Children and young people from Crossroads Care Young Carers project took part in the BBC’s Children in Need appeal day, choosing the songs for an hour during the Chris Evans Breakfast Show, writes Julie Blackburn.

Crossroads Care children’s officer Hannah Murphy said: ’They picked their favourite songs, they even had really good fun singing some of the songs.

’It was across the decades with lots of influence from mums and dads and family friends as well and they did a little recording to go with it.’

The recording, which introduced their hour-long ’takeover’, had the youngsters all joining in, saying: ’We are Crossroads Care young carers from the Isle of Man and we have chosen the songs for the next hour.’

Young carers across the British Isles took part in the ’takeover’ to raise awareness of and celebrate young carers.

The youngsters from the island were approached by the BBC to take part because a grant from Children in Need is helping to support the project over three years.

Hannah went on to explain that the project supports young carers literally from birth: ’Some children are born a young carer.

’If you’ve got, for example, an older sibling who is autistic and mum decides to have another child, that child, even in the womb, becomes a young carer.

’It could also be that the child is born to parents who have physical or mental health issues, or drug and alcohol issues as well.’

The services start with a nursery for babies and children, including those with a need.

Hannah explained: ’It’s very very difficult to find nurseries that will accept a child with a need and our staff are trained to look after children with needs.

’That could be medical: we have children with heart conditions who have had open heart surgeries; we have children who are autistic; those with developmental delay, children who have hearing loss - we don’t discriminate against any disability.’

Hannah went on: ’We then have a five to seven-year-old group which we do a little bit of work with to introduce them into young carers.

’When they get to eight that is when we start to put them in the proper groups so we pick them up from home we take them to one of our centres, we give them a meal and that could be anything from pizza and jacket potatoes to sausage baps.

’For some of these children, they don’t get these treats at home, so having a chippy tea may not be the healthiest thing but it’s a real treat for them.

’There could be arts and crafts, there could be games, so it’s giving them opportunities whether it’s to go out bowling, to go and watch the lights switch on, or we do sports sessions.’

These services are available to all young carers, with open referral so that anyone from a parent or neighbour to the police or social services can refer a child for help.

Despite this, Hannah said that it can sometimes be difficult to identify those youngsters who are just quietly "getting on with it".

She recalled going to a school in the island a number of years ago where one of the teachers had said to her that she really wished they had known earlier about young carers.

’This was because they had a girl who’d gone through school, a totally average child who never caused any problems,’ Hannah said.

’When it came to sixth form and they wanted her to do a UCAS application, it turned out that she’d been going home at lunchtime to help feed and change her mum through the whole of school and no one had ever picked it up because she was just that child that got on with it.’

Hannah added: ’Not everyone even realises they are a young carer even if, for instance, they have been taking their Downs Syndrome sibling to school every day.

’They don’t think if through because they just get on and do it and it’s not until crisis hits and some of the early intervention stuff that we do really really helps.

’The earlier we can work with them, the more impact we can have.’

There has been a lot more awareness in recent years of the role played by young carers and Hannah spoke of the pride many of them they have for what they do.

’Our young carers have a special type of resilience which is really hard to describe: there is part of them that will never give up and that will always fight,’ she said.

’A lot of our young carers are really proud of being young carers.

’They might resent who they’re caring for because of the situation but actually they’re really proud of being a young carer.’

She added: ’We can do as much as we can to help but they’re the ones who are doing it day in day out when we’re not there.’

â?¢ Crossroads Care is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year and is hoping to raise £30,000 towards running the wide range of services it offers.

For more information or to make a donation visit crossroadsiom.org.