Carers into Work Works
Our Carers Into Work Project (formerly the Return to Work Project) has had a wonderful year continuing to support unpaid carers of working age across the North of Tyne to pursue their goals – whether these are finding or retaining employment, education, volunteering, and/or training.
To welcome in the New Year, we want to highlight our key achievements as well as promote exciting developments by our partners.
Goodbye 2023!
Since our Project extension in March 2023, the Carers Into Work Project has now received over 50 referrals for unpaid carers from the three Carers’ Centres in the North of Tyne region – Carers Northumberland, Newcastle Carers, and North Tyneside Carers’ Centre.
With the majority of these carers actively accessing support, these referrals mean that the Carers Into Work Project has now engaged with over 300 carers since March 2020 – not bad considering there was a global pandemic during this time!
Of these 300 carers, we have supported a number of them to achieve their goals such as employment, training, and volunteering. We have boosted carers’ confidence and ability to maintain these achievements with support around soft skills such as arranging free long-term career coaching with an accredited mentor.
We have also increased carers’ awareness of other support to help them pursue their goals such as assistive technology, discretionary support, and legal changes such as Carers’ Leave and the new Flexible Working Regulations.
Carers engaged with the Project continue to provide positive feedback about the support, highlighting the need for carer-specific employability provisions to continue:
Hello 2024!
We will strive to continue this hard work and reach our project milestone of 350 carers engaged by April 2024, with as many carers supported as possible to achieve their goals within this period.
We look forward to engaging with service providers across the North of Tyne and wider to promote the support offered to unpaid carers both generally as well as through training on specialist topics such as carers’ rights within employment. If you and your organisation would like to hear more about this work, please do get in touch with us at ciwreferrals@ntcarers.co.uk
We are also excited to see a range of new support being provided by local and national organisations to promote unpaid carers and support them to navigate work alongside other next steps. For instance, the Government have just added a new ‘Working whilst Caring’ page to their Job Help campaign.
This addition, alongside legal changes such as Carers’ Leave and the new Flexible Working Regulations, signifies a rising national awareness of unpaid carers and the need to support them to pursue and remain in work. We hope that this awareness continues to rise and lead to more concrete support being introduced within 2024, to help more unpaid carers to thrive in the New Year.
Get In Touch!
If you wish to reach out to your local Carers’ Centre and discuss the support available, please get in touch with them at:
Best Wishes,
The Carers Into Work Team