An Insight into Young Carers in the UK
Blog by: Emily Farquharson, Social Research Apprentice at ROTA
There are likely around 800,000 young carers in England alone, yet only a fraction are formally recognised by institutions or recorded in official data.
Over the past decade, young carers have become increasingly visible in policy conversations across the UK. Schools, local authorities, and third-sector organisations are becoming more aware of their responsibilities to identify and support young people with caring roles.
This progress matters. But recognition is not the same as understanding.
Young caring itself is not inherently harmful, and many families rely on forms of interdependence that are culturally rooted and deeply relational. Supporting one another across generations can be an expression of care and community. The problem emerges when systems fail to recognise the realities shaping those responsibilities.
For many Black and Global Majority (BGM) young carers, the realities of care sit at the intersection of family responsibility, structural inequality, and institutional mistrust. Dynamics that are rarely captured in the frameworks designed to support them.
Life as a Young Carer: My Story
I began caring at a young age, and those responsibilities have continued into my young adulthood. At the time, however, it was rarely understood in those terms.
I believe that being a girl, and younger than the person I was caring for, played a role in how my responsibilities were perceived. When care responsibilities happened within immediate family, it was often treated by others as an expectation rather than something that requires recognition or support. External support rarely felt like an option, it felt all that was on offer was public or institutional scrutiny.
In fact, I was not referred to as a “young carer” until I was around 16, during the period around my GCSEs. At the time, I did not fully understand what that meant, and I don’t think many of us did. I remember being struck by the realisation that so many young people around me had different levels of responsibility and were supporting family members with different conditions, and despite those differences, we were all navigating similar pressures and uncertainties.
Through my own experiences, and conversations with friends and peers growing up, I became increasingly aware of how caring responsibilities intersect with wider structural realities. Race, migration, economic pressure, and institutional trust all shape how families experience care, and how young people’s roles are understood.
At the same time, many of the responsibilities that young people carry still fall outside the definitions typically used in policy. Translating for family members, navigating institutions, managing administrative processes, or mediating between services and relatives can carry significant emotional and practical weight. Yet these forms of labour are rarely recognised as care within formal frameworks.
The research reflects this gap. While identification of young carers has expanded, race remains insufficiently integrated into policy discussions. Racial inequalities in education persist, racially minoritised families continue to face disproportionate economic precarity, and migration-related administrative burdens remain high.
COVID-19 intensified care responsibilities and disproportionately affected racialised communities. As someone who was a young carer at the time, I saw how quickly those responsibilities could escalate, particularly when illness entered the picture. It made me think about the many young people who were trying to navigate school expectations while protecting high-risk family members, or those whose parents still had to work while they remained at home. For many, the pressures of care intensified almost overnight.
Together, these dynamics raise an important question: What happens when the category of “young carer” is applied without recognising the structural conditions shaping young people’s lives?
Sometimes competence is mistaken for capacity, and resilience is interpreted as the absence of strain. And when that happens, some young people remain overlooked within a category that was originally created to make invisible labour visible.
When support structures are missing, caring can become isolating and overwhelming, not because young people care for their families, but because institutions fail to see the full picture.
Final thoughts
Writing this work was also, in some ways, therapeutic. It allowed me to put into words reflections that have been forming for years, shaped not only by my own experiences, but by the experiences of friends and peers growing up in a community where caring responsibilities were common but rarely named.
More than anything, I hope this work contributes to a wider conversation about how we recognise and respond to young caring in all its complexity.
Because recognition alone is not enough. Understanding the conditions shaping young people’s lives, and responding to them, is what ultimately makes support meaningful.
Blog by: Emily Farquharson, Social Research Apprentice at ROTA