Jo’s Supported Lodgings Journey

At the moment I’m single. I was previously with someone, and we adopted our youngest son together. We had him on a Foster for Adoption (FfA) basis, whilst we were assessed for adoption. That meant that I did all the contact with family, recording, etc for the first few months. Throughout the court process, my partner at the time and I spoke about the possibility of fostering in the future. Shortly after the adoption, within a year or so, unfortunately, we separated when my partner came out as transexual. So, I didn’t obviously go down the fostering route with them. But it was quite shortly after we separated that I was taking my older son to his speech language session, and at the GP surgery where it was held, I picked up a flyer about Supported Lodgings and I went, “Oh, that’s a bit like fostering, maybe I could do that”. I mean, it really wasn’t the time. Literally, they had just left the family home and I was trying to juggle two kids. One was only 15 months old. I was running the home on my own finances. My ex-partner’s mental health was pretty bad because they were going through trans issues. But I picked up a flyer, took it home and put it in one of those places where you chuck everything! Every so often I would go through this bag and see it and go, “Oh, yeah. No, not yet”. It was about four years later, I reckon – it was between Christmas and New Year, two years ago – and I picked it out and went, “Yeah, now!”. And I literally phoned that day. And the rest is history. I just felt that it was the right time. We were divorced, we’d established a routine with the kids and finances were sorted. I had the house. My parents helped me stay in the family home. I had a spare room. It took about eight months to go through the assessment, but I haven’t looked back since then.

Pre COVID, I’d started hosting language students in my spare room. The first year I moved out of the biggest bedroom because basically you could have as many as would comfortably fit in there, so up to four. If you’ve got four beds, you can take up to four. So, I invested in bunk beds and two singles, and I was having three or four on a regular basis. Then COVID hit and it all went a bit different. There was a year with nothing, then the following year they’d lost a lot of their host families, either just through wastage or people had got out of the habit and didn’t come back. Some of the older ones were still worried about COVID. And they were really short, so they got to the stage where they were saying, “Can anyone take any more kids? We haven’t got enough beds”. And I said, “Well, I could put a couple up in the lounge, if you like! I’ve got a sofa bed and I can get a put-you-up bed or, pull out the bed from one of my kid’s rooms”. And I got to a stage where I was having seven on quite a regular basis, which was making really good money, but was really full-on, with a high turnover. I’d have them for three or four nights and we’d have the same menu every week because it worked, but it got a little boring for us: spaghetti Bolognese, fish and chips, pizza… But it worked, it was popular, and the feedback was good. But I was changing beds, rearranging the room to meet the turnover – I could cope with the extra work, but I did think that maybe just one youngster would maybe be easier.

I was approved in October 2022 for one young person, preferably male. Just because my kids always liked the male students.

My two boys gelled with male students better. Sometimes they would all go out in the garden, kick around a football. Or they’d talk gaming and YouTube clips, but we only ever had them three or four nights. It was never very long getting to know them. Then in November 2022, I had one girl and she has been with me since. She came with 24 hours’ notice as she’s an unaccompanied asylum-seeker. She’s lovely.

It depends very much on the day. There are some days that I do virtually nothing because I get up really early and leave the house at 7:20am to go to work, and I may not get back until 6pm. That’s only two days a week. So, I don’t really have very much contact with them at all. I may send some emails whilst at work if there’s something going on, but some days I do virtually nothing, other days can be really full on if they’re needing support with something. I have two days off a week, so obviously try to get it sorted on my days off. If they need support with Universal Credit, job centre, the doctors, and in the early days for the first girl I had, Solicitors, Home Office, all sorts of other things. Then there are placement reviews, meetings with Social Workers, all that. I try to work around my days off because I have two and half days off every week.

I now have two – I increased by one in November 2023 and they are really different. So, I was getting on really well with the first one – she hasn’t needed much support in the way of learning to cook, clean, do her food shopping, that sort of thing. She’s well versed in it. She’s a young African girl and when she was at home, she had very little schooling, but she spent all her time with her mother doing domestic jobs. So, she’s good at all that sort of stuff. She did try to overspend a bit, so I did have to help her with her budgeting slightly. When in the supermarket, she was like a kid in a sweet shop, but she does everything independently now. She just needed help with getting places and finding directions, for example, I took her on the bus to her college on the first occasion and then after that she went on her own. She got there fine, but on the way back she missed the stop (I’m in Worthing) and went all the way to Brighton. Her phone wasn’t working. She was gone for ages, and I was having a big panic, as was the Social Worker when I gave her a call to say she did not come home. Then she just turned up! She was unfazed by it, while we were all in a panic! But then she’s travelled all the way from Ethiopia to here, so I guess getting lost and going via Brighton probably wasn’t really an issue for her! But it was a perfect match. She’s great. She’s doesn’t socialise a huge amount because of her English. But she’s getting more confident. She wants to move to London. That’s another story!

Then after the success of one, I decided I’d quite like to have a second one and I don’t really have five bedrooms. I’m not that lucky, but I did want an extension, so when we had the students, we gave up our lounge. And we made do with a sort of open plan lounge, dining, kitchen area. The kids tend to spend a huge amount of time in their bedrooms. The young people spend their time in their bedroom usually, so I thought that would work and it does. Unless we need a private meeting, which can be a bit difficult. So, they approved me to have a second young person, which I’ve had since November 2023. Because I’m gay, I was quite keen to help an LGBT young person. I have a young trans lady here. She’s quite challenging. She’s a care leaver and doesn’t do anything at all.

It was something I’d always said that I was interested in, but then I was also interested in asylum-seekers because I’ve had international experience myself. And I’ve tried learning the language in another country and failed. But you know, working abroad and trying to learn the language meant that I was quite keen to support an asylum-seeker. Being LGBT, I know some of the difficulties. Even though I’m divorced from my trans ex-partner, I went through that with them, and we have a good relationship now. I thought the experiences I’d had and the contacts I had would be helpful to an LGBT young person to see that, you know, you can grow up and have a career; have friends and family that are accepting. You have work colleagues that accept you have a good career – I mean, I’m a nurse, my ex is a pharmacist. My girlfriend I had at the time is a Social Worker. Obviously, anybody who’s LGBT has a journey. And I think in some ways, that’s getting a little bit easier as time passes because it’s all very much more acceptable. Not completely, but in comparison to when I grew up, I’m 54, and it wasn’t mentioned when I was at school for sure, except in the very occasional sort of derogatory way of the PE teacher being suspected of being gay. And to be honest, when I was 13, 14, 15, I didn’t even know what that really meant. I didn’t have a clue. I was a bit naive, admittedly. I wasn’t interested in boys but didn’t think anything of that. I was busy. I did youth clubs, I did Guides, then I moved on to Rangers and had lots of female friends, but never thought any more of it. And then gradually over the next few years, I came to the conclusion that I was possibly gay. Having a young person living with me, who might be unsure of their sexuality or questioning their gender identity, having had some personal experience of this myself, hopefully feels reassuring. I was very straight when I went through the assessment process and said, “Look, anyone who comes and lives with me has to know that I’m gay before they move in”. Even if I was single when I was doing it, I didn’t want to have to hide it. I had to be allowed to be myself at home if I wanted to have a girlfriend and bring her round.

I think it has because of the people I have. Although with my young asylum-seeker, who’s Muslim, I was a bit worried because I was thinking, in African countries homosexuality is not really accepted. A lot of the countries they come from still have the death penalty or certainly life imprisonment for anyone caught in the act. So, I was a bit worried whether she would be okay with it. But the Social Worker said, “We’ve definitely told her”. You usually meet the person beforehand and decide whether they’re moving in and agree it, but because she had to leave a foster placement due to unforeseen circumstances, there wasn’t time for that. But her answer to the Social Worker when they said that I was gay, was something along the lines of, “I’m in England now, if that’s how things are, I’ve got to get used to it”. And she certainly has. She used to get on really well with my girlfriend. She had good chats with her, and we used to go out sometimes together. We weren’t overly demonstrative, we didn’t go around holding hands and kissing in front of her, but she certainly came out with us for a walk and coffee or lunch a few times and she was fine. In fact, when I told her I wasn’t seeing her anymore, she was quite upset.

Also, having my trans young person who is clearly trans, she’s a 6-foot 2-inch lady, who has had no treatment or hormones or anything. So, I mean, she does really look like an 18-year-old with long hair who could easily be a boy. It was a bit awkward telling her because of confidentiality. Obviously, I’d discussed with her that we were thinking of having a second young person. I had to say, “Do you have a preference of who comes to the second placement?” I said “If it was a boy, would you be OK with a boy, or would you be more comfortable with a girl? Are you okay with someone who’s LGBT?” We went through all these things, and she knew what I was on about because there’s somebody in the college that she used to go to, who was non-binary. She went, “Yeah, anybody’s fine”. I then went ahead.

Well, I guess it varies on the young person and their English. So, when my first girl arrived, I went through quite a lot of emotions. First off, you get the phone call and it’s all quite exciting because you’ve been working for six to eight months. You think “Yes, it is happening at last!” But then you get sort of nervous, thinking will I cope? Will the kids cope? Will it be OK? What if this or that happens? Or what if it doesn’t work out and all those other sorts of emotions that you go through, and I guess only time tells how things work out. With my first young person, it’s worked out really well.

Obviously, some experience of children, particularly teenagers, because they are teenagers. I’ve got a 13-year-old. You don’t get a huge amount of communication from some of them. Certainly, my second one. They like staying in bed for a long time. They don’t have a huge amount of motivation to get up and do things. So, you kind of have to nag them. It’s a bit of a fine balance because they’re 18. So, I don’t feel I can talk to them like I do my own children, I’m trying to treat them more as adults. Timekeeping and things like that was quite challenging with my asylum-seeker. She missed a doctor’s appointment the first time. I said, “Are you alright to go on your own?” It was just a blood test with somebody she knew and had been several times before. She said “Yes. I’ll go on my own”. But they couldn’t see her in the end because she was late. So, she wasn’t late the next time!

You also have to be quite flexible – I have four columns in my diary, one for each of them. You do sometimes have to change things last minute though and be quite accepting that they’re not going to be how you think they should be all of the time. They may not clean up; they may not tidy their rooms. They’re supposed to, but they don’t. Saying that my asylum-seeker is great, she tidies my whole house. She’s been telling me off this weekend for having too much clutter on my dining table. “Can you not clear this? like you did at Christmas”. I’m like, “Yes, mum. Okay, I’ll tidy up!”. The other one’s the opposite extreme. You have to be quite tolerant because things don’t always get done when you want. They leave the bathroom and kitchen in a mess. They don’t wash up, they don’t put their rubbish out, you know, they’re all things that they should be doing. But they don’t always. It’s reality. So yeah, patience, tolerance, adaptability, flexibility, acceptance of things that are going to go wrong.

I’ve never had any problem with West Sussex. I started the journey pre-adoption, probably around 2010-12 sort of time. The next few years I went to Pride in Brighton when West Sussex had stands at Brighton Pride and at least twice we visited the stand. We interacted with people on the stand and said, “We’ve got one child and we’re thinking of going down the adoption route for the second because the whole birth and IVF was quite traumatic.” They were always very encouraging. We then started the adoption process which took us a while to actually get through because we had a lot of hold up, but none of that was LGBTQ related. It took around four years. The whole process is quite intense.

Yeah, go for it. I love doing it! There are bits that I haven’t loved, obviously bits that have been a bit annoying and difficult, but on the whole, I really love doing it. I work part time, 23 hours a week and have two and a half days off each week. And I think those two days off give me the time to be available for my young people and my own children, and to get all the washing, shopping and prep done and up to date. I think personally I would struggle if I did it and I had to work full time, working every day. I think I would find it difficult because even sometimes on a workday, I find myself throwing emails backwards and forwards to Social Workers. Obviously, there’s a financial reward. But that’s not the main motivation. Seeing my asylum-seeker blossom in the last 14 months has been very good. We’ve shared some really low and high points. In the early days, I went through the whole asylum process with her. She had meetings with the solicitor, the Home Office, and those days were really stressful for her. Sometimes she doesn’t seem to come out of her room an awful lot. But she talks in her language to people online, she’s got friends, wherever they are. She’s got family that they do Wi-Fi chats. When she received the Home Office letter through to say she’s got leave to remain, I gave it to her in the bedroom and I made her read it. Her English is not that good, but I made her sort of try and read it herself. Then the smile and relief she had, to say “Yes, I’ve got it!” was just amazing! And the other thing is you kind of get to feel like a little bit of their family because she’s over here all alone.