Building for belonging: Embedding Young Carers in systems from beginning to end

After four weeks of travelling through the US and the UK as part of my Churchill Fellowship, I landed in London with a full heart, a tired body, and a mind hungry for more insights. I had already visited schools, advocacy organisations, universities, and government departments across the US and Manchester, and now, I was in one of the busiest cities in the world hoping to answer a big question: What does best practice support for Young Carers look like, and how do we build systems that recognise, include, and empower them at every level?

London didn’t disappoint. Over two packed weeks, I met with policymakers, program leads, researchers, school inclusion advocates, and health professionals all working in very different contexts, yet connected by a shared ambition to do better by Young Carers. And among these conversations, a few powerful themes emerged.

Let me start at the end, or what felt like the crescendo of my visit: The England Young Carers Festival. Held at YMCA Fairthorne Manor and hosted by The Children’s Society, this annual event brings together almost 1,000 Young Carers from across England for three days of fun, rest, and connection.

To call it a festival almost doesn’t do it justice. Yes, there were fairground rides, silent discos, glitter tents, DJs and food trucks. But there was also something deeper happening, a collective exhale. For many attendees, this was the first time they’d ever been surrounded by people who understood their life without needing to explain it. It was the first time they felt like kids first, not carers first.

And amidst the fun, there were also opportunities for impact. The Voice Zone, a dedicated space for Young Carers to reflect, give feedback, and share their experiences, is where systemic change often begins. Their insights have historically informed legislation and strengthened rights for Young Carers across the UK. To witness that combination of celebration and civic engagement was inspiring. We often underestimate the power of joyful connection, but here it was, in full colour.

A big thank you to the team at Carers Trust for having me on your Voice Zone activity for the day. I was proud to be representing an innovative, sector-leading organisation, collecting Young Carer experiences that directly feed into the work of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Young Carers and Young Adult Carers.

Back in the offices of London, the conversations turned more technical, but one theme was consistently clear: you cannot support a Young Carer in isolation.

At Dementia UK, I spoke with Hannah Gardner, a Consultant Admiral Nurse who works specifically with children and young people. Her team doesn’t just provide emotional support to Young Carers; they also work with parents and families, offering education, communication strategies, and tools to talk about diagnoses like dementia in child-friendly ways. As Hannah said, “Sometimes you have to work through the adult to get to the child.”

This idea of working with families, not just for young people, was echoed across several organisations. Carly Ellicott, a researcher from the University of Plymouth, is exploring the impact of caring on children under six, a group that is rarely acknowledged in literature or practice. Her insights challenged me to think more deeply about prevention, identity formation, and relational pedagogy. “If we’re not supporting Young Carers when their needs are low,” she shared, “then they won’t have the skills when support needs are heavier.”

Claire Briston from Newcastle Carers offered some of the most nuanced reflections on what inclusion truly means in practice. Claire’s team had noticed that very few asylum seekers or refugees were identified as carers within their services, even though, based on data from their local area, and individual circumstances, it was likely many of them were in caring roles.

Instead of expecting people to fit into an existing model, Newcastle Carers shifted their approach. They partnered with local refugee and asylum seeker organisations, offering culturally safe and inclusive programs where caring was introduced through shared meals, creative sessions, and storytelling. These gatherings weren’t about labelling participants as carers but about creating space for stories and trust to emerge organically. The result? A 4000% increase in identification.

Claire’s reflections reminded me that when working with people from marginalised or systemically excluded communities, we can’t always lead with the caring role, we have to lead with relationships, belonging, and culture. Systems that rely solely on formal pathways and eligibility criteria often miss the people who need support most.

In a conversation that continues to resonate with me, Fiona Rogers from the Queen’s Institute of Community Nursing (QICN) highlighted the enormous opportunity we have in community and public health settings to better identify and support Young Carers, if only we ask the right questions.

Fiona’s work spans systems thinking, integrated care boards, and frontline nursing. She spoke about equipping health professionals – from district nurses to health visitors and GP staff – to include questions about unpaid care in their routine assessments. “People live in communities, not hospitals,” she reminded me. That means if we’re serious about a whole-of-system response, we need to support professionals in every corner of the community to raise awareness, identify Young Carers, and know what to do next.

What struck me most was the passion of someone whose formal role doesn’t say “Young Carer Advocate”, but who has chosen to be one. “What I think is normal to know is not normal,” she said. “Most professionals don’t know what’s available locally. They don’t know what to do with the answer if they ask the question.”

The lesson is that it’s not just about policy, it’s about creating cultures of curiosity and embedding carer awareness into everyday professional practice.

From health to education, I also had the chance to speak with Kit Rooney from The Difference, an organisation focused on building inclusive practices in schools across England. Kit and her team are reframing the issue of “lost learning”, not just as poor attendance or academic failure, but as a symptom of systems that aren’t designed with vulnerable children in mind.

The Difference takes a tiered approach, working directly with schools to implement whole-school inclusion strategies and train leaders to become inclusion experts. One key insight they shared was about the visibility of Young Carers: many schools only notice them when care needs become extreme. The result, similar to Carly’s perspective, is that we are missing opportunities for early intervention and support.

Their Inclusion Framework includes practical strategies – from universal classroom provisions (like noise-cancelling headphones or fidget toys for all students) to high-level leadership training and school policy reform. Kit stressed the importance of making inclusion everybody’s business, not just the job of one passionate teacher or assistant.

It reminded me again of the critical role culture plays in systemic change. If schools, or any institution, rely solely on checklists or top-down programs, inclusion becomes fragile. But if we invest in the people and processes that surround Young Carers daily, we shift from reactive support to meaningful prevention.

Another key meeting was with Andy McGowan, Policy and Practice Manager at Carers Trust, who offered a birds-eye view of national strategy and network design. Carers Trust convenes over 130 organisations – 97 of which work directly with Young Carers – and facilitates regular communities of practice, shared frameworks, and policy advocacy. Their goal is not just to support the individual, but to shift the system that surrounds them.

Andy talked about the importance of building policy from both data and lived experience, ensuring that reforms don’t just reference Young Carers but actually include them as co-designers. He also raised critical questions about transition: how we ensure that young people don’t become dependent on services designed for their youth, but instead are supported to move into adult life with freedom, dignity, and choice.

Carers Trust is also exploring innovative models for engaging the 18–25 age cohort and tackling systemic barriers like transport, economic exclusion, and digital access. Their insight was clear: we can’t keep Young Carers hidden in policy or isolated in practice. Mainstreaming by embedding carer recognition and response into universal systems is not only necessary, it’s strategic.

At the Department for Education, Andrew Baxter shared the progress of adding Young Carers as a marker in the school census, enabling clearer tracking of attendance, suspensions, and academic outcomes. While still in the early days, the data is helping to show a compelling (if incomplete) story: Young Carers are more likely to miss school, more likely to be excluded, and often struggle in silence.

This data is now feeding into larger reforms around attendance, wellbeing, and inclusive education. “We’re not waiting for perfect data,” Andrew said. “What we have is already powerful.”

Mainstreaming was also a core theme in my conversation with Nic Brimblecombe, who has long worked at the intersection of health and care policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Nic spoke about the complexity of moving from recognition to action in a system that is still catching up on carer identification. She reminded me that while legislative frameworks are essential, change rarely happens without champions – people inside the system who raise their hands and say, “What about carers?”

Nic also reflected on the need for strategic alignment across departments – not just tokenistic collaboration, but co-owned outcomes that stretch across health, education, and social services; and the different support offerings that exist across the UK, from intensive one-on-one programs, through to group-based respite excursions. Nic’s reflection was that best practice sits somewhere in the middle of the two types of support, as long as the service remains flexible enough to meet the Young Carers and their family where they’re at. 

This approach was echoed in a meeting with NHS England, where I learned about the work being done to embed Young Carers into digital health records, streamline coding systems, and build referral pathways that actually trigger support. The long-term vision is a “no wrong door” approach, pulling on the Carers Trust “No Wrong Doors” framework, where being identified as a Young Carer, in any system, opens up the same access to help.

From policy, I turned to practice, exploring the innovative programs offered by MYTIME Young Carers, based in Bournemouth. In their Level Up program, their team partners with schools to embed a Young Carer Champion, deliver whole-school training, and facilitate peer groups that are not about “being a carer” but about connection and wellbeing. Their work is built on relationships, not compliance and it’s working, with over 98% of local schools engaged in the Bournemouth area.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution. But my time in London reminded me that there is a collective ambition we can share. The UK doesn’t have everything right. They still face postcode lotteries, digital barriers, and funding limitations, but are doing everything they can to head in the right direction. They’re embedding Young Carers into broader reforms. They’re building cross-sector strategies. They’re valuing lived experience. And they’re finding ways to balance joy and justice, as I saw so clearly at the Young Carers Festival.

As I begin to reflect on what implementation of principles of best practice might look like in Australia, my call out is simple. If you’re working in a school, a GP clinic, a community service, or anywhere young people show up, Young Carers are already in your world. They may not use the label. They may not always ask for help. But they’re there.

What would it look like if your policies, systems, and culture were built with them in mind from the beginning?

I’d love to collaborate with others thinking about these questions, across Australia and internationally, not waiting for perfection but rather building systems that listen, include, and evolve.

Written by Madeleine Buchner OAM