Growing up and leaving the care system is daunting enough, but for 22-year-old Hannah, from Hertfordshire, the biggest anxiety was the sudden reality of no longer having a crowd in her corner.

Turning 18 as a care leaver in England has been described as a “cliff edge” at which young people lose access to their social worker and support staff who provide day-to-day advocacy and help in a crisis – a reassuring and constant adult presence.

While in care, Hannah had lost touch with people from her old life. Then she used a family-finding service for care leavers to reconnect with an auntie and some friends from school, whom she hadn’t seen in years.

“It’s really nice to have more of a trusted network now. We as young people need this. We need this to make true connections and find our value,” she said.

“We’ve seen the number of deaths from care leavers and a lot of that is because people don’t have a support network around them. This has helped me reconnect with my inner child, to remember a time when I didn’t have as many worries.”

On Thursday, the government announced it would be launching a national Who Do You Think You Are?-style service for care leavers, with £8.4m of funding, to help them find family and friends they lost touch with while living in care.

A specially trained coordinator will work with a young person to identify important people in their life and safely locate them using social care records, old school reports and public birth and marriage registries, before reuniting them with a support plan in place.

In 2024, one in 10 children in care moved homes three or more times in a year, and more than one in five were living more than 20 miles from their home community, making isolation and lost relationships common.

The government said the new family-finding system would “make enduring relationships a central priority of the care system for the first time”.

“Too much of the care system breaks rather than builds relationships,” said Josh MacAlister, the children’s minister.

He added: “The anxiety of professionals around children and young people means we’ll make short-term decisions that rupture relationships in order to create safety for a short period of time. But that very act is the thing that means, long-term, the young person is at risk because they don’t have a tribe, they’ve lost those connections.

“That ultimately leads to the shockingly high rates of young people in care who we lose very young, who have very poor mental health, or very poor educational and employment outcomes.”

Last month, government data showed more than 100 young people had died after leaving the care of social services in England in the past year, which MacAlister described as “a stain on our society”. He said the national family finding programme would help to reduce deaths, by ensuring care leavers had a better support network when they left the system.

“A lot of the care-leaver deaths that I’ve looked at involve very isolated, very lonely young people,” he said. “We have an escalator in the system that pushes young people towards independence, when actually what they need is interdependence.”

Family-finding schemes already exist in some local authority areas and help care leavers reconnect with relatives, trusted adults, former carers, teachers and friends.

The government said these schemes had shown promising results, with participating young people gaining an average of nearly two additional meaningful relationships. More than a third had reconnected with immediate family members, while others had rebuilt connections with former teachers, social workers and other trusted adults.

“One of the things I have called for is that every young person leaving care should have at least two people in their life who love them,” said MacAlister. “Some people got very worried about that and questioned: how do we measure love?

“But the absence of that focus is the reason why we leave lots of young care-experienced people very, very vulnerable, particularly at 18.”