Juli’s Supported Lodgings Journey

One of the main motivators for me becoming a Supported Lodgings host was because I had always worked with teenagers in my career.

I don’t have any children of my own, and I’m most familiar with teenagers and they are amazing people. It’s lovely to see them becoming who they are going to be as they grow. It was something that I had talked to my partner about in the past and said this was something I really wanted to do, and he was game. So, when we moved into a place that had enough room, we started the process.

Our first young person joined us in 2019, and here we are!

If anybody’s coming forward and thinking about offering Supported Lodgings, it’s helpful to know what and how your family functions; what’s going on for you and are you managing it? It might make people think, actually, I could manage that as well.

So essentially, our family is just myself and my partner. We don’t have our own children, and we both work full time. I work full time Monday to Friday regular days. Some in London and some at home.

Prior to COVID, I was in the office five days a week and it was completely manageable then. My partner works full time, but he works shifts, so he’ll have a number of days where he’s working and also scheduled nights, you know. So, there is a mishmash of how we live together and how we function as a team when we have a young person living with us. We have to kind of work out things like, if I’m at home, I’ll do dinner. If Alex is at home, he’ll sort dinner. If we’re all at home, then we kind of chip in or we decide what we’re going to do.

And if a young person is at home on their own, then they can cook their own dinner.

We function well because of the way that we both work and there’s always generally someone around. But my work obviously takes me into London a couple of days a week or I’m working at home. And so yeah, it’s kind of thinking about how we manage the household. Those kinds of unsteady routines.

My highlights would probably be that it’s quite a lot of fun to help someone learn new things or try new things and see them succeed in those. They can be really small things like, you know, their first time using a washing machine, or making sure that they don’t leave pans on to boil dry! Seeing them succeed with those everyday tasks and knowing that you’re the one helping them learn those things so that when they move into their own place, they are equipped and ready to live on their own and understand all of the things that kind of go along with that. So, you know, keeping your place tidy, keeping it clean, thinking about the hygiene of your home and things like that, and seeing their joy in being able to do that. So sometimes it’s really nice seeing their independence when they say, “I’m going to cook my own dinner tonight”. And, you know, they’ve gone out and bought all the ingredients, make it all, then sit down to eat their dinner. And they’re really happy and impressed with themselves, which is really nice.

That and seeing them move on to their own place and becoming completely independent is also really lovely.

I think the initial challenges are things like learning how to live with somebody new in your home, who generally has probably lived as part of a family, or might have lived independently, or had a bit of a rough home life. I think it’s kind of understanding who you are, who they are.

What are your strengths? What are their strengths? What are your weaknesses? What are their weaknesses and how do you balance all of that?

Because it is Supported Lodging, not fostering, where you are doing everything. It’s that they have to effectively learn those independent skills, so you know it’s about kind of saying, OK, what are the rules, what are the boundaries you that you need to put in place? And how do you continue to nurture those things on a continuous basis?

And how do you enforce those, without making the young person feel like you’re dictating everything to them and so that they feel comfortable. I think that’s a challenge. It’s just learning their routines, your routines and slotting yourselves together a bit like jigsaw puzzle pieces which don’t necessarily match. But you kind of work it out.

The biggest challenges that we’ve faced was when we had unaccompanied asylum-seeking young people, because their situations were very challenging on their own. For example, there was the language barrier and cultural considerations, and the language barrier did not help in trying to understand what each other needed. It was quite difficult to start with, but both of those young people moved on.

Sometimes you have to accept that there are some challenges you can resolve. You have to come to terms with some things and they’re not always going to end how you would like them to.

You have to manage that yourself and manage your own emotions and self-regulate those things very closely so that you don’t become completely overwhelmed. How you feel, what you feel should have happened. What has happened, how you’re going to use those kinds of things in the future if you come up with the same situation?

I have attended a few different training courses. Some of them are like Safer Care, some are more general things like Prevent (exploitation awareness) courses, all of which I have done in the past as part of my career. For me it was useful to get an update or to check that I still have the same knowledge as I had before.

Some things were also quite fun, like Fire Safety, because you think, what is my house like? Do we have fire safe doors? Do all of the alarms work? I think that learning is quite beneficial, because you can assess your own home to make sure. Most of us tend to know a lot of these things already, so it’s getting that refresher and understanding those things.

One I attended most recently was a really good LGBTQ+ session. As somebody of that community, it was quite interesting to see the messages and the information we’re giving to other carers who may not necessarily be familiar with that; feeling reassured that people are being made aware of the challenges that young people will face if they are part of that community. And how carers can support them. I think that was a very valuable session.

Prior to that I’d attended a Child Protection course around identifying abuse. It was interesting to hear some of the things that Foster Carers had seen in their children or young people.

It makes you more aware of those things and to consider how it applies to my current young person.

If I had thought about that with one of my earlier young people, then I could have better supported them. So yeah, incredibly valuable to go to some of those courses.

I went on the learning platform and had a look at courses, which is where I saw the LGBT+ one.

There are a couple of extras that I’ve attended, but I can’t really remember what they were. There were a couple of others that would be really useful, but they didn’t have suitable dates – about young people or adults who self-neglect, because I currently have a young person who presents that.

There is also one about supporting young people into independent living, which I’m interested in when more dates come up.

The training feels like it’s geared towards supporting younger children rather than thinking about older teens, but now the Supported Lodgings is regulated [since October 2023], there should be more parity.

The support that I get from my Supported Lodgings Worker is amazing. She’s so easy going. She’s able to listen at any point, you know, wherever I’ve needed to be in contact. And when she’s been away, I have another contact. Again, they are always quick to be on the end of the phone to give advice or support.

And that’s really excellent. Just because it feels like you’re not alone, there’s always someone around that you’re going to be able to talk to or, who knows your case, they know who you are, how you work, how you look after your young people. That’s the most valuable part of all of this is having that connection with somebody who knows the case, who might have a different perspective or view on what you’re experiencing in your own home. And that’s always quite good and quite refreshing.

I accessed the out of hours phone line a couple of times in my placement prior to the one I’ve got now and those were for real emergency situations. It was easy to get hold of them, to get through, to report what I needed to report. They helped me understand what the next steps should be in the situation that I was in. That was really good because they told me what I needed to do, and then I could just take action. I haven’t made use of things like peer support groups or anything outside of that.

Yeah. Some of them obviously are online, but a lot of the training and support groups, if they’re in person, tend to be central or very far South. And I live in Crawley. I don’t drive, so if I’ve got to go anywhere, I have to get the train. So yeah, that focus on the wider support offer is slightly off for me particularly as I don’t drive.

Yeah, 100%. I think that was one of the things that when we went through this, thinking about how we would fit into the foster care system and Supported Lodgings for 16+ was exactly the perfect fit for us because of the way that we live, the way that we work and the kind of support that we wanted to give.

The public transport is great. You’ve got two train stations to pick from. You’ve got a million buses, so it’s good for that kind of thing, especially for the young people getting about that is definitely a big plus!

They should consider their own personal circumstances first to make sure that they that they feel that they are ready to give that kind of support to a young person – a young person may have very varied needs.

A lot of Supported Lodgings is about helping somebody who is still a teenager and not yet, you know, an adult. You’ve got to feel comfortable with the idea of having somebody who is nearly a fully grown adult living in your home.

But you are there to support them, and a lot of the time they’re going to feel vulnerable. They’re going to feel, you know, wary of living in a home with a family potentially.

You’ve got to think about how a young person might fit into your home and with your family. But I don’t feel that should be a barrier necessarily. I’ve talked with other Supported Lodging hosts who have teenage children of their own, and they thought that that was the best fit because then they would have people who, you know, were their peers in a way to kind of help them settle. But again, there’s nothing stopping you from being a Supported Lodgings host if you don’t have your own children or you’ve never had your own children.

I have no intention of having my own children ever. But for me, teenagers are the light of my life. They make life interesting and fabulous, so it works for us. And I think you’ve kind of got to make that judgement yourself.

Know that there are going to be amazing, lovely times, but also challenges that maybe you don’t foresee. But yeah, I think it’s an amazing thing to think about doing, because there are so many young people out there who need support, who have never had that or haven’t had it for a while, and you can give that kind of stability before they move on to independent living.