Young Carers

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Tuesday 18th January 2011 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)]

It is a delight to serve under your chairmanship again, Mr Chope.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for York Outer (Julian Sturdy) on securing the debate and on his exceedingly articulate and measured way of making a strong case. I echo most of the sentiments in his excellent speech, which I hope is heard more widely beyond today’s not overly crowded Chamber.

I am pleased, in particular, to be here to respond as a Minister. As shadow Minister for Children, I took a particular interest in the subject, and I have met many groups of young carers and the organisations involved with them. I pay tribute to those various organisations, some of which my hon. Friend has mentioned, for their excellent and often unrecognised work in a really important area, which affects many more children than some estimates suggest.

Supporting vulnerable children, including young carers, is, of course, a priority for the Government, which is why I am pleased to have the opportunity to articulate our approach to that subset of young people. Helping to care for a family member is something that many young people are happy and proud to do—it helps them to develop a sense of responsibility and skills that are important in later life. Such young people play an absolutely vital role in their families and in society as a whole, for whom they save an awful lot of money. They deserve our recognition and support. However, inappropriate or excessive levels of caring by young people—even if at their own behest—can put their education, training, social development or health at risk, preventing them from enjoying their childhood in the same way as other children. Too many young carers are trapped in harmful caring roles without much hope of fulfilling their potential. That can be for a number of reasons: they do not recognise themselves as young carers or, if they do, they do not seek help; services are not identifying them as carers; or they fear involving children’s services and outside agencies.

That is not, of course, the full picture. Thousands of carers, through admirable resilience and sheer determination, achieve so much despite the odds stacked against them. I have met many young carers, including at the annual young carers festival down in Southampton, which is organised by the Children’s Society—in particular, by Jenny Frank, who has devoted so much of her career to helping young carers—and by the YMCA Fairthorne Group. I have attended for most of the 12 years that that incredible festival has been running. I encourage my hon. Friend the Member for York Outer to attend, if he can—it is usually on a weekend in July. I never cease to be impressed by the commitment of the people whom I meet there and their determination to do the best not only for the person they care for but often for other members of their families, such as their brothers and sisters. Some of those young people have done all that and still succeeded at school and gone on to university or successful employment, but not all of them cope so well.

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for making the issue a priority and for finding time to meet the York Young Carers—I shall certainly look at the group’s excellent film on YouTube. As he has said, a new Member is at the call of many organisations wanting to familiarise themselves with new MPs. However, young carers, such as those in my hon. Friend’s constituency, have made it clear to me that they want their schools, GPs and the mental health and other health services with which their family members come into contact to be more supportive and more carer aware. My hon. Friend made a good point, which young carers often make to me, about how the doctor, social worker or professional from another agency, who is seeing the parent or whoever is being cared for, often talks over the head of the young person.

If that young person has the day-to-day responsibility, that young person has some very grown-up responsibility placed on them, they know an awful lot about their loved one’s situation, and they need to be talked to and involved in the process. That is a common plea, and my hon. Friend is right to highlight the issue. Professionals, therefore, need to be more carer aware. Young carers want professionals to recognise that the young carer, despite being a minor, will often be the responsible person in the house and might understand better than anyone what kind of support is needed and when.

It is shocking that so many young people lose the opportunity to live a normal childhood because of their caring role. Such young people are often hidden from everyone but their families. I agree with my hon. Friend that all of us, including those services I mentioned earlier, need to be mindful of the impact that caring can have on a young person’s education, training or employment opportunities. Indeed, that is why providing carers with vital information about the illness or disability that they and their family are coping with and involving them in the decisions about how best to provide care and manage their health is one of the key principles in the carers strategy, “Recognised, valued and supported: next steps for the Carers Strategy”, to which my hon. Friend has referred.

I pay tribute to the Minister of State, Department of Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Burstow), for the speed with which he and his Department, with support from the Department for Education and others in the Government, published the new strategy. I am pleased to say that carers’ views, including those of young carers, are very much at the heart of it. If we listened to the views of young carers, it would go a long way to helping them.

I shall take this opportunity to praise the young carers in York for producing their “Young Carers Revolution” media campaign, and for the sterling work that they have done to raise awareness and reach out to young carers. They come to the annual festival and have interesting things to say.

The new carers strategy recognises that there are hidden young carers. It sends out a strong signal that effective support for young carers requires adult and children’s services, including health services, schools and the voluntary sector, to work together and prevent young carers from taking on harmful or excessive caring roles. The early intervention grant, worth £2.2 billion a year over the period of the spending review, provides local authorities and their partners with the freedom and flexibility to decide how best to prioritise their resources in accordance with local demand.

The Government strongly believe that such support should be targeted at those children and families who are most in need, and I encourage local authorities to identify appropriate services for young carers and prioritise them. Local authorities can do that by adopting the “Working together to support young carers” programme, which is a memorandum of understanding published jointly by the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services and the Association of Directors of Children’s Services. The memorandum is unambiguous in stating that no care package should rely on a young person taking on an inappropriate caring role. I urge local authorities—including that of my hon. Friend—as does the Government’s carers strategy, to consider adopting that memorandum.

All too often, as an Ofsted report highlighted in 2009, services do not work together effectively and young carers fall through the gaps. Training can be an effective way of raising awareness of young carers among professionals who might not otherwise recognise that a young carer is involved. I am grateful for the work done by the Children’s Society, the National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse, the Social Care Institute for Excellence, and others, to train a range of professionals to be more carer aware.

There is already much good practice in this area, and I join my hon. Friend in saluting the dedication of staff—including thousands of volunteers—who through hundreds of young carer projects, mostly in the voluntary sector, provide young carers with the respite and one-to-one support that they need, giving them the opportunity to take part in activities or go on breaks with friends with whom they can share their experiences. Often, young people who find themselves as carers need to get together with other young people in a similar situation who can appreciate, understand and sympathise with the challenges they face at home. It is about having the opportunity to take an evening off to go and see a film with other people, or to go bowling, or whatever. There are lots of interesting projects, largely set up through the Children’s Society by Jenny Frank and others, and we have entertained many such projects in this House over the years. They could be something simple that make young carers feel that they are not alone and that other people understand and look out for them.

The voluntary sector plays a vital role in supporting those young people, and I am pleased that through the innovation fund, the National Young Carers Coalition is extending the support that it provides to the whole family. The carers centre in York is another example of a voluntary sector project that provides invaluable support.

It is not for Government to micro-manage and prescribe what is best for local authorities—local authorities should know what is most appropriate for their residents and communities. Practice and approach, however, varies across the country and I am committed to encouraging the sharing of best practice—something that we are often not terribly good at—so that all areas in the country can share knowledge about what works from areas that are doing well. I am pleased that the Princess Royal Trust for Carers, which my hon. Friend has mentioned, will, on behalf of the National Young Carers Coalition, showcase the learning from the innovation fund.

My Department has already made available the interim findings from the young carer pathfinders scheme. It shows that where intensive support was co-ordinated by a key worker and focused around the family, between entry and exit from the project, there was a 35% reduction in the number of young carers in those families, and a 41% reduction in the number of young people for whom caring was having a negative impact.

An improving picture is emerging as more young people are referred to receive the support they need as a result of their parents’ mental health or substance misuse problems, and more schools are becoming aware of the support that they need to provide. However, there is much still to do, and a number of families will be facing a range of other complex problems. For example, research highlights that family violence can be an issue at home. That is why I am pleased that on 10 December last year, the Prime Minister announced a new national campaign for families with multiple problems. That campaign sets out to support the most vulnerable 120,000 families, a number of whom will have a young person or persons in a caring role. It represents a new and determined effort to improve the lives of those families and those who live around them. It will trial innovative new approaches to providing tailored support to the whole family where there are complex problems, and it will provide personalised and holistic support to help a family deal with its problems. I look forward to seeing the benefits of that new approach.

From a young carer’s perspective, schools are arguably the local service with which they have the most contact and which play the greatest role in helping them. Young carers have told us that they want their schools to be more supportive and understanding about their caring role and education, and I support that. Young carers want teaching staff to recognise that they may need flexible learning arrangements and additional support. That is a major issue, and it comes up when I go to conferences and meet people. Young carers need an understanding teacher who knows the demands on them and can put in a word if, for some good reason, homework is in late or it is necessary to be in telephone contact with a doctor or another professional because a relative has taken a turn for the worse, or whatever. Good practice is for each school to designate somebody in that role, but that does not always happen.

Although many schools have systems in place to support young carers and have a lead person to support them, that does not happen enough. Some schools may like to consider whether a governor should have an oversight role, just as we recommend for children in the care system who have particular requirements. To increase the support available to young carers in schools, the Department for Education is working closely with the Department of Health to provide the National Young Carers Coalition with an e-learning module for teachers and staff as part of the healthy schools approach to help better identify and support young carers.

Another issue that affects young carers—I am aware of the research by the Princess Royal Trust for Carers that my hon. Friend has mentioned—is bullying. Unacceptably, and incredibly, nearly two thirds of young carers are bullied at school. Perhaps they are often late, do not have time to take part in social activities or do not dress in the same way as others. All those things can mark them out as different from their peers. The Government, the Secretary of State for Education and I, take that issue very seriously. It is unacceptable for any child to be victimised, and even more so when they have the responsibilities of a young carer on their shoulders.

We can be proud of the vast majority of young people, but when bullies are identified we cannot just suspend them for a couple of days and allow them to saunter back into school to torment their victims again. We will put head teachers and teachers back in control and give them a range of tough new powers to deal with bullies. Head teachers will be able to take a zero-tolerance approach and will have the final say. We trust that head teachers will use those powers but I hope they do not have to. By educating young people to appreciate, respect and empathise with the pressures on people who, through no fault of their own, find themselves in an adult caring role, I hope that we can eradicate that completely unacceptable form of bullying.

When bullying occurs, schools need to respond promptly and firmly. They need to apply disciplinary sanctions and work with bullies so that they are held to account for their actions and accept responsibility for the harm they have caused. Schools must also support those who are being bullied and, above all, they must educate bullying out of the school and classroom. All of us in society have a responsibility in that area. I hope that this debate and the other initiatives for young carers, such as the fantastic weekend at Fairthorne manor and the meetings in which we speak to young carers to understand their problems from the sharp end and look at how better we can accommodate them, will raise the profile of this issue, so that more people recognise the particular challenges faced by those young people.

The Department for Education will continue to work closely with the voluntary sector and local authorities to break down barriers to supporting young carers and their families effectively, which is the least we can do. We have a duty as a society to help those people, and frankly it is a false economy both socially and financially not to do that as actively as possible. I congratulate my hon. Friend on raising this subject and putting his case so strongly. I hope that he is a convert, an advocate and an ambassador for the issue of young carers, and that he will ensure that as many people in his constituency—and beyond—are aware of the challenges faced and do their bit to make the role of young carers as easy as possible.

Question put and agreed to.