Care Leavers' Association

Victoria Hull, who has worked for the CLA since late 2004, has left the organisation to join the Who Cares? Trust at their head office in London. Victoria is their new Policy, Research and Projects Officer. Victoria joined us as National Development Worker five and half years ago and recently became our National Director. She has played a leading role in helping the Association to develop. In recent years she was in charge of significant initiatives in relation to unaccompanied asylum-seeking children and children missing from care and raised the national profile of these issues. Her final project was the successful 'Speaking Out' event held in Manchester (see elsewhere in this 'News' section). We are obviously sorry to lose Victoria. However, her new post offers her the perfect opportunity to build on the experience and skills that she gained while with us. It also allows her to continue working to improve the lives of children in care and care leavers. We wish her well and hope to keep in touch and work with her in the future. We will be advertising for her replacement in due course, along with two new posts for which we have recently recieved funding.

Wirral MBC has become the first local authority to receive the CLA's quality mark for access to records (The CLEARmark)

Wirral demonstrated that they met all seven of the CLEARmark good practice requirements, which were decided by care leavers.

The CLA recently launched the updated version of our Access to Records Guide. You can download a copy here: Access to Records Guide 2009

The aim of this guide is to help care leavers who want to gain access to their files from their time in care.

The guide explains the law that allows care leavers to do this. It also explains: what information care leavers can have access to and what they can not access; how to make a request; some of the problems that might occur and what to do if a request is not responded to properly.

We hope the guide will help more care leavers to successfully access their files.

You can provide feedback about the new version of the guide by commenting on our Blog or voting in the current Poll.

In 2010, the CLA will be running an event, which will give young people in care and care leavers (aged 15-25), from black and minority ethnic background, the chance to speak out about the care system and how it could be changed for the better.

Work on this project is well on the way and we now have a steering group of young people who are helping us to plan the event.

However, we would still love to hear the views of other young people. This is crucial to make sure that we get things right. We want to make sure this event is as good as it possibly can be.

We have designed a questionnaire so that you can tell us what you think about our plans so far. You can download the questionnaire here: BME Project Questionnaire.

You can return it to us by email or by FREEPOST to the following address:

Freepost RSCK-REJX-ZCUB
Care Leavers' Association
Express Networks
1 George Leigh Street
Manchester
M4 5DL

If you want to give us your views but prefer not to fill in the questionnaire, you can get in touch in any of the following ways:

Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Telephone: 0161 236 1980

Post: at the address above