July 2025
This article examines how the voices of care-experienced young people are attended to within an English ‘leaving care’ service. Distinctively, it applies the work of the educational theorist Gert Biesta to the field of children’s social care. Biesta argues that education extends beyond providing knowledge and socialising young people into responsible citizens to include an emphasis on the existential burden of encountering the world in a ‘grown-up’ way. The article draws on an in-depth study of a leaving care service committed to hearing young people’s voices, which employed a qualitative and ethnographic approach. It illustrates how such voices emerge from everyday encounters with their personal advisers as relational, negotiated, situated and contingent, being expressed discursively and materially, including through digital technologies. The analysis surfaces the tensions between the advisers’ educational and administrative roles when responding to young people’s wishes and feelings and how such tensions limit the possibilities to challenge young people to question and probe in ‘grown-up’ ways that which they desire. The article argues for broadening the aim of leaving care services beyond supporting young people to transition to independent lives so that they might work out the kind of life they want to live together with others.
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