Guaranteed year-round accommodation, including summers
One of the biggest challenges for care-experienced and estranged students is the 12–14 week summer break, when a stable home is far from guaranteed. Acknowledging this is a key starting point. High costs, limited availability and the practicalities of moving belongings can create an insurmountable barrier – or at best, a stark reminder of their ‘difference’ from other students.
University of Strathclyde
Overview: The University of Strathclyde works actively to ensure care experienced and estranged students can access safe halls accommodation across the summer periods that are so problematic to many care experienced and estranged students. The summer offer is open to all relevant Home/UK students of any year and includes guaranteed/priority access to halls. This is backed up with access to emergency housing to enable crisis response alongside planned cover.
The university team use ‘push’ communication pre-entry and annually in the academic cycle, liaising with Local Authorities to ensure that young people are aware, and claiming/receiving relevant wraparound support from all stakeholders and to dovetail to the provision in a 39-week academic year as smoothly as possible. Summer housing is integrated into the wider suite of support for students.
Resourcing: Engagement with students is shared across the team of two under the Strathclyde Cares banner with staff from the widening access function, plus accommodation colleagues. In the last cycle 16 students were housed over the summer across the institution.
Scotland/Scottish students benefit from a progressive student funding environment with funding agency SAAS administering a summer grant scheme for care experienced undergraduates. The award of over £1,330 or £665 (depending on whether the tenancy is formal or informal, is sufficient to cover, or significantly contribute to, summer term rent in university cities. Key to note is that, currently, the summer after graduation and before registration is excluded from this scheme. Similarly, estranged students are not captured under this grant scheme though some may come under the wider definition of ‘care experience’ used in the Scottish context. These students can naturally still access the summer housing but require greater financial advice and guidance support to do so.
Monitoring/Evaluation: At present, quantitative measurement of student success and retention – whether care experienced and estranged students buck national trends on drop-out rates – is monitored by an institution wide approach and the housing components are not evaluated in isolation though this may eventuate at institutional or indeed national Government level in time.
