The founding of NAYPIC and the report Sharing Care marked the beginning of the rights movement for young people in care. This is the story of that movement — then, and now.

Then

The National Association of Young People In Care (NAYPIC), founded in 1979, was the first national organisation run by and for young people in and leaving care. Through it, young people who had been told they had no say built local groups across the country and a national voice that government, social services and the media turned to.

In 1983 I collated their views into Sharing Care and submitted it as NAYPIC’s evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee on Children in Care. The Committee called it “highly influential” and said children’s rights were “now being recognised as never before.” Its recommendations shaped the Children Act 1989 — among them the principle, now embedded in law, that young people must be involved in the decisions that affect their lives.

The policies that charities, academics and professionals build their work on today came directly from us.

I served on the board of the Children’s Legal Centre and on the first steering group of Black and In Care. It was members of the care community themselves — not academics or policymakers — who first put racism in the care system on the record, years before the issue reached mainstream policy.

Now

After three decades in television and teaching, I returned to the movement. Developed the Care Experienced Movement, working towards a national organisation for all care-experienced people, and was a member of the peer-support group RECLAIM. I imagined and established the Care Experienced Activism Archives Project — a Heritage-funded effort to map the genesis of the movement and the birth of children’s rights in the UK across fifty years.

I co-founded the Islington Care Leavers Association and authored the Turning Point report, calling on Islington Council for redress for survivors of systemic abuse in its children’s homes. I served as an Expert by Experience on the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, which I left on principle, and I sat on the Global Steering Group for the first Care Experienced History Month with Who Cares? Scotland.