Young Carers

A young carer has significant caring responsibilities for a member of their family who has:

• Physical disability

  

• Chronic, long term or terminal illness
• Learning disabilities
• Speech, sight or hearing loss

Just under half of the young carers that we work with are caring for parents with drug or alcohol dependency or serious mental health issues.

• 54% of young carers live in lone parent families
• One in three regularly miss school
• 71% are bullied because of their caring responsibility
• 40% care for someone with mental health problems

Respite activity

Within every district we run three regular groups broken down into age appropriate groupings of

• 5-9 year olds
• 10-13 year olds
• 14-18 year olds.

The 18-24 year olds supported by our service are generally supported through mentoring but are able to access any part of the activity program that they choose to.

The main purposes of these regular activities is as follows:

• To ensure regular contact between young carers who may be (or become) at risk as a result of their caring role
• To give the young carers the chance to have time away from their caring role, to have regular fun in an age appropriate way.
• To spend time with a peer group that have shared experiences – this has been shown to reduce their isolation caused by having significant caring responsibilities.
• To improve the young carers physical and mental health through ‘issue based activities’ provided on the regular respite activities including mental well health & relaxation, self defense and assertiveness training, sexual health, manual handling, safe caring boundaries, alcohol awareness, bullying and resilience workshops.

Healthy living activities

These form an element of the respite sessions above and in June 2009 we won a national award (British Heart Foundation award) for the young carers healthy living project.  Three young carers traveled to 10 Downing Street to meet Gordon Brown and talk about our project.

C4CK volunteering

During 2009 we launched a new volunteering and training project for any young carer aged over 12, rewarded with credits for every hour spent volunteering or gaining accreditation.  The credits can then be cashed in for money to be spent on their own choice of respite.  This gives the young carers control over their own respite time and enables them to save for something really special that we would not otherwise be able to

fund for the young carer. E.g. one young carer is working towards paying for a holiday for her and her disabled mum as they have never had a family holiday, we have been able to pay for driving lessons, gym membership etc thus giving the young carers much greater freedom and a sense of personal responsibility.  There have been 23 participants during 2010, gaining qualifications in 1^st Aid, Basic food hygiene, Kayaking 1star, Community Sports Leadership Awards, Volunteering certificates, and many diverse qualifications.

Mentoring

During 2009-2010 we continued to build our mentoring service and provided 1:1 support to 49 young carers over at least 4 sessions each.  The young carers receiving mentoring support meet an additional set of criteria (identifying them as additionally at risk, isolated or with boundaries preventing them accessing group work. The young carers receiving

mentoring are allocated a worker and a personal action plan with aims that they want to achieve.

Advocacy service

We have provided advocacy services during the year including the issues below:

• Educational issues, exclusions, bullying, alternative curriculum, better college and university support and funding to enable young carers to access further education.
• Housing, special adaptions, moving to more appropriate accommodation, help to explain and clear rent arrears.
• Health issues, poor access to GP surgery, no access to NHS dentist, poor level of understanding of care provided to cared for relative, parent being sectioned with no explanation to young carer.
• Social care, lack of involvement in cared for relatives assessment, mobility equipment installed unsafely or with no instructions for young carer, lack of contact from social worker.
• Family relationships, advocating for young carer to have lockable door due to siblings destructive and dangerous behaviour, Supporting young carers to discuss more appropriate caring role with family members.

Please click here to see the Young Carers website.