Dame Sharon White Guest Edits Today
Best of Today
BBC
4.0 • 837 Ratings
🗓️ 2 January 2023
⏱️ 75 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today’s final Christmas guest editor this year is Dame Sharon White, chairman of the John Lewis Partnership and former head of telecoms regulator Ofcom. She was named as the most powerful black person in the country in the 2023 Power List.
One of the key issues for her programme is how society can help more people who have been in care get into employment – and includes a report from the BBC’s Ashley John-Baptiste, who grew up in care.
She also speaks to world renown choreographer Sir Matthew Bourne about how to attract a wider audience to ballet, and she interviews England rugby star Maro Itoje about his activism off the field.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:04.8 | Hello and welcome to the best of today. I'm Simon Jack, and we are bringing you highlights of our final guest editor this year. |
| 0:11.0 | Dame Sharon White, chairman of the John Lewis Partnership, former civil servant, and she was named the UK's most influential black person in the 2023 power list. |
| 0:20.1 | One of the central themes of her programme is how we can better support those who are in care |
| 0:24.7 | or have been in the care system throughout their lives. |
| 0:27.5 | I've always been interested in care experience young people. |
| 0:31.7 | I remember one meeting I had at the Treasury. |
| 0:34.6 | And we were looking at young people who were essentially being exported |
| 0:38.5 | from London to coastal areas because there was no provision, no support. And that image of |
| 0:46.7 | sort of teenagers with a, you know, a suitcase or a backpack, effectively being sort of shipped |
| 0:52.1 | into a different parts of the country that had more resource into which they had even less connection really stayed with me. Christmas and New Year |
| 0:58.5 | are, for many of us, a time when all the focus is on home and family, but for some of the most |
| 1:02.6 | vulnerable young people in our society, it can be a very difficult period. Over 1,200 young |
| 1:08.4 | people in care are forced to move to new or temporary placements over the festive period. |
| 1:13.7 | That's according to a freedom of information request done by the charity Become, which supports young people with care experience. |
| 1:20.1 | That figure doesn't include young people who enter care during this period, and it highlights the instability in the system. |
| 1:25.8 | We'll be speaking to the chief executive of the charity |
| 1:27.9 | become Catherine Sacks Jones in a moment. But first, we can hear from one young man who has experienced |
| 1:32.8 | the impact of this instability firsthand. I moved about seven times to different foster placements. |
| 1:40.0 | I think if you include the temporary ones, I'd say it was more around 10 times. It can be sort of a very dehumanizing experience because you're sort of just like moved across |
| 1:49.5 | different homes and there's a lack of stability. |
| 1:52.0 | And I think especially when you're young and you've got all these other pressures of trying |
... |
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