By the age of five, Jamie Dalgoutte had lived with 14 foster families. “People just didn’t have the capacity to love a child like me because I wanted to be back with my mum,” Jamie, now 27, says. At just six months old, he had been taken from his mother’s care due to her alcohol and substance abuse. 

Passing from family to family as a baby and young child made Jamie feel “dispensable”: “When you’re a child in the care system, it’s like a dog that you take to the centre – if it’s too much work, if it’s too much anxiety, you can give it back to the shelter and say ‘I want a new one.”  

He stayed with his last family from the age of five to 21, yet never felt secure: “I knew they weren’t going to be there forever,” he says. Whenever a social worker visited, he’d ask if they were there to take him to a new Mum and Dad. 

This deep-rooted feeling of instability had a big impact on Jamie as he became a teenager. He got into fights; swore and threw things in class. It was a way for him to get the attention he craved. “I just wanted it to be acknowledged that I was in the room and that I existed and that I mattered.”

He believes he was a “bit of a target” to school bullies because of his background. But when they attacked him, he fought back. “I was just trying to fight for my place in the world – because I always had services in my life and nowhere I belonged,” he says. At school he also recalls feeling “envy of other kids who had their parents”. 

At 14, he was being suspended from school a couple of times a month. The school wanted to exclude him and send him to the local residential school, which teachers described as the “bad boys’ school” and often used as a threat. “My outlook, the way I seen [sic] life, but also the way life was genuinely going, the path it was taking, was one of pure misery,” he says.

“I knew that I wanted a good life – one with holidays and pets and a car and a home,” he says. “And I knew that if I kept going the way I was going, that would never be possible for me.”

It was at this point, in 2008, that he received a visit from a community worker, who introduced him to the Duke of Edinburgh award. “I thought I’d give it a go,” he says. “I had nothing to lose, everything to gain – and I have gained so much.”