Keep Care Leavers Connected — Digital Device Guarantee Campaign

In 2020, as pandemic-era digital exclusion intensified, Catch22 — together with the Care Leavers National Movement and the National House Project — publicly warned that roughly 80,000 care leavers aged 18–25 in England could not afford the internet access or devices needed to stay connected to support, education and employment. The coalition lobbied government to extend its "Get Help with Technology" scheme, which had until then focused on schoolchildren, to explicitly guarantee devices and a year of connectivity to every care leaver on first living independently.

In October 2021 the Department for Education responded with a £126 million expansion of the scheme, earmarking up to 10,000 of the devices specifically for children with a social worker and care leavers, allocated to local authorities based partly on the number of care leavers they supported. Catch22 subsequently surveyed local authorities covering more than 6,000 care leavers between them and found that 40% reported none of their care leavers had actually received a device through the scheme — a stark gap between the funding announced and what reached young people on the ground.

Catch22's own employability programmes illustrate the underlying need: across 621 care-experienced young people supported over four years, 62% did not have a working laptop and 48% had no home wifi when they joined. The campaign continues to call for a statutory guarantee — a device and 12 months of free connectivity for every care leaver in England — rather than a one-off, unevenly delivered grant, making this as much a case study in implementation gaps as in intent.

Read more: https://www.catch-22.org.uk/resources/thousands-of-care-leavers-facing-digital-poverty/

Read the full analysis: https://www.catch-22.org.uk/resources/thousands-of-care-leavers-facing-digital-poverty/