Council Identifies Five-Year-Old Carer In West Sussex

The youngest carer known to West Sussex County Council is only five years old.

The little one was assessed by the council’s Young Carers service and found to be ‘doing inappropriate caring for their age’.

The information was shared during a meeting of the children & young people’s services scrutiny committee on Wednesday (March 1) where the extensive ongoing work being carried out to support young carers was discussed.

A report to the committee revealed that despite the efforts of the team and the help  and support being offered, only 2,400 of an estimated 6,000 carers aged under 18 were on the service’s radar.

Caroline Pope, of Carers Support West Sussex, told the meeting that there had been a 35 per increase in the number of carers of all ages looking for help in the past year.

She said there were a lot of similarities between the problem being faced by young carers and those faced by the older ones.

She added:

“As you would imagine at the moment, there’s a lot around financial and cost of living support as well as carers struggling with mental health and their own wellbeing.”

One theme which ran through the discussion was the need for schools, GPs and council services to be able to work together to identify young carers and ensure they had the help they needed.

Sarah Clark, manager of the Young Carers team, said there had been a 44 per cent increase in the number of referrals from  West Sussex schools since the Children’s Commissioner launched The Big Ask survey.

The survey shone a light on young carers  and, for the first time, schools were asked to identify those children shown as young carers within the annual school census.

In the autumn term of 2021/22, 41 referrals were made, rising to 59 at the same point in 2022/23.

At the moment it takes around three months for a carer to be assessed and allocated to a Young Carers worker, though the service is working to bring that figure down, with the help of £100,000 from the 2023/24 budget.

Ms Clark said:

“We do triage cases to make sure we are not missing anything that is vitally urgent and that nothing that is an immediate safeguarding risk is missed.

“If needs be, we will take immediate action if there is anything there that raises significant warning signs.”

The three fundamental aims of the Young Carers service are:

• To undertake assessments of young carers and to reduce caring levels where this is a concern
• To build resilience in young carers and their families, and 
• To raise awareness of young carers. 

The committee agreed with a suggestion from Alison Cornell (Lab, Langley Green & Ifield East) that perhaps asking questions when children joined a school would help to identify more young carers earlier.

Ms Clark said the service did promote the need with the schools but there were very few really young carers and many did not even realise they did something ‘different’ to their friends.

She shared a story about small children being asked to describe what they liked about their mummy and daddy.

While most came up with nice stories about being taken on holiday, others said they liked it when a parent said thank you to them for making dinner.

Ms Clark said:

“It’s those sort of differences that raise awareness. So we are very much reliant on our partners to identify the children to us for assessment.

“Our role in that is to ensure they are equipped to do that identification.”

The committee suggested that the service  could look into whether there were any opportunities for peer reviews with other local authorities to make sure the team had the chance to learn from any best practice  already out there.

Chairman Paul Linehan (Con, Bramber Castle) also said he would write to the chair of the Health and Adult Social Care scrutiny committee to highlight the importance of the role of GPs and other health professionals had in identifying young carers.

• Young Carers Action Day will be held on Wednesday March 15, with the theme ‘make time for young carers’. Schools will be ask to consider how they provide time and support for their young carers as they proceed with their education.