Young Carers | Ignite - Forces Children Scotland

The Ignite Project for Young Carers

We have worked directly with young carers from armed forces and veteran families to co-develop an awareness-raising campaign.

Funding from The National Lottery Young Start Programme enabled us to launch this project in primary and secondary schools within the region of Fife.

Primary school Poster Secondary school Poster

What’s the campaign about

It’s about exploring creative ways to raise general awareness of what life is like as a young carer from an armed forces or veteran family today.

It’s also about helping young people, who may not realise that they are young carers, to realise that there’s support available from Forces Children Scotland and Fife Young Carers.

What is a young carer?

A young carer can be anyone, aged 25 and under, who cares for a friend or family member who, due to illness, disability, a mental health problem, or an addiction, cannot cope without their support.

The things young carers will do.

Practical tasks, like cooking, housework, and shopping.
Physical care, such as helping someone out of bed.
Emotional support, including talking to someone distressed.
Personal care, such as helping someone dress.
Managing the family budget and collecting prescriptions.
Helping to give medicine.
Helping someone communicate.
Looking after brothers and sisters.

Being a young carer in the armed forces community

Caring responsibilities can change significantly when a parent is deployed, or, in other cases, some young people may take on temporary caring responsibilities for their stay-at-home parent or siblings. In most cases this leads to limited or no contact with their serving parent, and changes to established routines.

Some young people can experience sudden changes if their parent is injured in service and is medically discharged, who will take on caring responsibilities whilst adapting to significant life changes in terms of identity and possibly moving from established communities of support.

All of which can impact mental health and wellbeing, abilities to do homework or concentrate on school. Due to these added responsibilities, the young carer may also become isolated from their peers.

Co-producing the campaign

Forces Children Scotland worked in partnership with Fife Young Carers to bring a group of young carers together for a series of development sessions to consider their target audience and campaign messaging.

Having explored the possibilities, the group felt the best way to reach their target audience was through a poster and social media-led campaign across Fife.

Having completed all this excellent work, the group developed two separate posters – a cartoon-focused one for primary school children and a photography-led alternative for older young people at secondary school.

Our working group have put QR codes on their secondary school poster to help young carers, teachers and general audiences access further information as quickly as possible through their mobile phones.

The group worked with Bluestar Streaming to co-develop short videos for social media, which focus on sharing their personal stories, their hopes for the project, why this campaign is important and to issue a call to peers to reach out for support.

Our young people launched their posters in primary and secondary schools across Fife during Young Carers Week, who ran a series of sponsored social media campaigns in support of their initiative to maximise reach and engagement.

Listen to members of the working group

In this video, Gracie-Jo, Erin and heather describe the day-to-day routines as young carers from armed forces and veteran families.

What we want to happen next

We want to push our campaign further!

Help us reach and support greater numbers of young carers from armed forces and veteran families across Scotland.

If you work in schools or a community setting, please download our posters and put them up on your noticeboards, promote via email or share on social media.