Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to improve the quality of data held by the Government on young carers and on assessing the needs of young carers, and if she will make a statement.

When a child is assessed as being in need of children’s social care services, social workers will record factors that are relevant to that episode of need, with ‘young carer’ as one of those possible factors. The recorded factors are published annually in the statistics release ‘Characteristics of children in need’, which can be found here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/characteristics-of-children-in-need.

The data for 2019/20, 2020/21, and 2021/22 shows that in England, a young carer was identified in around 18,000-19,000 episodes of need in each year, or around 4% of episodes with assessment factor information recorded. This data can be found here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/data-tables/permalink/af9db862-a2e7-42fa-8b24-08dafb06f66e.

There can be differences in the recording practices between local authorities, therefore the assessment factors data should be treated with a degree of caution.

From January 2023, all primary and secondary education settings in England will be asked annually if a student undertakes caring responsibilities at home, via the School Census. This will increase young carers visibility in the school system, give a wealth of demographic evidence on who young carers are, and provide an annual data collection to help identify long-term trends.