Should we offer a carer's passport?

Yes — a carer's passport is a low-cost, voluntary record of the flexibility a working carer has agreed with their manager, so it carries across role changes. It is good practice, not law, and free templates exist. For an employer with a valued member of staff who is juggling care — say a parent of a child with SEND, with appointments and EHCP meetings to fit around work — it is one of the cheapest ways to keep them.

What a carer's passport actually is

It is a short written agreement between an employee and their line manager. It identifies the person as a carer, records the flexibility and support already agreed — a later start on clinic days, the odd hour for an appointment, a phone left on during meetings — and travels with the employee when their role or manager changes. The point is that the same conversation does not have to be had from scratch every time someone moves team. Carers UK describes it as a tool to open that conversation and a record of the support offered in response.

It applies to staff caring for a dependant with a long-term illness or disability — including parent-carers of children with SEND — not to ordinary childcare. That gatekeeping line matters: the passport is for a long-term care need, and the child does not need a formal diagnosis for it to apply.

The two steps to put one in place

1. Adopt a free template. You do not need to draft one. Carers UK and Employers for Carers publish a free, editable Carer Passport template and toolkit you can lift more or less as-is.
2. Wire it into the policies you already have. Link the passport to your flexible-working and leave policies, then brief line managers so they apply it consistently. A passport that no manager knows about does nothing.

Where it sits next to the law

Here is the qualifier most guidance skips. A passport is not the same thing as statutory Carer's Leave, and it does not replace it. Carer's Leave gives an eligible employee one week of unpaid leave in any rolling 12-month period to care for a dependant with a long-term care need. It has been a day-one right — no qualifying service — since 6 April 2024, created by the Carer's Leave Act 2023 and set out in the Carer's Leave Regulations 2024 (regulation 5). The leave can be taken flexibly, in blocks as small as half a working day.

So the two work together: the legal floor is the unpaid week; the passport is the free, voluntary layer on top that records the day-to-day flexibility you have agreed beyond it. Offering a passport does not create a new legal duty, and it does not let you offer less than the statutory leave.

This page is general information, not clinical or legal advice.