Father Christmas? The tooth fairy? The Easter bunny? Are you someone to believe in? With this droll series of questions, the Department for Children, Schools and Families invited applications for a children's commissioner for England, to replace the incumbent, Sir Al Aynsley-Green. The salary, undisclosed, is "attractive".
What qualifications will be required? None, as such. "You might see yourself as an ambassador and campaigner for children," suggests the job advertisement. "Perhaps you're a kind of children's champion already."
And the job description? This, too, is tantalisingly vague. "It won't be your agenda you're pushing, but the children's." Well, someone needs to. Just a few days after the ads appeared, Ofsted published a report on the support available to those unfortunate children for whom the favoured euphemism is "young carers". This designation, with its hint of a precocious commitment to selflessness, could not be better chosen to conceal the fact that children looking after their disabled parents appear to be Britain's last legal source of child labour. Ofsted describes them as often "unidentified, unsupported and without a voice".
Around 175,000 children and young people, some as young as eight, are thought to be caring for their parents, doing everything from washing and feeding the adults to running the household. "Caring tasks included the collection and administration of medicine, first aid and dealing with family finances," Ofsted reports, in its "Supporting Young Carers" survey.
Unsurprisingly, many of the children struggle at school, getting there late, neglecting homework, missing class altogether. Sometimes, schools are better than any other agency at helping young carers. Sometimes not. "They don't remember I'm a young carer," says a child quoted in the Ofsted report. He says he "just puts up with detention". The young carers, the report notes, "were accepting of their caring role. They saw it as part of normal life".
Perhaps the stoicism of these children is one reason why we, too, seem so happy to countenance the surrender of their childhoods. In fact, we go further: the heroic achievements of young carers are regularly applauded on big broadcast charity nights or at tearful award ceremonies, as a model of youthful sacrifice. Bizarrely, an audience that would be aghast if prizes rewarded British children's commitment to begging, or their ingenuity in surviving on the streets, persists in hailing the neglect of these particular children's needs as if it were a worthy form of martyrdom. As if we did not have paid carers, nowadays, to help disabled people, where no children are available. But the more childish time consumed by washing, cooking, turning, nursing, ladling out medicine in the night, the louder the cheers.
Can there ever be proper help for schoolchildren caring for sick parents, when so many people think this is a defensible form of child abuse? In a decent country, we should not need an updated term for this form of drudgery, any more than we need one for chimney sweeps or scullery maids. Both of whom, one imagines, got time off.
Even professionals, to judge by the Ofsted report, could learn something from 19th-century philanthropists who campaigned against child servitude. Proper assistance for these young carers is partly frustrated, it found, by "a view among some professionals that it is acceptable for young family members to adopt caring roles".
In Bleak House, Dickens introduces Judy Smallweed, a child who has "never owned a doll, never heard of Cinderella, never played at any game". The Ofsted survey is hardly less heartbreaking about real children with gruelling duties. As noble as their vocation might be, it does not sound like fun. Young carers describe their lives as "hard" and "stressful". "If her speech knocks out I have to lay pillows round her in case she fits," explains one child. Another recalls: "I was quite lonely; I didn't know how many people were like me."
The government, on the other hand, has known the numbers for a while. The 2001 census provided the figure of 175,000 young carers, though Ofsted thinks this is an underestimate, "because many families do not reveal their situation". Two years ago, after the Princess Royal Trust for Carers described exhausted children crying themselves to sleep, the then children's minister, Beverley Hughes, maintained that the government had the needs of these young carers "in the frame".
She insisted a variety of agencies wanted "to make sure that every family gets the level of support they need". The Ofsted report confirms that this is complete rubbish. The needs of disabled adults continue to be assessed without reference to their children's lives. Or worse, they are assessed in the evident expectation that children should double as dependable suppliers of free patient care.
This failure is all the more shameful when you consider that Gordon Brown's default vision is, invariably, his grand scheme for children. It was topped up only last week with his absurd proposal to make action on child poverty legally enforceable. During the moment when he was popular, after that idyllic, wet summer spent seeing off floods and foot and mouth, he went so far as to compare himself, where children are concerned, with Jesus. "We all remember that biblical saying," he blithered, "'suffer the little children to come unto me'. No Bible I have ever read says: 'Bring just some of the children'."
Though his government has no excuse, in that case, for sustained neglect of a vulnerable group of children, it does not help that some young carers and their parents actively embrace their invisibility. Some families do not know that state support exists, others deliberately avoid it. "It's the issue of embarrassment," explains Maureen Nuttall, of the charity Action for Children, "and fear of outcomes of intervention. Will they be judged negatively?"
While parents are anxious about social services, children may realise how different their lives are from their peers', become ashamed, or frightened of bullying, and yet more isolated. "Often, they are very withdrawn and lack confidence," Nuttall says. "They don't want to draw attention to themselves. And sometimes parents will say, 'I don't want you to tell anybody.'" A child quoted by Ofsted says: "I don't have anyone back and I don't go out - just say I can't be bothered, it's easier than explaining."
It was for another character in Bleak House, the ghastly Mrs Jellyby, that Dickens coined the phrase "telescopic philanthropy". Consumed by concern for the inhabitants of remote Borrioboola-Gha, she ignores deserving causes under her nose. Perhaps, given his promise of personal transformation, it is not too late for Brown to demonstrate that his own, admirable vision for children is universally applicable. If it is pitiful that African children should have to stay away from school or forfeit their childhoods in order to care for sick parents, it is grotesque to discover that children are doing the same thing here, in the land of the attractively paid children's commissioner. No wonder the advert compares him to the tooth fairy.
