Supporting school staff to support young carers: EdyCare Online Course
The final output of the EdyCare project has been published. Seeking to make the project outcomes available to the largest possible number of learners in partner countries as well as in Europe, an e-learning course on young carers is available in the five languages of the project partner countries (English, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish and Slovenian).
By reading/hearing personal stories of young carers, participants of the course will get to understand what it means to have to juggle caring responsibilities with education. Moreover, thanks to an overview of good practices from other European countries, school teachers can get inspiration on how to support young carers in your school. The course seeks to show that small organisational adjustments or adaptations in educational methodologies can translate into big changes for the lives of many young carers.
In this way, the course seeks not only to increase awareness of teachers about the needs of young carers, but also to encourage better school attainment for young carers in the longer term.
The e-learning course, accessible through the Moodle platform, was designed to be accessible and to maximise exposure to information in a short period of time, with the course taking c. 60 minutes to complete.
The course consists of three modules:
- Module 1: Understanding the phenomenon of young carers in school context
- Module 2: Supporting young carers in schools: international experiences
- Module 3: Supporting young carers in schools: experiences and tools in [country] – this module is not available in English
Each module is a mix of theoretical information and practical activities (case-study, videos etc.)
A survey of registered users of the course has had overwhelmingly positive results, with all users suggesting they had learned a lot about young carers and would recommend the training to colleagues.