Care leavers are generally recognised as people leaving the social protection system.

We focus on young people without a stable family who are leaving or have recently left alternative care or residential placements (where they have grown up) after reaching majority or a legally set age (usually, 18 yrs old).

The risk of social exclusion they are subject to increases significantly in the presence of the following variables:
- long-term permanence in the welfare alternative or residential care system
- stay in residential placements (not in a family environment)
- early inclusion in an institution.

The institutionalisation of children (or their placement in a residential structure) in answer to situations of family discomfort, on a more or less temporary basis, is still a popular solution adopted by European protection systems, notwithstanding the focus of all social policies on family support.

In the 5 countries involved within the concluded project “Life after institutional care”, the central project and scientific team collected the data that were necessary to build the matrix.

1. Desk Analysis: relevant legislation, context and specific data (if any), services organisation and list of players;
2. Qualitative analysis:
a. giving out of 75 in-depth questionnaires (15 for each country) to the main actors in the social protection system, starting from those farthest from the subjects and proceeding inwards to the people most involved in the case (i.e., from the central decision makers, to the national co-ordinators, to the local decision makers, to the institution and education community managers, to the social workers and finally to the educators);
b. giving out of 125 in-depth questionnaires (25 for each country) to young people who have been out of the child protection system for at least two years, but for no longer than 5, and young people in the transition phase to adult life (recipients of specific social inclusion programmes).
3. Exchange and discussion activities with stakeholders and operators.

Below we have included a matrix of guidelines which, if applied, should increase the likelihood of social inclusion for young people who have been released from the child protection system. The guidelines shown in the matrix have been developed in the course of the project, but they are considered valid on a cross-sectional basis throughout Europe.

The need for a tool of this kind comes from the need to increase the quality of the activities implemented to support young people in the residential care system in becoming autonomous. Our research shows that this support is not currently organised, and it is usually left to the good will or personal initiative of individual operators, who decide to accept this burden even outside the scope of their skills.
Although the issues and needs are common to all of them, each European Union member state reacts differently, thus highlighting the total absence of minimum standards which, if in place and applied, would increase the social inclusion opportunities for this category of young people at risk.

In creating the matrix we have tried to identify the main players that will benefit from the guidelines, in order to try and make them easily understood, even though they cannot be exhaustive, given the diversity of situations that may be encountered in the European Union, due to the different organisation of the social protection system in the different countries.