Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if she will make an estimate of the number of young carers there were in (a) Lewisham Deptford constituency, (b) London and (c) England and Wales in each of the last five years.

Information on the number of young carers is not currently held by the department. Data is now being collected via the Spring school census for the first time from all state-funded schools in England to identify whether a student undertakes caring responsibilities at home. This will increase young carers visibility in the school system and provide an annual data collection to help identify long-term trends.

Data is also collected relating to young carers via the Children in Need census. When a child is assessed as being in need of children’s social care services, social workers will record factors that are relevant to that episode of need, with ‘young carer’ as one of those possible factors. The recorded factors are published annually in the statistics release ‘Characteristics of children in need’ which can be found here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/characteristics-of-children-in-need.

The following link contains data for 2017/18 to 2021/22 for Lewisham, Inner London, London and England (figures at parliamentary constituency level are not available) where ‘young carer’ was identified in episodes of need: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/data-tables/permalink/d0e547fd-650c-4144-947e-08db08498a11. It should be noted that not all episodes have factors recorded, but this has improved over time. Nonetheless, there can be differences in the recording practices between local authorities, therefore this data should be treated with a degree of caution. In addition, not all young carers will be children in need so these figures represent an undercount on the true number of young carers.