Developing ‘good’ support for student carers: a cross university study

Published on 2024-05-31 - 11:58 by Praxis Admin

This is the second stage of a two-phase project which aims to better understand and support the growing numbers of OU students who are carers. In the first phase - a project entitled ‘Caring about student carers’ - 20 student-carers based in HWSC were interviewed by telephone. The report, submitted in November 2019, highlighted the way in which student-carers face similar challenges to carers elsewhere – financial and time limitations, along with challenging, exhausting and unpredictable demands. The picture of carers that emerged was of a student group actively managing the challenges of caring while studying either in terms of their interpretation of academic demands or their strategic engagement in the most personally relevant or rewarding aspects of study. Their accounts foregrounded a vision for their career and future as nested within their overall biography as a carer and as a student. Significantly the findings also showed the importance of the OU support these students had received in helping them to successfully cope with studying and caring and ways in which this can be improved.

Developed in consultation with the Care and Caring network@OU, the second phase is a cross-university study that builds on the first phase. It aims to widen the scope of the investigation by including students from across the university in order to build our understanding of how caring responsibilities affect student study, persistence and retention. Outcomes will, be used to strengthen existing guidelines and support for these students. The OU is internationally recognised as a leader in carer support; this project can also sustain and enhance this reputation.

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Funding

PRAXIS

Project lead(s)

Chris Kubiak ; Mary Larkin

Team members

Tajinder Gill ; Manik Deepak-Gopinath ; Julie Messenger ; Jitka Vseteckova

Authorship group

Academic - Central

Project reference number

PRAXIS 2020/21 05-CK

Project start date

2020-10-01

Project end date

2021-06-30

Project status

Completed

Institutional priority category

Students Learning Experiences
Achieving Study Goals

Subject discipline

Health and Social Care
Health and Wellbeing

Project findings and recommendations

Recommendation Encouraging caring-experienced students to declare their status will enable the Open University to better support their needs. It is recommended that to improve declaration rates, a communication strategy is developed which incorporates: - Scheduling carers week to coincide with the beginning of the J presentations - The promotion of caring-experienced student stories; - The promotion of a carers’ passport which signifies entitlement to specific accommodations; - A caring experienced student website on StudentHome; - Encouragement to declare is embedded in a programme of welfare and support activities such as a seminar programme and the Associate Lecturer initial conversation. Caring-experienced students have much in common with those carers outside of the academy in terms of the challenges associated with their responsibilities. In terms of their study trajectories, these students are not defined by their caring role but often choose subjects which enable them to transcend their role. Caring responsibilities do impact on these students’ capacity to study and they have developed pragmatic strategies to manage the demands in their lives. Institutional responses to the needs of caring students typically include some degree of additional and remedially-focused activity not required of other students – guidance material to read, support groups to attend, spending time with advisors. We have recommended similar provisions here. But we argue that the challenge for this group is that these additional activities may not always be suitable for a group who are time poor. As the solo studiers in our subject demonstrate, most caring experienced students are pragmatists who careful with what they spend time on. Accommodations to allow this group more time may be welcome from time-to-time but changes to module design may be as effective for retaining this group of students. As Roberts’ (2011) suggests in his account of pedagogies for non-traditional students, redeveloping module structure may well benefit the wider student body too.