The Paradox of student support policies: The experiences of students who care for children while studying
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Abstract
In United Kingdom (UK) higher education, different groups of students have moved into and out of the focus of policy and practice, under the headings of widening participation (WP) and the Equality Act 2010. This often-changing focus has the potential to lead to inequitable experiences for those students who do not fit into any of the traditional student typologies, and the policies designed and alleged to support them. This can mean that policies focussed on ‘support’ can have a paradoxical effect on some groups in their implementation, I suggest in this article that Students who Care for Children while Studying (CCS students), are an example of such a group.
In this article I present the stories of two CCS students, trying to engage in student support policies, from an institutional ethnographic study (Smith 2006) over two academic years, at a research-intensive UK University, with 16 CCS student participants in total. Here I look specifically that their accounts of ‘activating’ (Smith 2002) institutional policies to support them, and observing the fractures between policy intent, appearance and experience which start to emerge. I discuss how these stories suggests the experiences of CCS students can be complex, variable and related to individual personal circumstances. Yet three recurrent themes are presented across my study epitomised in the activation of policy. Firstly, CCS students experience ‘othering’, whereby their difference from other students is made clear through a range of behaviours toward their needs as carers. Secondly, CCS students experience ‘individualisation’, which frames these students as being in deficit and personally responsible for the barriers they face due to their ‘choice’ to be both students and carer. Thirdly this ‘othering’ and ‘individualisation’ leads to ‘passing’ behaviours, whereby students seek to or are actively encouraged to hide their caring status, conforming to a more institutionally-accepted homogeneous conception of ‘students and their needs.
Concluding the analysis of these themes through a Fraserian lens of ‘recognition’ (1997, 2001, 2003), I suggest that the principal cause of inequity in the CCS student experience, at this institution, is a cultural misrecognition of their right to be students because of their caring status, which is captured in this article through the accounts of the ‘activation’ of policies which are paradoxically meant to enable and support their success in higher education.
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