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Disabled young people leaving care often experience a more complex transition to adulthood than other youths. Still, policy and services can fail to recognise the intersection between a young person’s care experiences and disability. Drawing on data from a qualitative interview study with fourteen social workers who work with aftercare in the Norwegian child welfare services, we investigate social workers’ professional judgements about support for this subgroup of the leaving care population. Our analysis uses the theoretical construct of institutional logics and shows that social workers did not include concepts of disability in their judgements about support for these young people. Instead, the social workers’ considerations were guided by three other organising principles: a ‘medical logic’, an ‘activation logic’ and an ‘aftercare logic’. We discuss these findings in light of critical disability studies and argue for a more nuanced understanding of disability in social work practice with care leavers. Highlighting disability rights and going beyond diagnosis and categorisations of disabled people can challenge a medical model approach to service provision.

Across child welfare and disability policy, the intersectionality of being a young person with experiences with both child welfare and disability services is not well addressed. In line with this, a growing body of international evidence shows a gap in the level of transitional and post-care support provided to meet the needs of this group of young people leaving care. The present article draws on data from a qualitative interview study with eight disabled young people leaving care in Norway. However, rather than giving an account of their individual experiences of aftercare, it uses these experiences as a starting point to a broader investigation of how the institutional setting of aftercare shapes these experiences. The study is inspired by institutional ethnography (IE), a method of inquiry developed by Canadian sociologist Dorothy E. Smith, which attempts to describe the interface between individual experiences and institutional relations. Our findings showed that the study participants experienced insufficient support from child welfare services related to their disability during the transition to adulthood. The institutional forces behind these findings are explored and discussed.

The transition to adulthood for young people leaving care has become a significant subject of research over recent decades, especially given consistent findings that suggest that alumni of care are at high risk of adverse outcomes. However, there is no definitive consensus on how findings from research can best inform practice with youth in transition out of care. The aim of the present article is to provide principles that can support practice based on a project mounted by a group of international care leaving researchers. These principles include, among others, the importance of listening to the young people, to supporting their autonomy during and after care as well as their cultural identity and diversity, to ensuring their access to education after care, to ensure preparation for leaving care and ensure that care leavers rights are upheld so that they get the support they need. The discussion considers these principles in light of the micro-, meso- and macrosystem levels in Bronfenbrenner’s social ecological model (1994) and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and reviews the challenges of generating these principles. In addition, implications for policy are highlighted in relation to rights, entitlements and access to services.

Young people leaving care are vulnerable youths in need of assistance. During recent years there has been a debate in Norway questioning if the support given is random and insufficient. This paper explores how the child welfare services in Norway assist young people leaving care in the transition to adulthood. The discussion is based upon a survey sent to all child welfare services in Norway. Even though most of the services report having a systematic practice, only a few have written guidelines. They also report difficulties motivating young people to receive further support, having too little time and starting the work too late. This could be due to the fact that providing assistance after 18 years is not mandatory, creating a situation of negotiation where both organizational and relational issues become important.