Blog3 December 2024
We have a societal obligation to support care-experienced and estranged young people in attending and progressing through higher education, including offering financial support where needed. This week’s important report by the Social Market Foundation has drawn attention to the inequalities and inconsistencies care-experienced and estranged learners are still facing in higher education. But with these stark findings come recommendations on how to improve access and participation for this group.
The recommendations rightly focus on how the sector and wider society could better support these students. One striking suggestion is that higher education providers could be provided £1,000 additional funds for every care-experienced learner who enrols in their institution. This policy approach is already in use in primary and secondary education, through a ‘pupil premium’, defined by the Department for Education as ‘extra money for schools to help disadvantaged pupils of all abilities to achieve their full potential’.
As with the pupil premium – where schools are given the choice of how to spend the additional funds – universities would then be tasked with ensuring that the £1,000 is well spent to deliver outcomes for care experienced learners.
This explains a second key Social Market Foundation recommendation: that the £1,000 goes hand in hand with effective evaluation. The report suggests that TASO support higher education providers in building this evidence base, much like the Education Endowment Foundation does with schools, with additional funding to support us in doing so. And as there is currently a lack of evidence on what works to support care-experienced learners, as we have previously reported, we welcome this recommendation for more and better evaluation in the higher education sector.
One benefit of tying the rollout of any new policy to evaluation funding is that evaluation can be baked into the design and delivery of that policy. TASO would be keen to work with providers as they implement any future care-experienced leaver premium in different ways, if or when the policy might be rolled out.
At TASO we are always seeking to learn from and build on the evidence, and the Social Market Foundation report is an important addition to our knowledge and understanding of care-experienced learners. We are also keen to work with higher education providers, government and others to better address these inequalities, including the practical recommendations from the report. In the new year we will publish further evidence on the different pathways care-experienced learners navigate, and data on their experiences and outcomes. We know there is a wider commitment to addressing these inequalities across the sector, and we look forward to providing support through improved evaluation, and ultimately for better outcomes for care-experienced students.