School project: Together towards an informal care-friendly school

Research shows that 1 in 5 of young people are confronted with care or illness in their home situation. They experience some consequences of this and these are of course often felt at school.

Samana developed an action model in which a process is followed together with schools: Together towards an informal care-friendly school .

The aim of this project is to create an environment tailored to the school, together with the school, where young informal caregivers feel understood and supported. The schools that have successfully completed this project will be included in the School Network for Young Informal Caregivers. In the schools where the project was already running, between 17 and 25% of the students turned out to be young informal caregivers. This means that almost every class has someone who takes on extra tasks at home. This percentage already indicates the urgency to focus on this target group.

We work together with the school during a school year, tailored to the school. This can be a full school year, starting from September or this can also be, for example, starting from January, where the project can continue until December the following school year.

The intention of the project is not to identify and put young caregivers in the spotlight , but to address the school climate in general through broad awareness and concrete actions. The plans for this are made at school with the students. Ownership lies entirely with the school, but there is very strong support. For example, the process is supervised by a school coach from Samana and Samana also takes care of scientific processing of data, etc.

Participation is free, but a commitment of one school year is required. During this school year, the school's workload is kept as low as possible, with the school coach taking the lead in driving the project.