Young carers

An early help assessment is a simple way to help identify your needs. It involves listening to you and your family to find out what your needs are and what is working well in your family’s life.

The assessment is carried out by a member of our team. They will ask you questions such as:

• Who are your immediate family members, such as parents, brothers or sisters? Do they live with you?
• What health conditions do the people who live with you have?
• Who is in your support network? This could include family, friends, care professionals or other people in the community
• Do you already access any local services, such as community or voluntary groups?

When the assessment is finished, we’ll provide you with a copy of your early help assessment.

Once we have your completed early help assessment, we’ll contact you by telephone to arrange a date when we can visit you to complete a young carer’s assessment.

Before you have your assessment, think about the following questions and whether being a carer is having a significant impact on these or other things in your life:

• What caring duties are you responsible for?
• How long do you spend on your caring duties each day?
• Are you getting enough sleep and eating well?
• Is your health being affected by caring?
• Can you still socialise with family or friends?
• Is juggling schoolwork and caring difficult?
• Can you enjoy hobbies the way you used to?
• Are you happy to continue being a carer?

On the day of your assessment, you and your family will visit Anlaby Children’s Centre and meet with a support worker from our young carer’s team. If there is anyone else you or parents feel should be there, you are welcome to invite them.

You’ll be asked questions about:

• the type of care you provide
• the tasks you carry out and how you feel about them
• how long you spend caring for someone each day
• how much you are relied on by your family to maintain the wellbeing of the person you care for
• the effect your caring duties have on things like your wellbeing and education
• how being a carer affects your life and the needs you have.

Give as much detail as possible as this will help make sure you get the support you need.

Our support worker will look at any support you currently get and whether we could provide you with support, so that you do less or none of the caring tasks you currently do.

Please note: assessments usually last about an hour.

We will use your assessment to decide if you need to access any of our services to meet your needs.

We will contact you to give you an idea of the sort of support that you can expect. This could be:

• help to create a support plan that explains how we will help you, and detail any council service you can access
• guidance of where to get the help you need within the local community and other organisations, such as charities.