Children who have been in care should be entitled to remain in the system up to the age of 26, according to charities.
The Children and Young People Bill sets out provisions to extend the age at which care leavers can get support from 21 to 26.
But the assessment process required to receive this "after-care" support should be scrapped and replaced with an automatic entitlement for every young person to remain or return to care up to the age of 26, children's charities say.
The coalition led by Who Cares? Scotland argues that this will provide significant benefits to young people, while saving money in areas such as housing, justice and health.
They have suggested amendments to the Bill which is being examined by Holyrood's Education Committee.
Duncan Dunlop, chief executive of Who Cares? Scotland, told the committee: "As parents, we look after a child through nappies to primary school to high school to college, maybe into further education. They leave home as a process, not a point in time. We are suggesting we should be able to afford this to our care leavers."
Those leaving care experience a "trapdoor shutting behind them", he said.
"We need to be able to continue to care for these young people up to the age of 26. What that means is to continue the care relationship. It is not necessarily suggesting continuing the care in a very high-cost residential bed to the age of 26."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article