Supporting Young Carers in Schools: A Toolkit for Young Carers Services

This toolkit provides essential support to enable young carers services in England to significantly increase the identification and support of young carers in schools, and to secure vital new or continuation funding for local school engagement work.

Key points

• Highlights the multiple benefits that Young Carers in Schools can bring to all services, including those with existing, successful school engagement programmes.
• Sets out the concept of the whole school approach to identifying and support young carers as promoted by Young Cares in Schools, and explains the rationale for this approach as the main aim of local school engagement work.
• Offers in-depth targeted advice on how services can secure funding for local school engagement work, engage school staff, maintain momentum and gather and showcase impact data.
• Provides a range of tools, templates and pro formas to make using Young Carers in Schools as easy as possible so that you can maximise the identification and support of young carers in your local area.

This toolkit contains essential tools, templates and guidance for:

• Services that already work closely with schools – enabling you to strengthen relationships with school staff, respond to the latest changes in the school system, and showcase achievements at an England-wide level.
• Services that are developing their local school engagement activities – making the development and delivery of effective local school engagement work easier than ever so that you can maximise impact in your local area.
• Services that do not currently have the capacity to engage directly with school staff – making securing funding as easy as possible and enabling you to implement simple, time-minimal actions to signpost schools to England wide support in the meantime. In doing so, it makes it easier than ever for all services to maximise use of resources and deliver significant positive outcomes for young carers in schools.

Tools 

1. Tools to support services to secure funding for local school engagement work.
2.  Tools to support services to raise the local profile of Young Carers in Schools.
3. Tools to support services to build and maintain engagement with schools.
4.  Tools to support services to gather impact data from schools.
5. Tools to support services with limited capacity to signpost schools to Young Carers in Schools.