Context:

Care experienced, estranged, young adult carer, and refugee/asylum seeker students face significant and often compounding barriers to accessing, continuing, and completing higher education (HE). These include structural, financial, social, and psychological barriers that frequently interact in complex ways that cannot be addressed through any single intervention.

While most universities provide financial support for care experiences and estranged students, and many offer named contact for pastoral guidance, the nature and effectiveness of this support can vary considerably. Factors such as staff caseloads, proactive engagement, and training and experience of staff can influence student experiences and outcomes (Bhattacharya & Payne, 2024).

In recognition of the heightened risks to student engagement, retention, and success faced by these groups, the University of Bath has developed a preventative, proactive, and multi-faceted model of support. This approach combines financial assistance, personalised support, and extensive partnership working across the University to address students’ needs holistically.

Evaluation Questions

• What contribution, if any, has the SRS interventions made to students’ continuation rates?
• What contribution, if any, has the SRS interventions made to students’ sense of belonging?

Methodology

• - Enhanced Theory of Change (eToC) project, creating a visual diagram of SRS interventions and supplementary narrative report.
• Participatory workshops with SRS staff will be delivered to create draft model. This will be reviewed alongside a literature review and internal review of SRS survey data and institutional academic registry data.
• Acknowledgement that this eToC can potentially be used for scoping and delivering a future Contribution Analysis approach (Befani and Mayne, 2014), to recognise the myriad of intervention strands and factors that could contribute to intended outcomes.

Type of evaluation evidence

Using the OfS standards of evidence this project will produce Type 2 (empirical evidence).

References

• Befani, B., & Mayne, J. (2014). Process tracing and contribution analysis: A combined approach to generative causal inference for impact evaluation. IDS bulletin, 45(6), 17-36. https://doi.org/10.1111/1759-5436.12110
• Bhattacharya, A., & Payne, D. (2024). Care and learning in Higher Education: How society and university can support care-experienced and estranged students to succeed. Social Market Foundation. https://www.smf.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Care-and-Learning-in-Higher-Education-Nov-2024.pdf

Published report

At the end of the project timeline, a report and visual model will be published on this webpage.