Care-experienced students need reliable relationships, not only bursaries

By Student Voice AI

Updated Apr 11, 2026

Care-experienced students do not stay in higher education on bursaries alone. They stay when formal provision is matched by reliable relationships that make support feel human, timely, and safe to use. At Student Voice AI, we see some of the most important student experience risks hiding in comments about whether a student feels known, backed, and safe enough to ask for help. In a 2025 paper in Higher Education, Ceryn Evans examines this directly through "The ethics of love and care in higher education: Perspectives of students with care experience". For UK universities using student voice evidence to improve access, continuation, and support, the paper is a sharp reminder that formal provision can look adequate on paper while feeling emotionally thin in practice.

Context and research question

Care-experienced students remain substantially under-represented in higher education in England and Wales. Evans notes that only around 12% of care leavers in England are in higher education by age 23, compared with 43% of the general population in England and Wales by age 25. Universities have responded with bursaries, priority accommodation, and designated contacts, but the paper asks a harder question: is that enough to help students stay and succeed?

The study focuses on a problem UK institutions should recognise: what kinds of support actually help care-experienced students stay and succeed at university, and what gets missed when support is understood mainly as financial or administrative provision? Evans addresses this through qualitative biographical interviews with care-experienced students and graduates in England and Wales, including a follow-up wave that captured how experiences changed over time. The result is a more useful picture of why some support arrangements steady students, while others leave them feeling alone inside a system that looks supportive from the outside.

Key findings

Material support mattered, but it was not the full story. Participants valued bursaries, practical help, and year-round accommodation. Those forms of support reduced pressure, but they did not automatically create the sense of security students needed when they were struggling, making a major decision, or trying to navigate institutional systems that could feel impersonal. The takeaway for universities is simple: provision only helps fully when students feel they can rely on the people behind it.

Relational support was central to retention. The paper argues that the most important support was often not a service in the narrow sense, but a dependable relationship: someone who noticed, followed up, and could be trusted. Students described the importance of friends, partners, foster carers, and occasional university staff who showed consistent care alongside practical help.

"Any form of support, no matter how small, can make all the difference."

That point matters because it changes the improvement question. The issue is not only whether support exists, but whether students experience it as human, reliable, and available at the moment they need it.

Those relationships were usually found outside formal university support. Evans found that love and care were seldom embedded in institutional mechanisms themselves. Instead, they were more often located in relationships beyond the university. For UK higher education teams, that is a serious operational warning: students may stay enrolled partly because other people are doing emotional support work that the institution has not designed for or even noticed.

When relational support was missing, the consequences showed up in trust and continuation. The paper includes accounts of students transferring institution, questioning whether they should remain, or leaving higher education altogether. In other words, retention risk did not appear only through major formal complaints. It also emerged through quieter experiences of being unsupported, having to repeat difficult personal histories, or not knowing whether anyone would respond with care.

Finally, the paper reframes support as an ethical issue as well as a service design issue. Evans argues that the kinds of support most important to care-experienced students are relational. That means universities should treat empathy, continuity, and trustworthy contact as part of educational access, not as optional extras added after the "real" provision has been delivered. If universities want access work to translate into continuation, this is where the standard has to rise.

Practical implications

For UK universities, the first implication is to pair formal entitlements with relational design. A named contact is only useful if that contact is stable, proactive, and able to stay involved across key transition points such as arrival and the first few weeks on course, accommodation changes, assessment pressure, and vacations. Warm handovers matter too, because asking students to retell difficult experiences to each new team can itself become a barrier. If the goal is retention, support has to feel continuous, not episodic.

Second, feedback collection should ask about support in a more diagnostic way. Instead of asking only whether students were satisfied with support, institutions should also ask whether students had someone they could rely on, whether support felt joined up, and what made help-seeking easier or harder. Open-text prompts are especially valuable here, because they surface the specific points where provision breaks down. Student Voice Analytics can help categorise themes such as trust, continuity, housing, money, and response quality across large volumes of comments. That gives teams something more actionable than a general satisfaction score.

Third, universities should connect student voice evidence to retention planning. If care-experienced students repeatedly describe support as inconsistent, transactional, or emotionally distant, that is not a "soft" issue. It is an early warning sign for disengagement and withdrawal. Analysing free-text alongside continuation data, casework, and pulse surveys gives institutions a better chance of spotting those risks early and acting before they harden. The benefit is earlier intervention, with clearer evidence for widening participation and student support teams.

FAQ

Q: How should universities translate this paper into better support for care-experienced students?

A: Start with continuity. Combine bursaries and practical provision with a named relationship that lasts across the year, proactive check-ins at predictable pressure points, and support during vacation periods when other safety nets may be weaker. Then use open-text feedback to test whether students actually experience those arrangements as trustworthy and useful. That is how institutions can tell the difference between support that exists in policy and support that works in practice.

Q: What should we keep in mind about the study's method?

A: This is a qualitative study, so its strength is in explaining mechanisms rather than estimating prevalence. The biographical interviews show how students interpret support, why some relationships matter more than formal services, and how those experiences connect to continuation decisions. UK teams should use the findings as a strong guide for what to look for locally, then test them against their own survey data, comments, and retention patterns. In other words, it sharpens the questions universities should ask even if it does not quantify how often each issue appears.

Q: What does this change about how student voice data should be used?

A: It suggests that student voice work should look beyond satisfaction scores and service usage. For care-experienced students, the crucial signals may be whether support feels caring, whether students trust a named person, and whether they feel safe asking for help more than once. Those signals usually appear most clearly in free-text comments, which is why text analysis tools for education and careful segmentation matter. Done well, that analysis helps institutions identify problems sooner and respond with support that feels credible to students.

References

[Paper Source]: Ceryn Evans "The ethics of love and care in higher education: Perspectives of students with care experience" DOI: 10.1007/s10734-025-01563-4

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