Early help & legal advice
Working with care-experienced young people and the professionals around them to understand and resolve complex immigration problems.
What is Care Leavers Clinic
Problem
Children in care can have unresolved questions about identity, nationality or immigration status without those questions causing an immediate problem. They may remain hidden for years while everyday care and planning continue around them.
The professionals supporting a young person are not immigration specialists, and the right questions are not always obvious. Missing documents, uncertain nationality or unresolved status can therefore remain unnoticed until a practical need makes them impossible to ignore.
By then, what might once have been identified early can have become a complex legal problem, requiring records to be reconstructed, status to be established and specialist advice to find a way forward.
What we do
We help young people and the professionals supporting them understand what needs attention, what can be done and when specialist advice is needed. Some questions are caught early; others reach us after years of uncertainty. The clinic is there for both.
Plain-language guidance helps young people and the professionals around them recognise when an immigration or nationality question needs attention. Resources cover the questions to ask, the documents and information worth preserving, and when a case should be referred for specialist advice.
For a young person who has lived with uncertainty for years, trusting another professional can be difficult. Our community connects care-experienced young people with others who have faced similar problems, helping them see what happened next and approach legal support with greater confidence.
Where a case needs specialist attention, a licensed immigration adviser helps the young person and the professionals supporting them understand the legal position, identify the available options and decide what needs to happen next. Where something has already gone seriously wrong, we also advise on how it can be challenged or put right.
See the data, outcomes and evidence behind the clinic’s work.
Four instruments, one brand