Caring responsibilities start young for many. Hundreds of thousands of young adults in the UK provide unpaid care to family members, juggling the demands of caring responsibilities alongside learning at school, college or in higher education (HE).

As we highlighted in 2023, despite the huge contribution they make, young adult carers often don’t get the support they need, with damaging impacts for their education and longer-term life chances. As a result, young adult carers are 38% less likely to obtain a degree-level qualification than their peers and, shockingly, young people caring for more than 35+ hours per week are 86% less likely to get a degree.

Like all young people, young adult carers deserve the right to go to university if this is where their talents and ambitions take them. However, they often don’t feel supported to do this. Research published by UCAS showed that almost two thirds (63%) of young adult carers say they do not receive support tailored to their circumstances to apply for HE. An even greater proportion (69%) say they were unaware of the support available to them at university or college, and of those that were aware, 21% said that information was difficult to find.

For young adult carers who make it to university, their caring responsibilities don’t simply come to an end. Most continue to care alongside their studies, often influencing the choices they make about university. The UCAS research shows that in selecting where to study, young adult carers are 41% more likely to stay within 30 minutes of home. Alongside balancing their caring role with their studies, young adult carers face a range of pressures in higher education linked to their caring role, including financial worries, impacts on their mental health, the effects of a lack of staff awareness about young adult carers and their needs, and barriers to accessing support. As a result, remaining and succeeding in HE can be a huge challenge:

With the right support in place, however, the experience and outcomes for young adult carers in HE can be different. Better identification of young adult carers is a crucial starting point. The option, since 2023, for students to identify themselves as carers through the UCAS application process is a positive step in this direction. So too is the addition in 2024 of students with caring responsibilities as a distinct group in the Office for Students Equality of Opportunity Risk Register. It’s also encouraging to see increasing numbers of universities building actions to improve support for young adult carers into their Access and Participation Plans, ensuring they are recognised as a priority student group.

Universities have a responsibility to offer good support for young adult carers and L&W’s Driving Change in Higher Education project can help with this. Starting from April 2024, Driving Change, delivered in partnership with Carers Federation, and supported by the National Lottery Community Fund, will work with 25 universities across England over three years. The project offers one-to-one tailored support, free of charge, for each university to develop and embed support that will make a difference for young adult carers. The voices of young adult carers are central to this, both in the delivery of project activities and in the way universities engage with student carers in developing their plans for improvement.

Evidence from research makes clear the need for more tailored and flexible support in HE for young adult carers, to ensure that, like other young people, they have a positive experience of university and can achieve better outcomes. Through Driving Change, an initial group of universities are taking steps to improve their offer for these young people: Queen Mary University London, London South Bank University, University of Hertfordshire, University of Central Lancashire, University of Southampton, York St John University, University of Liverpool, Edge Hill University, University of Law, and University of Chichester. Each university is taking positive steps to offer support that gives young adult carers the best chance of staying in learning, of having a positive experience of higher education, and achieving their degree.

Changes introduced by Driving Change universities include new processes to ensure early identification and increase ongoing identification opportunities, and the introduction of specific packages of financial support, such as bursaries. As one young adult carer from a participating university explained, this intervention was vital to them successfully sustaining and completing their studies:

Other actions include the specific inclusion of young adult carers in key policies such as Extenuating Circumstances and Admissions. New activities to raise understanding of young adult carers and the challenges they can face in HE have meant that academic and support staff better understand and feel more confident in supporting this group of students. Participating universities are also joining up with local carers services, for example running specific young adult carer events. This is helping young adult carers and their families identify that the university is carer friendly, encouraging them to consider an HE pathway and helping to support their transition from FE to university.

Support for young adult carers has come a long way in recent years, but there is more work to be done to ensure these young people have equal opportunities to their peers without caring responsibilities.