Young Carers play a vital role in supporting family members, often balancing their caregiving responsibilities with school life. This guide outlines the various ways our young carers can be supported in school.
Caring for someone at home and having to deal with school can become overwhelming. The Young Carer Team can support you by:
The Young Team can come into your school to hold an assembly about Young Carers.
If you are feeling overwhelmed, we can come and talk to you at school.
If you are feeling low, or experiencing anxiety about your caring role, we have a wellbeing service that can support you at school.
Being a Young Carer can be difficult, let your school or teacher know about your caring role so they can support you.
Why not register as a Young Carer? The team can support you in school and outside of school too!
If your school has a Young Carers Lead, talk to them. They can help if you are struggling to balance your caring role with your school life. They can let the Young Carers Team know that you need support.
Create a relaxing bedtime environment. Limit your screen time before bed and try to create a calming atmosphere.
Take Breaks: make time for yourself to relax and recharge.
Talk to Someone: If you’re feeling overwhelmed, it’s okay to reach out to a trusted adult or friend. Why not talk to a member of our team?
Offers support, advice, and resources tailored for young carers, including information on being a young carer.
Provides information and resources for young carers and school staff on support for young carers.
Offers resources for mental health support, including stress management and self-care tips.
A website with lots of advice on ow to tell school you’re a young carer.
Sometimes it’s easier just to talk to someone. If you would like to speak to someone just click the button below and book a time that suits you.
A carer looks after someone in their family, who couldn’t cope without their support, such as a brother or sister, or a parent. We understand you may need some help, to ensure you look after yourself and your wellbeing.
0300 111 1919
Registered Charity Number: 1135507
Company Number: 07140432
Registered Address: Emerald Court, Pilgrim Centre, Brickhill Drive, Bedford, MK41 7PZ
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Young Carers Bedford Borough
We firmly believe that the internet should be available and accessible to anyone, and are committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of circumstance and ability.
To fulfill this, we aim to adhere as strictly as possible to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1) at the AA level. These guidelines explain how to make web content accessible to people with a wide array of disabilities. Complying with those guidelines helps us ensure that the website is accessible to all people: blind people, people with motor impairments, visual impairment, cognitive disabilities, and more.
This website utilizes various technologies that are meant to make it as accessible as possible at all times. We utilize an accessibility interface that allows persons with specific disabilities to adjust the website’s UI (user interface) and design it to their personal needs.
Additionally, the website utilizes an AI-based application that runs in the background and optimizes its accessibility level constantly. This application remediates the website’s HTML, adapts Its functionality and behavior for screen-readers used by the blind users, and for keyboard functions used by individuals with motor impairments.
If you’ve found a malfunction or have ideas for improvement, we’ll be happy to hear from you. You can reach out to the website’s operators by using the following email
Our website implements the ARIA attributes (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) technique, alongside various different behavioral changes, to ensure blind users visiting with screen-readers are able to read, comprehend, and enjoy the website’s functions. As soon as a user with a screen-reader enters your site, they immediately receive a prompt to enter the Screen-Reader Profile so they can browse and operate your site effectively. Here’s how our website covers some of the most important screen-reader requirements, alongside console screenshots of code examples:
Screen-reader optimization: we run a background process that learns the website’s components from top to bottom, to ensure ongoing compliance even when updating the website. In this process, we provide screen-readers with meaningful data using the ARIA set of attributes. For example, we provide accurate form labels; descriptions for actionable icons (social media icons, search icons, cart icons, etc.); validation guidance for form inputs; element roles such as buttons, menus, modal dialogues (popups), and others. Additionally, the background process scans all the website’s images and provides an accurate and meaningful image-object-recognition-based description as an ALT (alternate text) tag for images that are not described. It will also extract texts that are embedded within the image, using an OCR (optical character recognition) technology. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, users need only to press the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn the Screen-reader mode on as soon as they enter the website.
These adjustments are compatible with all popular screen readers, including JAWS and NVDA.
Keyboard navigation optimization: The background process also adjusts the website’s HTML, and adds various behaviors using JavaScript code to make the website operable by the keyboard. This includes the ability to navigate the website using the Tab and Shift+Tab keys, operate dropdowns with the arrow keys, close them with Esc, trigger buttons and links using the Enter key, navigate between radio and checkbox elements using the arrow keys, and fill them in with the Spacebar or Enter key.Additionally, keyboard users will find quick-navigation and content-skip menus, available at any time by clicking Alt+1, or as the first elements of the site while navigating with the keyboard. The background process also handles triggered popups by moving the keyboard focus towards them as soon as they appear, and not allow the focus drift outside it.
Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements.
We aim to support the widest array of browsers and assistive technologies as possible, so our users can choose the best fitting tools for them, with as few limitations as possible. Therefore, we have worked very hard to be able to support all major systems that comprise over 95% of the user market share including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Microsoft Edge, JAWS and NVDA (screen readers).
Despite our very best efforts to allow anybody to adjust the website to their needs. There may still be pages or sections that are not fully accessible, are in the process of becoming accessible, or are lacking an adequate technological solution to make them accessible. Still, we are continually improving our accessibility, adding, updating and improving its options and features, and developing and adopting new technologies. All this is meant to reach the optimal level of accessibility, following technological advancements. For any assistance, please reach out to