‘I feel like I'm drowning’ – young carers face lack of in-school support
‘It's harder than anyone understands and I feel like I'm drowning.’ There has been a steep rise in the time young carers spend looking after family members, yet more than half say they receive little to no support from their school.
There has been a steep rise in the time young carers spend looking after family members, yet more than half say they receive little to no support from their school.
A warning has been issued by the Carers Trust after new research found that many young carers, such as the young person quoted above, feel stressed, lonely, and anxious.
A third (36%) of young carers report caring for 20 to 49 hours a week, with 14% caring for 50-plus hours a week.
The study involved almost 600 UK young carers and young adult carers aged 12 to 25 and found that 53% said the amount of time they spend caring per week has increased in the past year.
The pandemic has exacerbated the situation for many young carers as essential services were closed during the lockdown or difficult to access.
It is estimated that there are as many as 800 000 young carers aged 11 to 16 in England, this according to research from the University of Nottingham and the BBC in September 2018.
And the new study found that young people's caring role resulted in them either feeling ‘worried’ (36%), ‘lonely’ (33%), and/or ‘stressed’ (42%).
However, most concerning is the lack of in-school support the young carers in the study report: 40% said they ‘never’ or ‘not often’ had someone to talk to at school about being a young carer, while 52% said they ‘never’ or ‘not often’ got support from their school, college, or university to help them balance study with their caring role.
The study confirmed that many schools are working to identify and support their young carers, with 34% of young carers in the survey saying that their school understood their caring role.
However, the fact remains that for too many, the support is not there. Comments from young carers in the study revealed some of the difficulties they face from their schools:
- ‘They don't understand when I'm late arriving to school – my mum can't get up most mornings.’
- ‘My school doesn't care that I'm a young carer, they force me to come to school even when I've been up all night looking after (the person I care for). I am so burned out.’
- ‘We have a no phones rule which makes it difficult to keep in contact if needed.’
- ‘Teachers don't understand why I have to check my phone, or I'm distracted in school.’
- ‘School don't often understand the complexity and how draining caring can really be.’
Elsewhere in the study, 47% of the young carers said they felt less connected to others, 46% said their education was suffering, and 44% said their mental health is worse.
The report advises: ‘Having a dedicated student carer support policy which takes account of reasons behind lateness, absences, late or missing homework or coursework, and mobile phone usage, would all support young carers and young adult carers.
‘This could include offering space in school to do homework, prioritised use of the library for college and university students, flexible deadlines, adding young adult carers to bursary criteria, and allowing appropriate mobile phone usage.’
Local authorities have a statutory duty to identify and support young carers, including with funded support packages which help young carers and their families. The Carers Trust now wants to see better monitoring of this duty.
It is also urging schools to take a more ‘integrated and collaborative approach’, including working with health services, local authorities, and local carer organisations.
Carers Trust CEO, Kirsty McHugh, said the findings were ‘stark’. She continued: ‘Too many are left unsupported, struggling to access the services they need with knock-on effects to their education, mental health, and wellbeing.
‘We need more investment in social care generally and local care organisations specifically to relieve young carers of the overwhelming pressure so many are under. In addition, the NHS must ensure its mental health services prioritise young carer support. Otherwise young carers will continue to be left alone to cope with complex problems and responsibilities that would overwhelm most adults, let alone young people.’
Carers Trust is a charity which works to improve support, services and recognition for anyone living with the challenges of caring, unpaid, for a family member or friend.
Further information and resources
- Carers Trust: It's harder than anyone understands, March 2022: https://bit.ly/3quitYu
- University of Nottingham: New research suggests more than one in five children in England carry out some care for sick and disabled family members, September 2018: https://bit.ly/3knDSPp
Child poverty: The hidden costs of school spelt out
Expensive trips, costly music and arts classes, stigma about clothes and mobile phones, barriers to school food – a report has laid bare how poverty is impeding children's access to education.
The research involves 4 600 pupils, 840 parents/carers and 420 members of school staff and focuses on the hidden costs of schooling in England.
The Cost of the School Day in England: Pupils' perspectives has been published by Child Poverty Action Group and Children North East and is based on the charities' Cost of the School Day project.
Government figures from 2021 show that there were 4.3 million children living in poverty in the UK in 2019/20 – which is 31% of children. And 75% of these children are in a household where at least one person works.
The research involved primary and secondary schools in London and the Midlands, and it identifies and breaks-down some of the key barriers to education for those in poverty. Findings include:
Families are often expected to own learning resources for use at home and at school, such as textbooks and IT equipment.
Pupils are financially excluded from full participation in subjects and activities, such as PE, music, swimming, and art.
The costs associated with resources and equipment can restrict pupils' subject choices in secondary school (food technology and art, for example, can be expensive to take).
Some special events like trips, fundraising activities, and celebrations can be out of reach for children in poverty, often causing ‘great anxiety and financial and social pressure’.
Children in poverty and on free school meals often do not have the same food options as their peers at lunchtimes. Many more children miss out on FSM altogether due to ‘restrictive eligibility criteria’.
Furthermore, the report warns: ‘Day-to-day practices in schools often unintentionally draw attention to family incomes and make children feel embarrassed and different. These include expensive uniform policies, non-uniform days and requests from schools to bring in material possessions like pencil cases.’
It also warns that families are borrowing money to pay for school activities like school trips, ‘not wanting children to lose out on these valuable learning opportunities’.
The report breaks down in detail the key barriers across core areas of school life, including the curriculum, resources, extracurricular work, school food, and others.
For example, regarding school food, the report warns that many children in poverty simply are not eligible under current criteria. Those who are eligible face other barriers, such as losing their FSM allowance should it go unspent and not being able to spend it at breakfast or break-times.
For those families in poverty but not on FSM, the way schools sometimes try to resolve debt on school meal accounts – often involving the children – is inappropriate.
Other barriers include many children in poverty being forced to have packed lunches as they cannot afford hot meals. Some schools even make packed lunch pupils sit apart from those on hot meals, unintentionally isolating disadvantaged pupils from their friends.
This echoes previous research showing that across the UK, a third of school-aged children living in poverty – roughly one million young people – do not get free school meals due to restrictive eligibility criteria and barriers to FSM take-up (Patrick et al, 2021).
- CPAG & Children North East: Cost of the School Day in England: Pupils' Perspectives, March 2022: https://bit.ly/35Byc0p
- CPAG: Cost of the School Day Calendar: https://cpag.org.uk/cost-school-day-calendar-2021-22
- Patrick et al: Fixing Lunch: The case for expanding free school meals, Cod Realities & Child Poverty Action Group, August 2021: https://bit.ly/38vHZn2
SEND and alternative provision Green Paper gets a cautious reaction
There has been cautious welcome to ideas set out in the long awaited SEND Green Paper but exasperation that it has taken so long to get to this point.
The SEND sector has been waiting years for government action to tackle the crisis in funding and red tape for special needs pupils.
A cross-party inquiry by MPs identified the key problems back in 2019. Three years on and the government's SEND Review – Right support, right place, right time, which was published last week and runs to more than 100 pages, has reached similar conclusions.
A 13-week consultation has now been launched over proposed new reforms based on the recommendations of the review.
The review identifies ‘a vicious cycle of late intervention, low confidence and inefficient resource’ and that ‘decisions are too often made based on where a child or young person lives or is educated, not on their needs’.
It finds that ‘settings are often ill-equipped to identify and support’ pupils and adds: ‘It is not clear to families what they should reasonably expect from their local mainstream settings, and they lose confidence that these settings can meet their child's needs. Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) and, in some cases, specialist provision, are seen as the only means of guaranteeing the right and appropriate support.
Increasing numbers of requests for EHCPs and specialist provision means that pupils ‘face significant delays in accessing support’.
It sets out three key problems:
- Navigating the SEND system and alternative provision is not a positive experience for too many pupils and their families.
- Outcomes for pupils with SEND or in alternative provision are consistently worse than their peers across every measure.
- The system is not financially sustainable.
The fact that the government could have saved a lot of time and effort by listening more closely to MPs on the Education Select Committee in 2019 won't be lost on professionals.
Ever since the now infamous Education Select Committee report in 2019, professionals have been demanding something be done to tackle the adversarial experiences faced by many families seeking support for their children via EHCPs.
The MPs' landmark report said that poor implementation of the government's 2014 SEND reforms has resulted in ‘confusion, at times unlawful practice, bureaucratic nightmares, buck-passing, no accountability, strained resources, and adversarial experiences’.
The cross-party inquiry into the overhaul of the SEND system found that while the reforms were the right ones, families still face a ‘titanic struggle’ to get the right support for their children. The MPs reported that poor administration and a ‘challenging funding environment’ means that schools are struggling to cope and local authorities are under pressure.
The MPs' report said that at school level, children on SEN Support in particular were being let down and their needs going unmet. As such, desperate families are applying for EHCPs, leading to huge pressure on the system.
This in turn has led to unlawful practices by local authorities, such as rationing and gatekeeping, leaving many children's needs unidentified and/or unmet. There are further problems with ‘misleading or unlawful advice’ being passed from local authorities to schools and then to parents.
The SEND reforms entered into legislation in 2014, seeking to place children and families at the heart of decision-making. They saw the introduction of new 0-25 Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs), replacing the system of SEN Statements.
A SEND Code of Practice was introduced, parents were given more control of budgets and decision-making for their children, and local authorities were required to produce a Local Offer detailing the available support for SEND.
The new Green Paper now wants to achieve greater consistency in SEND support. It proposes:
‘A new national SEND and alternative provision system setting nationally consistent standards for how needs are identified and met at every stage of a child's journey across education.’
‘New local SEND partnerships bringing together education, health and care partners with local government to produce a local inclusion plan.’ This will set out how each area will meet the national standards, when specialist support is needed, and the provision that is available within the local area (including alternative provision service focused on early intervention).
Support for parents and carers to express ‘an informed preference for a suitable placement’ by providing a tailored list of settings – mainstream, specialist and independent. Parents will continue to have the right to request a mainstream setting.
A ‘standardised and digitised EHCP process and template to minimise bureaucracy’.
A streamlined redress process to ‘make it easier to resolve disputes earlier, including through mandatory mediation, while retaining the tribunal for the most challenging cases’.
The government has pledged an ‘additional’ £1 bn in 2022/23 to support pupils with the most complex needs and an investment of £2.6 bn over the next three years to expand and improve provision for pupils with SEND. It has also set out plans for a new SENCO national professional qualification (NPQ).
A ‘cautious welcome’ is certainly the phrase to describe the profession's reaction to the plans.
Jo Hutchinson, a director at the Education Policy Institute, said: ‘On paper, these reforms hold the potential to begin the task of building an inclusive system which intervenes early to prevent needs from escalating and provides similar services irrespective of which school a child attends or what postcode they live in.
‘The devil will be in the detail and most crucially, the implementation. Families across the country will rightly only believe in better SEND provision when it arrives.’
Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said the system was ‘in crisis’.
He continued: ‘It is driven by a vicious cycle in which parents and schools are left desperately trying to access support and funding for children through EHCPs, often facing a postcode lottery of processes, delays, and bureaucracy.
‘The Green Paper proposals of a system built on early and accurate identification of needs, with common standards on what support should be provided and when, and local partnerships to deliver that on the ground, seem right and sensible.
‘The frustration is that the government's SEND review began in September 2019, it has taken nearly three years to reach this point, and full implementation of the Green Paper is some way off.
‘In the meantime, many thousands of children and young people will continue to pass through a broken system, with schools left to pick up the pieces without sufficient resources.
‘We understand that the pandemic has delayed this review, but the government has not shown enough urgency.’
Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the National Association of School Leaders, said that a ‘persistent lack of funding from central government’ was at the heart of the problems.
He added: ‘We agree with government that early identification and intervention is essential and the key to improving pupil outcomes – schools know this instinctively, but we also know that waiting lists to see specialists, such as speech and language therapists, are currently far too long and we see little evidence at this stage that the government has ambitious enough plans to properly address this.
‘The bottom line is that we need to make sure each part of the sector has the resources it needs to meet the varying needs of pupils with SEND and is able to access the specialists pupils need at the earliest possible opportunity. That is what will make the biggest difference.’
Annemarie Hassall, CEO of special needs association Nasen said that the system has been ‘fragile’ for some years now.
‘The (Green Paper) clearly recognises that we must urgently resolve the postcode lottery around securing an EHCP. We need to simplify the process, making it more flexible, with less red tape and supporting parents and carers to make informed decisions without them feeling like they are regularly battling the system. By improving oversight and transparency, we will help drive better outcomes.
‘We currently face a sad reality that despite there being lots of excellent practice for SEND in education, our system has been fragile for years.’
- Department for Education: Open consultation: SEND review: right support, right place, right time, March 2022 (closes July 1, 2022): https://bit.ly/36XJ61l