February 21, 2017

The Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland, in partnership with Carers Trust and Scottish Young Carers Services Alliance, commissioned Blake Stevenson to gather the views of young carers on their mental health and wellbeing.  For this project, we collaborated with a local illustrator who attended the Scottish Young Carers Festival with us to work with young carers to design illustrations for the survey while we piloted the questions.

We distributed the survey through carers’ groups and analysed the results in collaboration with the University of St Andrews Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children team. This allowed us to make comparisons not only between young carers with different levels of responsibility, but also between the young carers sample and other young people who don’t have caring responsibilities but are from similar demographic groups.

Our full report, ‘Coping is Difficult, But I Feel Proud’, was laid before the Scottish Parliament today, and can now be read on the Children and Young People’s Commissioner’s website: http://www.cypcs.org.uk/ufiles/CopingWithCaring.pdf