that is not built around what has happened to them. The residential homes that understand this treat vocational pathways not as a procedural element of the leaving-care process but as one of the most significant investments in a young person's long-term sense of self that the placement can make. Getting a young person into a work experience placement takes coordination and persistence. What it can return — a young person who has begun to imagine themselves as a worker, as a contributor, as someone with a future — is worth considerably more than the effort it costs.