What does ‘Home’ really mean? Lessons from care leavers

A comparative look at how systems either cultivate or compromise young people’s sense of belonging—and why it matters for policy.

When we talk about housing for young people leaving care, we often reach for words like stability, independence, or affordability. But ask a care leaver what they really want, and the answer isn’t just “a flat” or “a place of my own.” The word that keeps coming up—quietly, sometimes reluctantly—is home

But what does home actually mean for someone who’s grown up in the care system?

For my PhD research, I’m exploring that question through a comparative, ethnographic study in Wales and Finland. These two countries offer contrasting approaches to care and housing transitions. Wales, like much of the UK, relies on piecemeal accommodation pathways that often ask young people to prove their “readiness” before earning stability. Finland, by contrast, offers a Housing First for Youth model that sees secure housing as a baseline right—not something conditional on behaviour, compliance or maturity.

This difference isn’t just technical or procedural. It’s emotional, psychological and deeply political. In Finland, young people are more likely to describe feeling settled, supported, and in control. In Wales, the same transitions are more often marked by disruption, bureaucracy and isolation. One young person told me: “It’s not that I didn’t have somewhere to sleep—it’s that no one cared if it felt like home.”

That sentence lingers. Because it captures what is so often missing from our policy discourse: the meaning of home as a relational, not just physical, space. For care leavers, home is not just a roof over their heads—it’s a feeling of being safe, known, and remembered. And when the systems designed to support them fail to offer that, the consequences are long-lasting.

We know that care-experienced young people are disproportionately represented in homelessness statistics. But housing insecurity is not just about access—it’s about belonging. It’s about whether young people feel they have somewhere they want to stay, not just somewhere they’re allowed to stay.

That’s why I believe we need a radical shift in how we think about housing and aftercare. We must move away from transactional models that measure success in tenancy length and instead ask: Does this young person feel at home?

Policy can lead this shift. Housing First principles—especially when adapted to youth-specific needs—offer a model that centres stability, agency and dignity. But we also need deeper cultural change: valuing relationships over processes, and permanence over performance.

This research isn’t about blaming practitioners, who often work heroically within broken systems. It’s about creating the conditions where care leavers are seen not as problems to be managed, but as young people deserving of love, respect and home.

Because in the end, housing is not the goal. Belonging is.