Work and education
Caring About Equality offers the opportunity to focus on the different inequalities impacting unpaid carers, including the disadvantages carers can face within education and employment.
Education
Young carers can experience significant inequalities at every stage of their education journey, impacting their grades, future opportunities, and social connections with peers.
Attendance figures show that young carers are more likely to miss out on time in school. In England, attendance figures demonstrate young carers miss more than a month of the school year (23 days) on average, compared to 13 days for pupils without a caring role. (1) The difficulties of juggling education and caring responsibilities also reduce the amount of time many young carers can dedicate to learning at home, impacting their grades and performance at school. Two in five (44%) of young carers frequently struggle to study for tests or exams because of the demands of their caring situation. (2)
Inequalities in education persist into higher education, with young adult carers more likely to miss out on the opportunity to study at this level. Research has found that young adult carers in the UK were 38% less likely than their peers to get a degree. (3) Furthermore, for those who do go on to study at university their choices can be limited by their caring responsibilities. UCAS data shows that young adult carers in the UK are 29% more likely than their peers to go to a university or college within a 30 minutes’ drive from home. (4)
Far too often young people are missing out, without the right support to balance caring and education. This Carers Week let’s call for greater support, to ensure more young carers get to fulfil their aspirations and potential.
Employment
The challenge of how to juggle care and paid employment is one that many of us will face during our lifetime, with 1.9 million people in paid employment in the UK becoming unpaid carers every year. (5) Becoming an unpaid carer can lead to the need for many people to make significant changes at work. For instance, Carers UK research based on polling, found that 2.6 million people have given up work to care, and 2 million people have reduced their working hours to care. It also found that 1 in 7 people are juggling work and care. (6) These changes can impact carers’ incomes, future pensions, and their ability to save for the future.
Working age carers in the UK are less likely to be in employment than people without caring responsibilities, 62% compared to 75%, placing them at a greater risk of financial insecurity. This is of significant concern, as difficulty combining paid work with unpaid care is one of the main predictors and drivers of carer poverty. (7)
The challenge of combing work and care can also negatively impact carers’ career aspirations and opportunities. 36% of working carers in the UK said they had turned down a job offer or promotion, or decided not to apply for a job, in the last 12 months because of their caring responsibilities. (8)
More carers, who wish to combine paid work with their caring role, should be supported to thrive in the workplace.
Get involved
- Support Carers Week 2025 and join the call for equality for carers.
- Read our information for carers, including on support to help you balance paid work and care.
- Find out how employers and professionals working in education can get involved in Carers Week.
References
1 Carers Trust attendance analysis of 2023/24 Department of Education attendance figures.
2 Carers Trust (2022) Caring and classes: the education gap for young carers.
3 Baowen Xue, Rebecca E. Lacey, Giorgio Di Gessa, Anne McMunn (2023) Does providing informal care in young adulthood impact educational attainment and employment in the UK?
4 UCAS and Carers Trust (2023) What is the experience of young adult carers in education?
5 Centre for Care (2022) Cycles of caring: transitions in and out of unpaid care.
6 Carers UK (2019) Juggling work and unpaid care.
7 WPI (2024) Poverty and financial hardship of unpaid carers in the UK.
8 University of Sheffield (2020) Supporting working carers - How employers and employees benefit.