Making caring visible and valued this Carers Week

2 mins read

Monday 7 June 2021

It’s Carers Week 2021 and this year’s theme is making caring visible and valued.

Millions of adults and young people make an enormous contribution to our society every single day by selflessly providing round-the-clock care for disabled family members, friends and loved ones in the UK.

At Contact, we work with parent carers in lots of ways to raise awareness of the invaluable work they do in caring for their children and young people with additional needs.

How we support parent carers

At the beginning of the pandemic, our Covid-19 vaccine campaign successfully led to parent carers being prioritised for the jab. Our vaccine campaign continues as we now call for priority access to a vaccine for the 61,800 clinically extremely vulnerable children across the UK. Without it, tens of thousands of families we support will be left with no roadmap out of lockdown. 

Our work as a leading member of the Disabled Children’s Partnership has shone a spotlight throughout the pandemic on its impact on parent carers. Most recently, our focus has been on the struggle many families continue to have when accessing essential services and the severe levels of social isolation many families are experiencing despite the easing of lockdown.

Contact also supports the 151 parent carer forums (PCFs) across England through our contract with the Department for Education. The collective voice of over 96,000 parent carer forum members is a powerful way to make caring visible and valued, sharing parent carer views and experiences with local authorities and health providers and helping improve both local and national services for children and young people with SEND and their families.   

Look out later this week when we’ll be telling you more about how you can help us shine a light on the financial impact of the pandemic as we launch this year’s Counting the Costs survey.

Sign up to our free e-newsletters to make sure you keep up to date with all our latest news and information for families with disabled children.

Take a look at all the free workshops we have coming up for parent carers, and book a chat with our Listening Ear service if you are looking for some practical or emotional support.