Young Carers Project
A young carer is a child or young person who provides substantial unpaid care for a relative who has disabilities, long-term physical illnesses, mental health difficulties and/or drug or alcohol issues. We agree with our colleagues at Sheffield Young Carers that it is the right of every young carer to be recognised in their role and have the same opportunities as other children and young people of a similar age.
Learn Sheffield are working with Sheffield Young Carers to improve the identification of young carers and our ability to understand their outcomes. We believe that these two things will improve the support that can be provided to children and young people in the city and also enable us to better understand the barriers and challenges that young carers in our city face.
Click on the links below to find out more about our analysis of the problem and our current project.
2025 Update
Analysis
Project
2025 Update
Sheffield Young Carers
Anyone can become a young carer at any time. An inquiry by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for young carers and young adult carers suggested that 10% of all pupils will provide high or very high levels of care – equating to three young carers in every class. This could mean well over 7,000 young carers in Sheffield alone.
Young carers face a number of barriers when it comes to education, and their caring role can impact heavily on their attendance and attainment.
Almost half (45%,) of young carers at secondary school were persistently absent in 2023/24 – nearly twice as high as their non-caring peers, with young carers missing 23 school days (DfE, 2024).
The key to supporting young carers from the negative impacts of caring and improving their outcomes is (early) identification.
Keeping Children Safe In Education statutory guidance for schools and colleges (2024) states that ‘any child may benefit from early help, but all school and college staff should be particularly alert to the potential need for early help for a child who […]
- is a young carer
- is in a family circumstance presenting challenges for the child, such as drug and alcohol misuse, adult mental health issues and domestic abuse (p.10).
Five simple actions your school can take to identify young carers:
- Designate a Young Carer Lead – supported by a member of SLT - who understands the issues surrounding being a young carer, leads on identifying and supporting young carers in school, and is an identified point of contact for pupils, families, staff and external agencies (see here for a recommended list of duties).
- Ensure all staff complete Sheffield Young Carers free e-learning module: ‘Young Carers: Identifying and supporting young people with caring responsibilities in Sheffield’ (it takes approx. 90 mins).
- Manually record all known young carers on your Management Information System, in order to address their needs, track their progress, and for the purposes of the school census. (see MYTIME’s MIS guide for guidance on how to record for the census).
- Create a Young Carer Policy that recognises the needs of young carers and outlines how your setting will identify and address these needs. Sheffield Young Carers has created a template policy for schools and colleges in Sheffield, endorsed by Sheffield Children’s Safeguarding Partnership.
- Join Sheffield Young Carers Schools Network for free advice, support and resources to identify and support young carers in your setting.
Project
In order to address these issues, we are seeking to ensure that:
- All Sheffield settings are recording any identified young carers in their census return in January 2025.
- All Sheffield settings have a good understanding of how to identify and support young carers in their community.
We are working with Sheffield Young Carers, Sheffield City Council and Sheffield’s education settings to ensure that any identified young carers are included in both the city register and the census return of their setting. We will develop guidance to support this during the autumn of 2024.
In 2025 we will work with our partners to increase everyone’s understanding of how to identify and support young carers in Sheffield.
Sheffield Young Carers also offer free training and resources.
Analysis
Young carers are significantly under identified in local and national data.
The All-Party Parliamentary Group Inquiry into Young Carers and Young Adult Carers in 2023 suggested that approximately 10% of all pupils will provide high or very high levels of care – equating to an average of two or three young carers in every class. Yet in the January 2024 census, the proportion of recorded young carers nationally was less than 1% and that, in Sheffield, this figure was even lower, with only 334 (0.4%) children and young people being recorded as a young carer.
| |
Primary |
Secondary |
Special |
| England |
0.46% |
0.88% |
0.26% |
| Sheffield |
0.12% |
0.76% |
0% |
The local young carers register (held by Sheffield City Council) had 879 recorded young carers in July 2024. This means that, while thousands of young carers are not on the city council register, even fewer are being logged on our school management information systems.
This therefore means we only have a partial understanding of the outcomes of young carers and the nature and intersectionality of the cohort.
What we do already know:
- 2022/23 national data suggested that 39% of young carers are persistently absent from school, almost twice the rate of their peers (Carers Trust)
- Young carers were twice as likely (22.6% vs 11.2%) to leave primary school below Age-Related Expectations. (MYTIME Young Carers, 2024)
- 28% reported either ‘never’ or ‘not often’ having someone in school, college or university who understood about them being an unpaid care (Carers Trust, 2023)
- Young adult carers are significantly (38%) less likely to achieve a university degree than their peers, with those who care for 35 hours or more a week 86% less likely to have a degree qualification. (Xue, B., Lacey, R.E., Di Gessa, G. and McMunn, A., 2023)
Much of this data and research has been based on relatively small-scale studies, however, and none is local to Sheffield. Better and more complete analysis of the outcomes of young carers is therefore needed to ensure settings and those who support families can target their resources most effectively and to make the case for greater support.