What helps adult care leavers return to education? exploring the relevance of learner identity and the life course perspective

ABSTRACT

Adult care leavers who have spent time in ‘out-of-home care’ during childhood face many educational challenges. While some care leavers may manage to adhere to ‘normal’ timelines within their educational progression, others may experience delays in their educational journey or a longer-term ‘resignation’ from education during their care/post-care journey. In this paper, we offer a fuller understanding of what drives underachievement in this population, as well as what helps care leavers to re-engage with education. Using a case study approach, we explore the potential of the life course principle ‘linked lives’ for better understanding barriers to re-engagement and the processes through which key actors may promote the (re)development of learner identity, and educational re-engagement among adult care leavers, over time. We draw on analysis of data from two studies of positive educational outcomes for adult care leavers - one in education, one in the workplace. Using a linked lives lens, this theoretically-informed paper presents the concepts of support, learner identity, and educational memories as candidates for deepening our understanding of educational re-engagement of care leavers – and comparable populations facing educational challenges.

KEYWORDS:

• Adult care leavers
• learner identity
• linked lives
• life course perspective
• educational re-engagement
• educational memories

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 While the general literature on this topic uses the phrase ‘learning identity’, we propose to adapt this phrase to ‘learner identity’ – as used in the work of Evans, Schoon, and Weale (2013, 38) to capture the ‘lived’ and ‘embodied’ nature of this aspect of identity.

2 The university matriculation examination in the Republic of Ireland is called the ‘Leaving Certificate’ (Nic Fhlannchadha 2018).

3 The focus of this paper is on facilitation and opportunities in relation to education however, we note that the removal of barriers is also important in this context; indeed the linked lives principles centres the ways in which our behaviour and development is shaped in negative and positive ways over time (REF).