Student-parents and higher education: a cross-national comparison

Abstract

During its time in office, the UK’s Labour government gave a strong message that having caring responsibilities for a young child should not be seen as a barrier to engaging in education and training. Its widening participation strategy included a specific commitment to increasing the number of mature students in higher education (HE) – students who are more likely than their younger peers to have caring responsibilities for dependent children. Furthermore, considerable resources were devoted to encouraging teenage mothers to return to education and training soon after the birth of their child. Nevertheless, despite this policy focus, there have been relatively few studies of the experiences of ‘student-parents’ within HE. This paper draws on findings from a cross-national study (funded by the Nuffield Foundation) to explore the support currently offered by UK universities to students who have parental responsibilities for one or more children under the age of 16. It compares this support to that offered by Danish institutions, to assess whether differences in ‘welfare regime’, the structure of the HE system and pervasive assumptions about gender relations have any discernible impact on the way in which student-parents are both constructed within institutional cultures and assisted by institutional practices.

Keywords:

• comparative
• qualitative

Acknowledgement

I am very grateful to the Nuffield Foundation for funding the research, Sarah Robinson and Victoria Young for carrying out the majority of the interviews, and the respondents who gave up their time to be interviewed. I would also like to thank the two anonymous referees, Carole Leathwood and the members of the Education, Identities and Social Inclusion research group at Brunel University, all of whom provided very useful comments on previous versions of this article.

Notes

1. It had been hoped to include HEIs with different numbers of student-parents. However, as preliminary research suggested that very few institutions in the UK or Denmark collected statistics on whether or not their students had dependent children, it was not possible to use this as a sampling criterion.

2. Previous work on mature students has tended to focus on those from working class backgrounds, and suggested that socio-economic status has a significant impact on both access to HE and the experiences of students once at university. As this paper draws exclusively on the interviews with members of staff and analysis of policy documents, not the interviews with students, it is not possible to discuss here the impact of the students’ social class. However, this is an important aspect of the ongoing data analysis, and is likely to be discussed in some detail in a subsequent paper from the project.