How it works

If a young person was born in the UK between 1 September 2002 and 2 January 2011 they almost certainly will have a Child Trust Fund. If your local authority has designated the young person as being ‘without a responsible adult’, the account should have The Share Foundation as its registered contact. If not, we can help 16 or 17 year olds to find their account provider using https://findCTF.sharefound.org .

A young person cannot have a Junior ISA opened for them if they already have a Child Trust Fund. If he or she was born outside the date range above, or was a migrant coming to the UK, and if he or she has been in care continuously for over one year, then there are a number of simple steps for us to establish the Junior ISA for the child/ young person who you are responsible for:

  1. Your local authority registers with us to enable all children and young people in their care who are eligible to have a Junior ISA.

  2. They send us a regular, highly secure data file, usually monthly, containing the required information needed for us to open the account.

  3. We check eligibility, then draw down £200 per child/young person from the Government to open the account.

  4. Using account allocation advice prepared independently for us, we open an account for each child/young person with the appropriate Junior ISA provider.

  5. We inform the local authority that the account is open, and encourage them to authorise us to provide details of, and to discuss, the account with carers and young people as appropriate.

  6. As additional voluntary contributions are raised, we allocate additional money to the accounts in general or, if the donor has specified, on a restricted basis. We are also able to direct contributions from friends or relatives, or the young people themselves, to specific accounts: click here for an Individual Contribution form.

  7. We provide a regular valuation reports to the local authority on the progress of the accounts, both in summary and on an individual account basis. In these reports we encourage local authorities again to put us in touch with carers and young people as appropriate, and provide links to financial education materials available on our website:

  8. There are some special points at which the basis for the accounts change:

    • at age 16, when young people can take control of their account;

    • at age 18, by which time each young person should have taken responsibility for their account, and when they are permitted to access the money. However if it is not claimed, or if their decision is to continue to hold their savings/investment, the account turns into an adult Individual Savings Account and the ISA provider will not be able to accept instructions from anyone other than the young adults themselves.

  9. There are also some special situations which may affect particular children or young people: there's a number of guidance sheets on our website which relate to these, and to communication with other people such as birth parents.

    We also have some simple online slide displays designed for carers to explain the Child Trust Fund and Junior ISA arrangements for young people in their care, once they have reached 16 years of age:

    https://www.sharefound.org/MyCTF - where a Child Trust Fund is administered by The Share Foundation.

    https://www.sharefound.org/missingmoney - if the account provider for a Child Trust Fund is unknown, but the young person is of Child Trust Fund age.

    https://www.sharefound.org/MyJISA - where a Junior ISA is administered by The Share Foundation.