Young Adult Carers in the UK - The Princess Royal Trust for Carers

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Rosie is finding life extremely difficult as she seeks to balance new motherhood with
parenting her siblings and maintaining a relationship with her baby’s father. Poverty
and a lack of family support have left Rosie feeling excluded and unable to pursue work,
leisure or social activities for herself or her family. In addition, Rosie’s siblings present
challenging behaviour, attributable to their own loss and trauma, and this is
undermining the stability of this family unit.
Rosie regrets not having the opportunity to build an independent life with her partner
and baby. She knows little about her entitlements to services and feels particularly let
down by children’s services, which she says have not followed through their offers of
support. Rosie and one of her siblings are receiving some support from a local project
for children whose parents have problems with substance misuse. She is very concerned
that her sister has been out of school for some months with nothing else in place for
her. Ideally, Rosie would like to train as a plumber if she could get the opportunity
to return to college but for now she sees this as a remote possibility.
Young adult carers, dependent on state benefits, spoke of the implications of their financial
circumstances and the ‘felt exclusion’ from their peers. For many it restricted their ability
to go out socially, take a holiday or buy personal items like clothing:
“…like when summer comes, like my friends, they all want to do something, but I always
have to watch my pennies, I can go maybe next week, but not this week, sort of thing.
And it just puts a downer on the rest of them, well if you don’t go then we’re going
to have to change it all around and stuff, and I just feel really bad”. (Daljit, aged 21)
“The toughest thing is having no money to go out and buy clothes, I mean I have to wash
my clothes every day just so I’ve got clean clothes to wear again and some are getting too
small for me to wear”. (Sarah, aged 18)
Educational Maintenance Allowance
Box 7.1: Educational Maintenance Allowance
EMA is a means-tested benefit designed to support young people from low income
families to remain in education or specified training programmes. Young people aged
16-18 can claim it and based on parental income they can recieve up to £30 per week
(England). The benefit is available in other UK countries too.
Virtually all the young adult carers in our sample who had been to college had received
an Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA) and this had been an important source of
income for them. What frustrated and dismayed some was when this allowance was under
threat because of their attendance dropping due to caring. There was a view that colleges
had to be more flexible about this for young adult carers as sometimes their lack of
attendance was beyond their control. Some participants described how they had to
supplement the family income from their own education allowance because benefit amounts
were insufficient for their family’s needs or because parents were unable to manage their
money well enough. For example, Kelly explained how she has to be very careful about
spending her adult learning grant because she needs to ‘loan’ it to her parents to help
pay for household bills as her mother has a tendency to waste money and her father
spends his money on alcohol.
There was evidence that many young adult carers did not understand the benefits or income
coming into their household as this was seen more as the domain of their parent(s) or
relative(s). As long as this attitude prevails young adult carers are in no position to be able
to question or seek advice about whether their family is receiving all to which it is entitled.