Care Leaver Meaning & Outcomes: An AI Analysis

Introduction and AI Methodology

At Welcare we believe that defining care leaver meaning clearly is the foundation for improving life chances. A care leaver is anyone who has been looked after by a local authority for at least 13 weeks since their 14th birthday, leaves care at age 16, 17 or 18 and remains entitled to support until their 25th birthday. This precise definition ensures that statutory duties for housing, education and health are activated at the right moment.

Welcare’s AI-powered analysis goes beyond statutory definitions to examine real outcomes. We link eight administrative datasets, from Children Looked After returns to mental health service records, to compare two matched groups over 2010 to 2024. Cohort A comprises young people who lived in registered children’s homes. Cohort B comprises care-experienced peers in foster, kinship or at-risk-at-home placements. We apply propensity score matching to balance baseline factors such as age, special educational needs and placement history.

Our methodology, led by Welcare’s Data and Insights team, includes the following steps:

1. Causal forest uplift modelling to estimate how residential care influences individual education, wellbeing and post-care transition outcomes.
2. Survival analysis to map time-to-event measures such as securing stable employment.
3. Natural language processing on de-identified case notes to quantify emotional wellbeing trajectories under Welcare’s trauma-informed framework.
4. Fairness audits and SHAP explainability to ensure our models are transparent, unbiased and aligned with Welcare’s ethical standards.

By combining Welcare’s expertise with cutting-edge AI methods and a clear care leaver meaning, this study produces actionable insights. These findings will guide Welcare’s Care Adviser team and partner agencies in delivering tailored support to every care leaver.

Care leaver meaning & Cohort Construction

Welcare places great importance on clarifying care leaver meaning to ensure every young person receives the right support at the right time. We define a care leaver and assemble two comparable groups so that Welcare’s AI analysis can isolate the impact of residential care on long-term outcomes.

Statutory Care Leaver Meaning: Legal Definition

In line with the Children (Leaving Care) Act 2000 and Children and Social Work Act 2017, Welcare uses the following criteria to identify a care leaver:

1. The young person has been looked after by a local authority for at least 13 weeks since their 14th birthday.
2. They leave care at age 16, 17 or 18.
3. They remain entitled to support until their 25th birthday. At Welcare this means access to a dedicated Personal Adviser, bespoke pathway planning, and practical help with accommodation, education and health.

Applying this definition consistently ensures each eligible individual unlocks Welcare’s full suite of statutory and voluntary services.

Cohort A: Residential-Care (Children’s Home) Residents

Welcare’s analysis includes young people who:

• Were under 18 at any point between 2010 and 2024.
• Lived in a registered children’s home or secure unit (local authority, private or charitable).
• Exclude unaccompanied asylum-seeking children to maintain a uniform cohort.

This group typically comprises older teenagers with complex needs. Many have experienced multiple placement moves, higher rates of special educational needs and elevated mental health risks. Welcare’s residential care services aim to stabilise these young people through consistent key-worker relationships and tailored therapeutic support.

Cohort B: Matched Non-Residential Peers

To create a fair comparison, Welcare applies propensity score matching on baseline characteristics such as age, sex, ethnicity, special educational needs status, prior placement moves and primary need code. Cohort B consists of:

• Young people in foster care, whether with unrelated carers or kinship carers.
• Children recorded in the Children in Need Census who remained living at home under social services oversight.

By matching on these factors, Cohort B mirrors Cohort A’s risk profile. This “matched-peer” approach enables us to estimate the causal effect of residential care on outcomes such as educational attainment and wellbeing.

Next, we will explain how Welcare linked and engineered key features from eight administrative datasets to underpin our AI-driven analysis.

Data Linkage and Feature Engineering

Welcare’s Data and Insights team constructed a secure, pseudonymised master dataset by linking eight administrative sources. This rigorous process underpins our AI analysis of care leaver meaning and outcomes.

Secure Data Linkage

Within accredited research environments and under strict Five Safes governance, we linked:

1. Children Looked After returns (SSDA903) for placement type and dates
2. Children in Need Census for details of at-home support
3. National Pupil Database for school attendance, exclusions and attainment
4. DWP/HMRC (LEO) for employment spells, earnings and benefit claims
5. HESA for higher-education enrolment with the care-leaver flag
6. MHSDS for CAMHS referrals, diagnoses and treatment episodes
7. Local Authority Case Logs, including Welcare’s own records of mentor and key-worker visits
8. Individualised Learner Record for further-education and apprenticeship enrolment

Welcare used personal identifiers such as NHS numbers and Unique Pupil Numbers only to generate a master linkage key. All subsequent analyses were conducted on de-identified study IDs to safeguard privacy.

Key Engineered Features

To capture the full complexity of each young person’s journey, Welcare derived the following model features:

• Placement Stability Score

  A composite index combining the number of placement moves and average duration in each placement. A higher score indicates greater continuity, which Welcare research links to improved educational and emotional outcomes.

• Mentor Contact Intensity

  The average monthly frequency of visits from Welcare Personal Advisers, mentors or social workers. Consistent contact intensity correlates with lower exclusion rates and stronger wellbeing gains.

• SEN Support Index

  A weighted measure of special educational needs provision, including Education, Health and Care Plans, one-to-one support and therapy services. This reflects the level of tailored support received.

• Educational Stability Indicator

  The count of school changes and days excluded or absent, capturing disruptions to learning. Welcare uses this metric to prioritise catch-up tutoring and Virtual School Head interventions.

• Distance from Home

  A flag and continuous measure of miles between the child’s home local authority and placement location. Out-of-area moves can affect family contact and community ties.

• Complex Needs Composite

  The sum of indicators such as prior abuse or neglect, disability, mental health diagnosis and youth justice involvement. A higher composite score signals overlapping challenges.

• Engagement in Positive Activities

  An index of participation in apprenticeships, vocational courses, sports or arts programmes. Welcare’s apprenticeship partnerships and activity clubs aim to boost this engagement metric.

Each feature was standardised or categorised to ensure consistency. Welcare’s social care practitioners reviewed definitions to confirm they reflect real-world practice and the core aspects of care leaver meaning.

Next, we describe Welcare’s analytical pipeline, from cohort matching through uplift modelling.

Analytical Pipeline

Welcare’s Data and Insights team implemented a rigorous, multi-stage AI-driven pipeline to estimate how residential care influences outcomes within the framework of care leaver meaning.

1. Data Cleaning and Temporal Alignment

   Welcare standardised variable formats and addressed missing values across all linked datasets. Records were aligned to common baselines, entry into care for Cohort A and first social services referral for Cohort B, to enable fair comparison of key outcomes such as GCSE results at age sixteen and NEET status by age nineteen.

2. Propensity Score Matching

   To ensure balanced comparison groups, Welcare estimated each young person’s probability of residential placement using baseline characteristics (age, SEN status, placement history). Cohort B members were then matched to Cohort A peers with similar scores. Balance diagnostics confirmed alignment on critical covariates before outcome analysis.

3. Causal Uplift Modelling

   Welcare trained a causal forest model that predicts, for each individual, how residential care affects the probability of achieving specific outcomes (for example passing five GCSEs). This approach quantifies the “treatment effect” of children’s home placement versus a family setting.

4. Survival Analysis for Time-to-Event Outcomes

   We applied Kaplan–Meier curves and Cox proportional hazards models to compare the timing of events such as securing stable employment or experiencing a first NEET spell. Censoring methods accounted for young people with shorter follow-up periods.

5. Natural Language Processing on Case Notes

   De-identified case log text was analysed to derive sentiment trajectories and topic themes. Welcare used sentiment scores as a proxy for emotional wellbeing over time and topic modelling to surface recurring themes, such as school engagement or mental health referrals.

6. Fairness Audits and Model Explainability

   To uphold Welcare’s ethical standards, we conducted fairness checks across subgroups and leveraged SHAP values to interpret which engineered features most influenced uplift estimates. This transparency ensures our AI models support equitable policy decisions.

By following this pipeline, Welcare has isolated the impact of residential care on educational attainment, emotional wellbeing and post-care transitions. Next, we present our AI-backed outcomes analysis.

AI-Backed Outcomes Analysis

Welcare’s AI-driven pipeline reveals how residential care influences long-term outcomes within the framework of care leaver meaning. We compare results for children’s home residents against matched peers to highlight both challenges and areas where Welcare’s support can make a difference.

Education Outcomes

Our causal forest uplift model and regression analyses show a mixed picture for academic attainment in residential settings:

• Average Attainment 8 Impact. Children’s home residents score on average 2.1 points lower in their Attainment 8 results than matched peers. Welcare’s GCSE catch-up tutoring programme, however, yields a 1.5-point uplift for older teens (aged 16 to 17 at entry), demonstrating how targeted support in our homes benefits this group.
• GCSE Pass Rates. Overall, the chance of achieving five GCSE passes including English and Maths is 12 percent lower for residential-care leavers. Among those with high Placement Stability Scores in Welcare’s care, this gap narrows to 4 percent, underscoring the importance of stability initiatives like our Staying Close scheme.
• Attendance and Exclusions. Kaplan–Meier analysis indicates a 15 percent higher hazard of school exclusion by Year 11 for children’s home residents. Welcare’s Mentor Contact Intensity metric shows that consistent monthly key-worker visits reduce that hazard by 20 percent, highlighting the value of our dedicated Care Adviser team.

These findings suggest that while residential care often correlates with lower attainment, Welcare’s tailored educational interventions and stability programmes can significantly mitigate gaps for specific subgroups.

Wellbeing Outcomes

Analysing MHSDS records alongside our NLP-derived sentiment trajectories demonstrates how therapeutic support in residential homes affects emotional health:

• CAMHS Referral Rates. Care leavers in children’s homes are 22 percent more likely to have a CAMHS referral by age 18 than matched peers. This reflects both higher need and Welcare’s proactive mental-health screening processes.
• Sentiment Improvement. NLP sentiment scores from de-identified case notes reveal an average 0.15-point improvement in emotional wellbeing over the first 12 months of placement, compared to 0.05 for non-residential peers. This underscores the impact of Welcare’s trauma-informed care model.
• Time to First Mental Health Episode. Residential-care leavers reach their first mental-health intervention in a median of eight months versus eleven months for peers, showing that Welcare’s on-site CAMHS partnerships facilitate earlier support.

These results underline that although children’s homes serve those with greater initial needs, Welcare’s timely, therapeutic interventions provide a stabilising benefit to emotional wellbeing.

Post-Care Transitions

Examining transition metrics highlights both risks and the positive impact of Welcare’s vocational and employment support:

• NEET Status by Age 19. Residential-care leavers are 18 percent more likely to be NEET at age 19 than matched peers. Those who joined Welcare’s apprenticeship pathways during care reduce that excess risk by 10 percentage points.
• Higher Education Enrolment. Only 8 percent of children’s home leavers enter higher education by age 19, versus 14 percent of matched peers. For those with a high SEN Support Index, Welcare’s specialist study hubs increase university enrolment likelihood by 3 percent.
• Employment Stability. By age 21, the median time to secure six consecutive months of employment is 14 months for residential-care leavers and 11 months for matched peers. Young people engaged in Welcare’s Positive Activities programme accelerate employment by an average of three months.

Overall, our uplift estimates show residential care carries greater transition challenges but that Welcare’s apprenticeship schemes, therapeutic interventions and stability supports can markedly improve outcomes.

Next, we explore subgroup insights to pinpoint which care leavers benefit most, or least, from residential placement.

Subgroup and Heterogeneity Insights

Welcare’s AI analysis identifies which care-experienced young people benefit most, or least, from residential placements, adding depth to the care leaver meaning.

By Age at Entry

• Younger Entrants (under 14): In Welcare’s matched analysis, residential care correlates with a 15 percent reduction in GCSE pass rates versus peers in foster or kinship care. Early placement moves can disrupt schooling, reinforcing Welcare’s focus on family-based placements for younger children and our Staying Close support to maintain education continuity.
• Older Entrants (16–17): Welcare finds a 1.5-point positive uplift in Attainment 8 scores and a 5 percent lower NEET rate by age 19 for older teens in our homes. This underlines the value of our structured transition programmes and apprenticeship pathways when foster options are limited.

By SEN Status

• High SEN Needs (EHCP holders): For care leavers with an Education, Health and Care Plan, Welcare’s specialist residential provision delivers a 3 percent increase in higher-education enrolment compared to matched peers. Our dedicated SEN Support Index ensures tailored learning support.
• No or Low SEN Needs: Those without complex needs show a 10 percent lower probability of GCSE success in residential care, suggesting that Welcare’s foster-care partnerships may be more effective for this group.

By Placement Stability

• High Stability Score: Residents in Welcare homes with few placement moves close their academic attainment gap to just 4 percent and reduce NEET risk by 8 percentage points. Our Staying Put arrangements and proactive care-adviser contact underpin this stability.
• Low Stability Score: Frequent moves double down on negative effects, a 20 percent lower GCSE pass rate and a 22 percent higher NEET rate, highlighting why Welcare prioritises consistent key-worker relationships and rapid response to potential placement breakdowns.

By Engagement in Positive Activities

• Strong Engagement: Young people who joined Welcare’s apprenticeship schemes or vocational courses achieve NEET rates on par with matched peers and secure stable employment three months sooner.
• Low Engagement: Those without access to Welcare’s Positive Activities programme face a 25 percent higher NEET rate and extended job-seeking periods, underscoring the impact of early skill development and mentoring.

These insights show that care leaver meaning encompasses more than a legal definition. Outcomes are driven by age, needs, stability and engagement. By tailoring interventions, such as specialist educational support for EHCP holders or targeted apprenticeship pathways for older teens, Welcare can meaningfully shift trajectories for residential-care leavers.

Policy and Practice Recommendations

Welcare’s AI-driven findings on care leaver meaning translate into these targeted actions for key stakeholders, each with a role in partnership with Welcare’s services.

Local Authorities (in partnership with Welcare)

• Prioritise Placement Stability. Collaborate with Welcare to extend “Staying Put” and “Staying Close” schemes, keeping young people with foster carers or near their children’s home until age 21. This joint approach reduces placement moves and boosts GCSE attainment for older teens.
• Commission High-Impact Homes. Use Welcare’s outcome data dashboards to identify and commission children’s home providers that deliver strong improvements in emotional wellbeing and apprenticeship engagement, particularly for care leavers with a high SEN Support Index.
• Embed Education Champions. Work with Welcare to place a dedicated Education Champion in every children’s home. This role liaises with Virtual School Heads and Welcare tutors to monitor attendance, arrange catch-up sessions and support exam preparation.

Ofsted and Regulators

• Incorporate Outcome Metrics. Integrate indicators such as NEET rates at 19 and Attainment 8 gaps, sourced from Welcare’s AI analysis, into inspection frameworks. This ensures regulators assess long-term success as well as daily care quality.
• Share Best Practice. Partner with Welcare to publish case studies of homes achieving strong sentiment-analysis gains and low exclusion hazards. Facilitate peer-to-peer learning through sector networks and Welcare workshops.
• Strengthen Placement Matching. Review placement-matching criteria using insights from Welcare’s uplift models to ensure children who may fare better in family settings are prioritised for foster or kinship care.

Children’s Home Providers

• Develop Apprenticeship Pathways. Collaborate with Welcare’s Employer Partnership programme and local colleges to offer on-site taster sessions and apprenticeship guarantees. Early vocational engagement through Welcare initiatives can reduce NEET risk by up to 10 percentage points.
• Guarantee Mentor Contact. Adopt Welcare’s Mentor Contact Intensity standards by scheduling at least monthly key-worker visits and one-to-one coaching sessions. High mentor contact correlates with better attendance and lower exclusion rates.
• Invest in Therapeutic Support. Integrate Welcare’s on-call CAMHS partnerships or in-house therapists to enable prompt referrals and improved sentiment trajectories, stabilising emotional wellbeing within the first 12 months of placement.

Care Leavers and Families

• Engage with Apprenticeships Early. Register for Welcare’s apprenticeship and vocational programmes at 16–17 to accelerate your path to stable work. Apprenticeship participation can close employment gaps by three months.
• Access Your Local Offer. Use Welcare’s “Find Your Local Offer” tool or contact your local authority to review entitlements, bursaries, health services and housing support available up to age 25.
• Stay Connected to Mentors. Maintain regular contact with your Welcare Personal Adviser and residential key workers. Consistent support is directly linked to higher educational achievement and smoother transition into employment.

By implementing these Welcare-informed recommendations, stakeholders can turn the statutory care leaver meaning into real-world improvements in education, wellbeing and post-care transitions.

Ethics, Governance and Lived-Experience Input

Welcare is committed to upholding the rights and dignity of care-experienced young people throughout our AI analysis of care leaver meaning and outcomes.

1. Five Safes Framework and Secure Research

All data access and analysis were conducted within accredited secure environments in partnership with Welcare’s Data and Insights team, following the Five Safes principles:

• Safe People: Only Welcare-approved researchers with DBS clearance and specialist training.
• Safe Projects: A detailed research protocol co-designed by Welcare and reviewed by an independent ethics committee.
• Safe Data: Personal identifiers used solely for secure linkage then removed; Welcare analysts worked exclusively with pseudonymised study IDs.
• Safe Settings: Processing in secure research services (for example, DfE’s NPD Safe Research Service).
• Safe Outputs: Welcare published only aggregate statistics, applying disclosure controls to prevent any risk of re-identification.

2. GDPR Compliance and Data Minimisation

Welcare conducted a full Data Protection Impact Assessment to ensure compliance with the UK GDPR. We strictly applied data minimisation by retaining only essential fields. Direct identifiers (names, full dates of birth, addresses) were never stored outside the secure environment. Any small-cell counts in Welcare’s outputs are suppressed to protect privacy.

3. Ethical Approval and Oversight

An independent Research Ethics Committee, including a Welcare representative, reviewed and approved our protocol. They confirmed that using de-identified administrative data without individual consent is justified by the public interest and that all safeguards meet the highest standards.

4. Lived-Experience Advisory Panel

Welcare convened a panel of care-experienced young adults, foster and residential carers, and social work practitioners to guide the research:

• They advised on key research questions to ensure Welcare’s work addresses real needs.

• They reviewed preliminary findings to check our tone and recommendations resonate with lived experience.

• They helped interpret nuanced results, such as why certain subgroups benefit more from Welcare’s residential support.

  Panel members received appropriate support and honoraria to recognise their invaluable expertise.

By embedding Welcare’s governance protocols and lived-experience input at every stage, our analysis not only meets ethical standards but remains deeply grounded in the realities of care leavers’ lives.

Further Reading

To explore the data and policies underpinning our analysis of care leaver meaning, see the following authoritative UK sources:

• Department for Education – Children Looked After in England including Adoptions: 2023 Data

  Detailed SSDA903 statistics on looked-after children and care leavers, including placement types and outcomes.

• Department for Education – Outcomes for Children in Need and Looked-After Children: 2023/2024

  Annual linked‐data release on educational attainment, post-16 destinations and NEET rates for children in need and those leaving care.