This report is produced by the Coram Institute for Children, the first Independent Research Organisation dedicated to children to mark the 50th anniversary of Coram Voice as the leading national charity for the voice of the child in care and care leavers.
Over 10 years, the Bright Spots programme has been an important part of our work making sure young voices are heard and inform decision-making by capturing how children and young people themselves feel about their lives and informing both local and national policy.
Developed in partnership with Professor Julie Selwyn at the University of Oxford, the Bright Spots surveys were co-produced with children and young people to measure what they felt made their lives good and has been made possible by The Hadley Trust.
To date, the Your Life Your Care (for children in care) and Your Life Beyond Care surveys (for care leavers) have heard from thousands of children and young people aged 4 to 25 and over. This report draws on 27,000 of those responses from across more than 70 local authorities gathered between 2015-2024, with a particular focus on the most recent data from 2021-24 (11,104 responses).
This is not a study of care system outcomes, which are reported in government data such as educational attainment. Nor is it a commentary on child protection priorities that led to children and young people entering care. Instead, this study is distinctive for its explicit focus on the views of children and young people—what matters most to them in their lives—its scale relative to the numbers in and leaving care, and its perspective over ten years.
