Overview: The Higher Education Access Tracker (HEAT) is a membership organisation for educational institutions, collaborative outreach groups, and charities like Sutton Trust or Unite Foundation, that are heavily engaged in HE widening participation initiatives. The HEAT database has been predominantly used to capture and then track the entry into HE, of participants of outreach activities like summer schools. It works through a year on year ‘matching’ exercise, the Higher Education or HE Track, that connects a record on the database with the student’s formal HESA record, returning all the material held on progression to and within HE, including WP characteristics like polar quintiles.

Much like the human brain, the functionality of the HEAT database is wider than simply tracking into the university ‘entry’ data point – valuable though that certainly is. Post-entry intervention activities can also be captured and participants monitored through to degree completion, and indeed into post-graduate outcomes and employment destinations (Graduate Outcome Survey). 

The Unite Foundation is an affiliate member of HEAT and has uploaded all scholarship applicants, distinguishing between selected and not selected, for a natural comparator group.  Suggested actions for existing HEAT members to build their long-term data diligence on care experienced and estranged students:

• Ensure outreach functions routinely capture flags for care experience and, separately, estranged
• Build HEAT consent into bursary and service access across both populations; in this way HEAT can deliver a professional and secure institutional participation platform (whilst still enabling excel usage locally).
• Add an ‘activity’ for each #HomeAtUniversity measure e.g. rent guarantor scheme, summer in halls, housing plan, and record the participation/uptake by student.
• Annually access HEAT’s HE Track downloads that prompt investigation and learning dependent on pattern of interventions (e.g. comparing care experienced to estranged if offers do not apply to both, examining intersectionality, developing insight into national returns trends.)

Resourcing:  HEAT is a subscription-based research collaboration which is owned and steered by the members; of which there are varying types. Only one subscription per institution is required – check the HEAT membership lists here to see if your university already has access to this data resource and find out who the principal user is amongst your colleagues (known as the HEAT ’Database Point of Contact’.  Your outreach team is a good first port of call.

The data entry process is supported by excel-based templates which facilitate bulk uploading.  The frequency of data entry can be flexible but naturally with a minimum of annually, ahead of each HESA matching window.  Upload of student personal data must be GDPR compliant, and this important aspect is supported with guidance for both privacy policies and participant forms.

Monitoring/Evaluation:  Each HE Track matched return can be downloaded and imported into a Power BI dashboard for ease of analysis.  Every step toward this analysis has supporting guides, and the dashboard now includes pre-built comparator populations as well as an intuitive sliding segmentation tool that automates cutting your own data set by levels of engagement in interventions, activity characteristics as well as student characteristics.  Each ‘slice’ on the database generates a clear graphic for ease of cut and paste into data communication content.  Delays with the HESA Data Futures project has caused a temporary backlog of matching returns but this is set to resume predictable regularity in early 2026.

Every student struggles, but some students struggle more than others. Care-experienced and estranged students will often struggle the most because there are only a handful of them at each university – we don’t have a big sign over our head announcing our status and so we can often get forgotten about.

Definitions for these groups are also inconsistent, meaning support varies. For example, around 1 in 5 estranged students have been in care; they do not fit the statutory definition of a care leaver. This leads to some students receiving less support than needed, depending on how their student funding body, university and government individually choose to define their circumstances.

Data from the Student Academic Experience Survey 2025 highlights several key challenges. Academically, 43% of care-experienced students and 44% of estranged students have considered withdrawing from university, compared to 28% of their peers. Additionally, 44% of care-experienced students have requested deadline extensions, compared to 29% of non-care-experienced students. These figures suggest that these students face greater academic pressures, which can lead to increased risk of disengagement or withdrawal.

Financial pressures also play a significant role. Care-experienced students work an average of 11.3 hours per week, and estranged students work 11.1 hours, compared to 8.8 hours for other students. Over a quarter (27.3%) report that financial issues negatively affect their mental health, compared to 19.6% of their peers. The need to work longer hours alongside study contributes to stress and can undermine both wellbeing and academic success.

Social challenges further compound these difficulties. Around 45% of estranged students and 36% of care-experienced students report feeling lonely all or most of the time, compared to 27% of other students. Only 26.8% say they have someone to turn to in a crisis, compared to 42.3% of their peers. More than one in five express little interest in the social side of university life, almost double the rate among other students. This isolation can intensify mental health challenges and reduce engagement with the wider university experience.

Intersectionality adds another layer of complexity. A significantly higher proportion of care-experienced and estranged applicants identify as transgender or non-binary compared to their peers, highlighting that these students often face overlapping and compounded challenges. While existing data provides some insight into these barriers, it does not tell the full story.

Better record keeping could help universities more clearly identify these intersecting challenges and design more effective, targeted interventions.

If universities don’t address these issues properly, there are several consequences – all of which are avoidable.

Universities will have more difficulty providing support to the wider student population and this delayed support directly impacts a student’s ability to engage with their studies and worsens academic outcomes. When support is reactive, meaning students get support only when they have reached a breaking point, rather than intervening on early warning signs there is again a negative impact on students with the difficulty accessing support breaks down trust and can lead to disengagement with university life. We see this play out as students in vulnerable positions must continually advocate for themselves across different departments, causing added stress and difficulty seeking support.

More robust record keeping systems, such as HEAT, offer a way forward. They enable universities to track the entire student lifecycle, from application through to graduation and beyond, providing a more complete understanding of student experiences. This improved visibility helps expose specific barriers faced by care-experienced and estranged students and supports the development of more effective, evidence-based interventions. Crucially, it allows institutions to shift from a reactive approach to a proactive one, addressing systemic issues before they escalate into crises.

In my experience, my university only tracks a few factors for all students, leading to student support being rather blunt without the ability to support the wide variety of student issues.

I believe that universities should prioritise:
+ Clear and universal definitions for care-experienced and estranged students.
+ Better data collection and sharing consent for student support.
+ Track intervention impact to identify what best supports care-experienced and estranged students.

Through this I think that universities can help care-experienced and estranged students struggle less and improve their university experience.