Care Leavers' Association

The Truth Behind Reading My Files

Following a childhood full of pain, rejection and traumatic experiences, I entered the care system at the age of 13, at my mother’s request.

My first admission into a children’s home in December 1984 was very short, after 3 days I refused to return and my mother and stepfather agreed to have me back home. Just over a year later, in January 1986, following more traumas, my mother’s divorce, a move out of the family home, separation from my brother, and no real relationship with my mother, I was admitted into an adolescence girls children’s home, where I lived for over 2 years. In 1988, when I was 17yrs old, I left the girls home and moved into lodgings were I was to begin my adult life, with no real support from the care system, except from a staff member of the home, who I kept in touch with, and still receive much needed care and support from.

A Childhood on Paper: Accessing the Child Care Files of Former Looked After Children in the UK

In December 2005, Jim Goddard, Secretary of the CLA, launched a report on access to records along with Julia Feast (BAAF) and Derek Kirton (University of Kent). The research was launched at a conference, where four different care leavers gave their own individual account of accessing their records.

This story is about one of the early pioneers of files access, Graham Gaskin. Graham was a key influence on getting greater access to our files, through his famous European court case of 1989.

It was a Sunday night in November 2003, when I was unable to sleep; I started to get some memory back of my time in foster care.

I am aware that many people have great difficulty accessing their files and this is something that we at the CLA will continue to work on, but it is interesting to note that some local authorities are better at this than others, as my own story shows.

I spent the whole of my minority, save for the first seven months of my life, in care with a large charitable organisation.

I accessed my file in 1998, which held information on my childhood spent in a children's home run by a charity called the Mission of Hope.

I arrived in the United Kingdom in 1999 from Kosovo and I was placed into a children's home in Leytonstone.

My early life was spent in-care, i.e. from the age of three and a half to about the age of twelve. My memories are very scanty about my past, mainly because either I was too young to remember or I've tended to block out that part of my life because I didn't care to remember.

For anyone who has grown up in care, the information contained in their social services file is almost bound to be interesting and important. Once you have left care, it is much more important to you than it ever will be to anyone else.

I was put into care at birth. When I applied for the letters and records held by Doctor Barnardo's during my 18 years in their care, it was out of a sense of inquisitiveness. I wanted to unravel some of the stories I'd heard about my past, to discover my life I never knew.

I became interested in my case files while doing my family tree. Genealogy is a very addictive hobby and through doing it I had already found out about certain things that I did not know.

After about a 4 month wait I have been lucky enough to get a copy of all the files from London Archives that were held on me.

Recovering mine from Hatton Gardens, Liverpool took two stabs. Eventually a very nice woman from Liverpool drove over to Leeds with mine. It had taken 4 years after the original request was made.