June 10th marks the start of Carers Week in the UK. This year’s awareness-raising week takes place just over a decade from when the Care Act received Royal Assent. . The Act promised that people who looked after family and friends due to disability, illness or addiction would no longer have their needs ignored and that their own rights to care and support would be enshrined in law. But new research on young adult carers provides clear evidence that this decade-old promise has been far from fulfilled. Together with the Carers Trust, Rebecca Lacey, Anne McMunn and colleagues have been investigating the impacts of caring on young adults’ mental health, education, and employment prospects not just in the UK but in other European countries. Their findings and recommendations add weight to growing calls for a National Carers Strategy to support younger carers wherever they live in the world and to eradicate the inequalities they face.
With so many of us living longer, more and more of us now need, or will need in the future, someone to care for and support us with our day to day lives as we get older. Huge pressures on health and social care systems have only been exacerbated by the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, with ever longer waiting lists delaying the treatment people need to enable them to remain independent.
A lack of state support in many countries means this care is increasingly being picked up by unpaid carers (usually family members), including young people aged 16-29. In the UK alone, the cost to our economy of this is valued at more than one billion pounds per year. But it is also costly to the lives of unpaid carers themselves.
Just when young people are about to head off to further or higher education, into work, or creating a family of their own, they can find themselves with caring responsibilities that make forging ahead with their own lives and ambitions, harder or even impossible.
Eurocare research findings
Over the last three years, our research (Eurocare) has been trying to establish how many young adult carers exist in Europe and who they are, in terms of who they care for, how much care they provide and other aspects of their lives.
The project also looked at how becoming and being a young adult carer affects their education, jobs, health, and friendships. In some cases, we have been able to make comparisons between countries to see if where carers live makes a difference to those outcomes, and how different social policies might improve them.
Here’s what we found:
Around one in ten of all carers in Europe are young adults, with the same proportion of young adults in Europe reporting having caring responsibilities. The prevalence of young adult carers varies by country from 2 per cent in Cyprus to 31 per cent in Iceland.
Most young adult carers provide <10 hours of care per week, but 1 in 5 say they are caring for more hours per week than this. The majority of carers providing more than 10 hours of week are women.
There are important socioeconomic inequalities in who is a young adult carer in Europe; for instance, young adult carers are more likely to be from households with lower incomes and lower parental education.
We were able to see that becoming a young adult carer quickly affects mental health and wellbeing. The more hours a young person was caring for someone, the more likely they were to report poor mental health. In a piece of comparative research we did looking at the UK and Germany, we could see that the impacts of being a young adult carer were more marked in the UK.
When we looked at how being a carer affected a young person’s education and work prospects, we saw that they were more likely than their peers to be ‘Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET)’, less likely to hold a university degree and less likely to enter work. Again, providing more hours of care per week made these negative impacts more likely and more pronounced.
Implications for policy and practice
It’s clear from these findings that more needs to be done to ensure young adults who are caring have the same life chances, opportunities and positive outcomes as their peers who do not have these responsibilities.
But what does that support look like? Together with the Carers Trust, we have come up with a number of clear policy recommendations in our report, a few of which we have highlighted here:
- National and local governments should consider the specific needs of carers greater needs, such as those living in the most deprived areas.
- Systems to identify young carers early and intervene promptly must be established. This is likely to involve health such as GPs, hospital discharge teams, social work practitioners, and staff in schools, colleges and universities. Governments could mandate health professionals supporting an adult with ongoing or long-term health and/or support needs to ask whether there any children or young adults who might be providing care or support.
- Mental health support for young adult carers must be prioritised
- All schools, colleges and universities should have a young (adult) carer lead and a young (adult) carer policy.
- Carer awareness training should be introduced for all education professionals to help them identify and support students with caring responsibilities.
- Dis-incentives and barriers to pursuing further and higher education must be removed. For instance, the UK government could remove the 21-hour study rule for Carers Allowance in England and Wales, improving financial support for carers who are in full-time education and still providing significant levels of care.
It is abundantly clear from this research that the more hours a young adult spends caring, the less well they do in life compared with their peers who do not have those same responsibilities. This underlines the need for a cross-Government National Carers Strategy that focuses on improving identification and support for young adult carers, a strategy that should also set out actions to reduce the amount of care that a young adult provides through the strengthening of access to and funding for formal care, including respite care.
No government will tackle key issues such as reducing youth employment rates, or the post-COVID-19 mental health crisis without getting it right for young adult carers. With at least two young carers in every classroom, every lecture hall, every workplace right across Europe.
As part of this work, we have spoken and worked closely with many young adult carers themselves for whom these findings are wholly unsurprising. They chime loudly with their everyday experiences of trying to juggle caring with college or getting a job. They recognise the impact that caring has on their own stress levels, how much sleep they get, and their ability to have time away from their caring role. Young adult carers themselves are calling for change, recognition and support. It’s time not just to listen, but to hear them.