Comic Relief and the Princess Royal Trust for Carers

Comic Relief and The Princess Royal Trust for Carers

Young Carers Grants Programme 2006-10

Final Evaluation Report

June 2009

Fiona Becker and Saul Becker

The University of Nottingham

First published in Great Britain in June 2009 by Young Carers International Research and Evaluation, School of Sociology and Social Policy, The University of Nottingham.

School of Sociology and Social Policy

University of Nottingham

University Park

Nottingham NG7 2RD

Telephone: 0115 951 4546

© Fiona Becker and Saul Becker

Fiona Becker is Senior Research Fellow, School of Sociology and Social Policy, The University of Nottingham.

Saul Becker is Professor of Social Policy and Social Care, School of Sociology and Social Policy, The University of Nottingham.

The right of Fiona Becker and Saul Becker to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act.

All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the authors.

The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the authors and not of The Princess Royal Trust for Carers, Comic Relief or The University of Nottingham. The Princess Royal Trust for Carers, Comic Relief and The University of Nottingham disclaim any responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication.

Acknowledgements:

Thanks to Alex Fox, Siobhain Flynn and Danni Manzi from The Princess Royal Trust for Carers for their ongoing support.

Citation: This publication should be cited as:

Becker, F. and Becker, S. (2009) Comic Relief and The Princess Royal Trust for Carers Young Carers Grants Programme 2006-10: Final Evaluation Report, Nottingham: School of Sociology and Social Policy, The University of Nottingham.

Content Page

1: Introduction to the grants programme 4

2: The numbers & characteristics of the young carers and their families 8

3: Outcomes from the grants programme 12

4: Case studies 20

5: Beyond the grant funding – what next? 29

6: References 31

List of Tables

Table 1: Numbers of young carers being supported by projects by gender 8

Table 2: Numbers of young carers being supported by age 9

Table 3: Number of young carers supported from priority groups 9

Table 4: The families of young carers by care needs 10

Table 5: Family characteristics of young carers being supported 10

Table 6: The outcomes for young carers supported by the grant funded work 13

Table 7: Extent to which intended outcomes were achieved by projects 14

Table 8: Extent to which intended outcomes were achieved by projects 18

Appendix

Appendix one: Summary of the grant funded projects 32

1: Introduction to the Grants Programme

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Comic Relief commissioned The Princess Royal Trust for Carers (The Trust) to distribute grant funding to services supporting young carers, under 21 years of age, during 2006 and 2007.

Young carers have been defined as “children and young persons under 18 who provide or intend to provide care, assistance or support to another family member. They carry out, often on a regular basis, significant or substantial caring tasks and assume a level of responsibility that would usually be associated with an adult. The person receiving care is often a parent but can be a sibling, grandparent or other relative who is disabled, has some chronic illness, mental health problem or other condition connected with a need for care, support or supervision” (Becker, 2000, p.378).

This report presents the evaluation findings up to May 2009. At the point of preparing this report only half of the total amount of monitoring data were available as the remainder is not due until later in 2009 or 2010 due to staggered start dates of the funded projects. Hence this final report provides a partial picture of the progress of the funded projects. Data and figures should therefore be treated with caution as they represent the first one and half years of programme activity and not the total outcome of the grants programme.

The Young Carers Grants Programme

The Young Carers Grants Programme was open to all registered charities and registered charitable companies in the UK who were or who intended to support young carers. The programme aims were:

·  To encourage services for young carers to focus on those most in need of support: those that are hard to reach or from under-represented communities or the most vulnerable young carers or those with the heaviest caring responsibilities.

·  To fund work that demonstrates the value of planned and outcome-focused work.

·  To generate a toolkit of ideas and good practice examples to share sector-wide.

·  To provide services that focus on direct support to young carers themselves and also promote the ethos that young carers work should strengthen families.

Altogether grants were awarded to 44 projects located across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The total number of young carers estimated to benefit from the grants programme work was just under 1,500.

The total value of the grants programme was a little under one million pounds and of that:

·  The total value of grants awarded was £841,994 of which £59,829 was spent on 31 small grants and £782,165 was spent on 13 large grants. Three rounds for grant allocation were held between 2006 and 2007.

·  Large grants were up to £25,000 per annum for a maximum of 3 years, with a 50% taper in year 3. The individual maximum grant value being £62,500.

·  Small grants were for funding individual support for up to eight young carers. The individual maximum grant value being £2,000.

The large grants were allocated to a variety of projects both within and outside of The Trust’s network of 85 young carers services. The focus and location and nature of the funded work varied according to identified need such that the large grants programme consisted of the following 13 projects:

·  7 projects were supporting young carers from families with all types of care needs although three of these had a specific focus on supporting young carers with specific characteristics linked to their ethnicity, age or gender (BME, 16 plus and male respectively).

·  5 projects were supporting young carers caring for parents with mental ill health and/or substance misuse problems.

In addition:

·  3 out of the 13 projects were delivering interventions primarily through schools.

·  3 out of 13 projects were delivered by organisations new to delivering a service for young carers.

·  2 projects were seeking to specifically support BME young carers.

Scope of the evaluation

Recognising the value of learning about effectiveness of interventions for young carers, The Trust commissioned Young Carers International Research and Evaluation at The University of Nottingham to undertake an independent evaluation of the Young Carers Grants Programme 2006-10. A toolkit of learning and resources generated by funded projects will be available in 2010 and therefore this report does not draw out the key learning across the grants programme rather it considers the outcomes of the funded interventions.

An interim evaluation report was produced in August 2007. This included an evaluation of the grant application and allocation process, early findings from small and large grant funded projects and a summary of all the funded work. The Trust used the findings from this report to amend their grant allocation process for the subsequent Comic Relief/PRTC Young Carers Grants Programme which was launched in 2008. They decided not to replicate the small grants programme because although useful it could have only a limited impact given the small amount of funding it brought to projects.

This final evaluation report concerns the 13 large grant projects that are due to complete their funded work at the end of 2009 or 2010. A summary of the interventions funded is provided in appendix one. The evaluation has been conducted at a programme, rather than project level. As the evaluation report was required by Comic Relief and The Trust prior to the completion of the funded work it has been based on data available up to May 2009. The sources of data used for the evaluation report are:

·  grant application forms;

·  annual monitoring returns submitted by projects to The Trust

·  semi-structured telephone interviews with funded projects during February - May 2009.

Unfortunately, it was not feasible, within given resources, to interview young carers and their families for their views of the funded work. Rather it was the responsibility of projects to ensure they had their own monitoring and evaluation systems in place and to use this information in reporting back to the Trust. However, this does mean that there were no consistent evaluation tools being used across all projects, something since rectified for the Young Carers Grants Programme 2008-11 (Joseph, Becker and Becker, 2009).

The key objectives for the evaluation were to:

·  Provide a synthesis of the monitoring data in order to show the characteristics of the children and families who have used the large grant funded services;

·  Generate findings about the outcomes of the funded work in respect of (a)The personal development, social relationships, education and well-being of young carers; and (b) The families of young carers;

·  Identify the impacts of the funded work on children’s caring roles;

·  Identify the extent to which projects will continue beyond the grant-funded period, other funding sources they have identified or their exit strategies.

2: The numbers and characteristics of the young carers and their families that were supported

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The thirteen grant funded projects supported a total of 567 young carers during their first year of funding which suggests they are on target to meet the intended 1,500 young carers to be supported over the three years of grant funding. A further 345 young carers were supported by six projects in year two. These totals mask the fact that the actual numbers of young carers supported by each project varied considerably. Looking at year one, the numbers supported by each project ranged from 8 to 149 young carers. This wide variation seemed to be due to: the type and intensity of the intervention; the extent to which the intervention adopted a whole family approach; whether the intervention was already established or brand new; the target audience for the intervention; and staffing issues (sickness and recruitment). The extent of development work that projects needed to do to set up a new service had clearly been underestimated in some instances thus reducing the number of young carers that were supported in the first year of operation in some projects. In a minority of cases projects were very dependent on the co-operation of others to be able to deliver their service and there were examples of where this did not go as smoothly as expected making it harder to achieve identified aims and objectives.

Tables 1 to 6 tell us something about the numbers and characteristics of the young carers in receipt of the funded interventions to date.

Numbers supported by gender and age

Table 1: Numbers of young carers being supported by projects by gender

Round one or two projects / Year one
female male / Year two
female male
Round One (n=6) / 157 119 / 182 163
Round Two (n=7) / 135 156 / n/a n/a
Totals / 292 275 / 182 163

Note: n/a = not yet available. Data for 18 months equivalent (out of 36).

One project did not provide data for year one.

The number of males and females being supported across the grants programme has been broadly even, with slightly more females being supported overall. This was also the case at individual project level except for one project that was specifically for male young carers. Overall, projects have done well to engage with male young carers as anecdotal evidence suggests they can find it harder to admit to their caring responsibilities and/or to use support services on offer.

Table 2: Numbers of young carers being supported by age

Age groups / Year one (n=13 projects) / Year two (n=6 projects)
Under 11 / 142 / 95
11-15 / 273 / 194
16 - under 21 / 152 / 56
Totals / 567 / 345

Note: Data for 18 months equivalent (out of 36). One project did not provide data for year one.

Nearly half of all the young carers supported in year one were aged 11-15 and the rest were evenly spread in the other two age groups. In year two this age pattern was replicated in the round one funded projects. However, there were differences in the age range of young carers being supported at the individual project level depending on the type of provision and the specific target audience.

Numbers supported by priority groups

Data was collected by projects about the priority groups they reached and illustrated here in Table 3:

Table 3: Number of young carers supported from priority groups

Priority groups / Year one (n=13 projects) / Year two (n=6 projects)
Under-represented communities or hard to reach young carers / 393 / 275
The most vulnerable young carers or those with the heaviest caring responsibilities / 363 / 181

Note: Data for 18 months equivalent (out of 36).