Tech4YoungCarers: The Evidence After One Year

19 Feb 2026 01:15 PM

Young carers are often expected to operate in a digital-by-default world while living in anything but. Caring responsibilities interrupt the usual rhythm of schoolwork, online learning, and staying connected with friends. When access is fragile, the smallest technical problem becomes a genuine barrier.

That is the context for the Tech4YoungCarers one-year evaluation report released today by the Digital Poverty Alliance, alongside an in-person discussion in Cambridge focused on what the first year of evidence is showing.

Tech4YoungCarers has been delivered in Cambridgeshire in partnership with E2BN, with support from Cambridgeshire Local Authority. Between August 2024 and November 2025, 100 young carers aged 14 to 25 were enrolled. The independent evaluation was led by Nottingham Trent University and draws on referral data, interviews, and survey data collected across three time-points.

The referral findings challenge a familiar assumption about digital access. At the point of referral, 83% of young carers had access to a smartphone. Only 9% had access to a laptop or computer, and 13% had access to a tablet. The biggest reported barrier to being online was access to a computer, cited by 85%, with device-sharing also reported. Access existed, but it was not the kind of access that can carry schoolwork, deadlines, and the everyday admin that now sits online.

The interviews sit beside those numbers and show how this plays out. A young carer describes a device freezing repeatedly, stress building, and Zoom failing at the moment they were trying to speak. Another describes the lack of choice at home in a single line: “we kind of take what we can get”.

The evaluation then tracks what changes once the basics are in place. There was evidence that Tech4YoungCarers supported young carers’ ability to complete schoolwork and develop new skills, including employment-related skills. Young carers also described wider household effects, including lower stress, time freed up to help, and additional digital capacity at home. One beneficiary’s family summed up the difference in five words: “It matters a great deal.”

Elizabeth Anderson, CEO, Digital Poverty Alliance, puts the central point plainly: “This report begins from a simple reality. For young carers, digital access is not a convenience layered onto everyday life. It is bound up with school, care, communication, and the ability to keep going when time and energy are already stretched.”

The recommendations follow directly from that reality. A suitable laptop needs to be treated as a baseline requirement for young carers in education and training, designed for long-term access rather than short-term loans that return the problem a few months later. Connectivity needs to be addressed alongside provision, including practical routes to in-home Wi-Fi at no-cost where possible, and clearer awareness in schools of what support already exists. The report also underlines two points that too often get missed: impact is household-level as well as individual, and skills and confidence are built through use, not as a precondition. Finally, young carers need explicit recognition within digital inclusion policy so provision matches real patterns of need, not assumption.

Read the full report here