A Young Carer is a child or young person who provides unpaid support to family or friends who could not manage without this help. This could be caring for a relative, partner or friend who is ill, frail, disabled or has mental health or substance misuse problems.
Young and student carers are a largely invisible group who provide crucial emotional and physical support and care and are unremunerated for it. Young carers, young adult carers and students face a multitude of problems including serious barriers to their education, social inclusion, health problems and often live in extreme poverty.
When young carers go to college or university they are allowed to access a student bursary or loan, but consequently lose their carers allowance. The maximum level of financial support a Scottish Domiciled Student can access is less than someone on benefits and below the relative poverty line. Therefore young students with caring responsibilities do not have access to enough financial support to study and perform their caring responsibilities. This leads to increased drop out, mental health illness and lower academic achievement.
Why Young Carers Need Financial Support
- Being a young or student carer can have a negative impact on their life or student experience and leave the young person feeling isolated from others.
- Many carers give up an income, future employment prospects, and pension rights to become a carer.
- Many carers also work outside their home and try to juggle jobs with their responsibilities as carers.
Carers save the Scottish economy £10.3 billion a year - the cost of providing NHS services in Scotland.
In the Young Carers Forum that Lauren is involved with, a recurring issue that emerged from their engagement and consultation was always that young carers had to continuously miss school - not because they wanted to but because of their caring role. Many of the young carers lived in poverty or had a low income due to having only one or no parents working. Therefore, they depended on their education maintenance allowance to help them and their family pay for bills and get by but, due to the poor attendance, many of the young carers' EMA would be cut off or stopped for a period of time. This could leave a young carer feeling isolated as, in many cases after 16, they no longer belong to a support project so have no where to turn for help.
It is estimated that there are around 100,000 young carers in Scotland, around 10% of the school-age population (http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Health/Support-Social-Care/Unpaid-Carers). The Scottish Government’s 2010-2015 Young Carers Strategy, ‘Getting It Right for Young Carers’, highlighted research that showed that the majority of young carers experience economic deprivation. This partly relates to the increased probability that they live with a disabled adult who is less likely to be working and more likely to be relying on benefits. However, the research importantly recognises that young carers experience financial hardship in their own right. Case studies in the strategy highlighted examples of young carers who had to leave school to care for a parent but were unable to claim Carer’s Allowance due to being under 18 (http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/Doc/319441/0102105.pdf). For those who remain in full-time education, and similarly are not entitled to Carer’s Allowance, their caring responsibilities can prevent them from working part-time to supplement any income from EMA, student loans and bursaries - in addition to increasing their chances of dropping out or their education suffering as a result of working to make ends meet on top of caring.
Carer’s Allowance (https://www.gov.uk/carers-allowance/overview), which along with other welfare and benefits is reserved to the UK Parliament, is not an option for many young carers. Currently, to be able to apply to receive it, a carer needs to be spending at least 35 hours a week caring for someone who is ill or disabled and receives Attendance Allowance, Disability Living Allowance or Constant Attendance Allowance. They can’t get Carer’s Allowance if they’re under 16, in full-time education, or earning more than £100 a week. Whilst some young carers who are ineligible may qualify for Carer’s Credit (https://www.gov.uk/carers-credit/overview), as a National Insurance credit, this will not make a difference to their ongoing costs of living and is of limited use in this context.
The SYP is not prescriptive about how a Young Carer’s Grant might be delivered, and whilst we recognise that welfare and benefits are reserved issues, we feel there is plenty of scope within the Scottish Parliament’s devolved powers, including within education and student funding, and funding for national carer’s organisations, to deliver much-needed financial support to Scotland’s young carers.