Education

Scotland is tackling barriers for estranged students – so should the rest of the UK | Becca Bland


This week the Scottish government announced the first review of its kind into estranged young people in universities. This will bring vital recognition for those who exist off the radar of the care system but have no relationship with their parents. Not only will it gather data on these people for the first time, it will consider extending to them the bursary and corporate parenting entitlements that care-experienced young people receive. This is a critically important move.

We often assume that when it comes to serious family difficulties the care system will step in for young people, and that someone, somewhere will notice. And we assume that when they notice, they will act. However, for estranged young people, the care system has often let them down. Either the system failed them and didn’t act, fobbed them off as they were approaching 16, or had no remit to intervene and help with their family difficulties.

Some estranged young people that my charity, Stand Alone, has met were too ashamed to tell anybody what they were going through, conflicted by their love for an abusive parent, or feeling the burden of being the only carer of an abusive parent. For others, there’s no choice. They have been disowned from their family for coming out as LGBTQ+, transitioning, or turning down an arranged marriage, or for being unwanted baggage in a parents’ new marriage. Disownment and threats of disownment, in my view, is one of the severest forms of emotional abuse and coercive control.

Whatever the circumstances, they have no parental relationship to rely on for support. It may be hard for us to accept that families act this way, but as a society we may compound their trauma and let them down further by ignoring them. Local authority systems in all four nations have not been set up to recognise or support these young people. As they are left to self-remove, or are disowned and cast out of the family home, they are effectively invisible in society. Worse, many are met with doubt.

The realities of this position are stark. Some make it to homeless shelters and charity housing programmes. Others may find informal and often precarious arrangements with other family members, or sofa-surf on the couches of friends. It is from these transient places that they try and find their way into universities.

In all of these patterns of family breakdown, young people are left lacking family capital: they have no financial, material and emotional support. As they enter university, research suggests that they are stretching a loan intended for nine months over 12, struggling to find guarantors or deposits for accommodation. At the end of their studies, these young people face a cliff edge, and are too often staring down the barrel of homelessness.

I have long admired the work that has developed with care-experienced students in Scotland. It shows a different standard of social fabric. Any young person with any experience of care, at whatever age, is entitled to a full bursary and corporate parenting structure, which carries additional safeguarding responsibilities, through university. Extending this support to estranged young people seems only fair, since research shows that they face similar barriers. They are three times more likely to drop out of university than the average student, are less likely to be integrated into the student community and lack a safety net to fall back on.

Perhaps the most important aspect of Scotland’s announcement is the affirmation that politicians take estranged students’ struggles seriously. Their truth has been seen and believed, and the importance of supporting them in higher education has been acknowledged.

Conversely, although in England the Office for Students’ plans to widen access to top universities for disadvantaged students are well intentioned, they miss the mark. Disadvantage should not only be defined by what area you come from, but by the strength of family capital you have.

We must now ask English, Welsh and Northern Irish governments to think differently, as is starting to happen in Scotland. They must tackle the underlying assumptions in the higher education system that family will help financially and emotionally.



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