University applicants who have experience in the care system or family estrangement should receive guaranteed offers to boost access, a report recommends.

The Social Market Foundation report, which examines the accessibility of higher education for estranged and care-experienced applicants, says a “guaranteed offer scheme” would improve enrolment rates at universities, especially highly selective providers.

Young people who have experienced the care system or estrangement are less likely to attend university, and more likely to seek life choices that provide “security”, says the report, commissioned by Unite Students and the Unite Foundation.

But this can leave such applicants disadvantaged as they may apply to a lower-tariff provider because they feel they have a greater chance of being accepted, even if they have the grades for a higher-tariff provider, or they might not apply at all if they are unsure if they will gain a place.

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“The risk of applying and not knowing if you’d been admitted until shortly before term starts is too much of an unknown for many young people who need stability,” the report says.

Consequently, a guaranteed access scheme would go “beyond reducing competition in admissions” by “raising aspirations and by increasing stability”.

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The report found that only 14 per cent of 19-year-olds who have experienced the care system are in university, compared with 47 per cent of the wider population. Once at university, such students are significantly more likely to drop out compared with their peers, with dropout rates standing at 38 per cent, compared with 6 per cent.

Estranged young people face similarly reduced chances, the report continues, “but with even less visibility and support available. For all young people without parental support, education often becomes secondary to survival.”

Figures from the Student Loan Company released earlier this year show that the number of estranged students and care leavers receiving university loans fell in the last year across most of the UK, the first time that the number had dropped since records began in 2017-18.

One interviewee told the report that “Scotland [is] always ahead of England in relation to children in care and education”, because care-experienced applicants are guaranteed an offer to study if they meet minimum advertised entry requirements.

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The number of such applicants has climbed “significantly” in Scotland, which has seen an increase in full-time care-experienced students of almost 300 per cent since 2013, and a rise of almost 50 per cent since the access scheme was introduced in 2019.

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The report further recommends that universities receive a guaranteed minimum of £1,000 per care-experienced or estranged student per academic year, and that Student Finance England be reformed to provide these students with non-repayable grants, and extend student finance to cover the full 52 weeks of the year.

Aveek Bhattacharya, research director of the Social Market Foundation, and an author of the report, said more needed to be done to ensure that care-experienced and estranged young people “can fulfil their educational potential”.

“At present, support is inconsistent, and it is too easy for students to fall through the cracks. Additional money should come with increased expectations, particularly to make sure that initiatives follow the evidence and help us make genuine progress in reducing educational inequality,” he said.

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juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com