Role Description – School Lead for Young Carers
This is senior role and is an integral part of the responsibilities shared by leadership team in the school. The School Lead for Young Carers role is to oversee the policy and provision for young carers in the school. The person undertaking the role should have sufficient influence in the school to advocate for young carers and their families.
This description is presented as a role rather than a job description as a leadership team could share these tasks to manage identification, provision and support for young carers and their families.
However, whether the role is shared or not, one person should hold the title, take the lead and network with other agencies so that the school benefits fully from local and national support and guidance available.
Key tasks and responsibilities
- As a member of the school leadership team, ensure appropriate strategies, policies and procedures are in place to proactively identify young carers, ensuring that their needs are recognised and met.
- To ensure that those young people who have caring responsibilities are supported
- effectively and enabled to meet Every Child Matters outcomes and that they have the same access to educational and career choices as their peers.
- To lead on establishing staff induction, training and information to enable staff to:
- recognise the signs that a child or young person has caring responsibilities
- increase their understanding of the impact of such responsibilities,
- ensuring that they are aware of the identified school lead with responsibility for young carers, and
- help young carers and their families understand how this support can be accessedTo ensure that the curriculum promotes a full understanding and acceptance of, and respect for, the issues and needs of young carers and their families, promoting positive images and challenging stereotypes around disability and impairment.
- Monitor relevance of existing school policies e.g. attendance, anti bullying, procedures and practice on the well being and specific needs of young carers. Report strengths, weaknesses and recommendations to school leadership team and governors for inclusion in school development plan.
- Use and evaluate existing data effectively to monitor the welfare and progress made by young carers. Highlight barriers to achievement such as poor attendance and punctuality, failure to complete homework, non engagement with extended school or extra-curricular activities and work with appropriate colleagues to remove / reduce these barriers enabling young carer to achieve their full potential.
- To establish a first point of contact for young carers and their families within the school, encouraging young carers and their families to self identify and to discuss any barriers they face and additional help they may need. The designated lead may choose to have Key Contacts in each year group or key stage in larger schools.
- Ensure that young carers and their families receive coordinated support by communicating effectively and working in partnership with internal and external support agencies using Common Assessment Framework.