Mark Sewards

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Pritchard. I start by thanking my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) for securing the debate. My experience as a maths teacher at a secondary school taught me about the barriers to opportunity that students face. As I have highlighted these issues many times and will continue to do so as a member of the Education Committee, I want to focus today on the lack of support for young carers, primarily because that has been raised by my constituents. A recent report by the Carers Trust highlights the issues. It spoke to almost 25,000 pupils and 65 young carer services for the report, which highlighted three main concerns. First, caring can have a significant negative impact on education, opportunity and attendance. In 2022-23, young carers on average missed more than a month of their education, which was nine days more than their classmates who were not carers. The report also found that, in England, almost a half of young carers were persistently absent from secondary school that year. The second area of concern was that many young carers are not spotted or recognised while they are in education. Only a quarter of the respondents to the survey agreed that teachers had a good understanding of their challenges. Although many local young carer services are promoting awareness-raising campaigns, only a third of them said that they had the capacity to give education providers the help they need to identify young carers. The third area highlighted in the report was the inconsistency of support offered to young carers in education. Almost one in four young carers stated that there was no support for them in their college, school or university. What can we do to tackle that? There are two things I would like to ask the Minister to consider. First, to consider adding young carers to the Department for Education’s daily attendance reporting scheme. That will help to inform schools and local authorities about the young carers who are missing from school and their level of attendance. Secondly, I ask the Minister to consider introducing a young carers’ pupil premium. That would ensure that schools had the funding they need to support all the young carers in their educational institutions. In conclusion, I am very keen to support young carers in our community.