The Department for Education has launched a review into the deaths of young people who have left care, after data published in May 2025 recorded 91 notifications in 2024-25. The department said most of those deaths involved care leavers aged 16 to 21, adding weight to concerns that some young adults face severe risk as they move out of the care system and into more limited statutory support. In policy terms, the practical shift is from headline monitoring to case-based examination. The review is intended to look beyond the number itself and test what support was in place, where agencies were involved, and whether there were missed opportunities to intervene before a death occurred.
The review will be led by experienced social worker Clare Chamberlain and care-experienced author and broadcaster Ashley John-Baptiste. According to the Department for Education, their work will focus on young people’s experiences, the relationships and services that mattered to them, and what more could have been done by professionals and public bodies. That scope matters because care leaver deaths often sit across several services rather than within one department. Chamberlain has said the work will hear not only from professionals but also from family members and friends, which suggests the review will look at personal support networks alongside formal statutory provision.
The government has placed the review within a wider package of reform linked to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. The Bill would introduce a new duty on local authorities to provide "Staying Close" support up to the age of 25, with the aim of helping care leavers secure accommodation, enter work and access health, education, training and relationship support. If enacted, that would put part of post-care support on a clearer statutory basis. For councils, the change would mean a more explicit expectation to maintain contact and practical assistance beyond the point at which many young people currently experience a sharp drop in professional involvement.
The same Bill would also extend corporate parenting responsibilities to public sector bodies, requiring them to take account of care leavers’ needs when designing policy and delivering services. The Department for Education’s argument is that support for care leavers cannot rest with children’s services alone, particularly where housing, health, employment and education decisions shape day-to-day outcomes. For practitioners, this would be a significant governance change. It would widen responsibility across the public sector and make it harder for agencies to treat poor outcomes among care leavers as someone else’s remit when service thresholds, access rules or administrative delays contribute to risk.
The Department for Education has already changed the reporting framework. Since December 2023, local authorities have been expected to report the deaths of care leavers through the Serious Incident Notification system, creating a more consistent route for central government to collect data and identify patterns. The department said the next annual release was expected in spring 2026, alongside further work to improve the quality and consistency of reporting. That matters because notifications can show scale, but they do not by themselves explain causation. Better data is necessary if ministers, inspectors and councils are to distinguish isolated cases from repeat system failures.
Ministers said the findings and recommendations will be published later in 2026 and fed into the forthcoming Enduring Relationships Programme, which is intended to strengthen lasting relationships for children in care and care leavers. Children and Families Minister Josh MacAlister has described the number of deaths as unacceptable and said the review should identify what is going wrong as young people leave care. The work also sits alongside a three-year pilot announced in December 2025 to bring social workers and NHS professionals together around earlier mental health support for children and families. Taken together, the review, the Bill and the pilot indicate a stronger emphasis on transition planning, cross-agency accountability and sustained support into early adulthood. The test for the Department for Education and local authorities will be whether that emphasis produces measurable changes in practice before more young people are lost.