There has been increasing interest in understanding the higher education experiences of students who spent time ‘in care’ (e.g. with foster carers) as children, usually due to maltreatment or neglect within the birth family.  Members of this group tend to have to overcome strong barriers to educational success, including social disruption, trauma, societal stigma and low expectations from professionals (Stein, 2012).  Individuals who spent time in care are often referred to as ‘care-experienced’ and it is increasingly understood that their average educational outcomes are significantly lower than the general population (Berridge et al., 2020; Sebba et al., 2015).

Nevertheless, many care-experienced people thrive within the education system and achieve highly.  Official figures for England (Department for Education, 2022) show that 13% of those in care at 16 enter higher education by 19; numbers appear to be growing, while care-experienced people often choose to study later (Harrison, 2020).  Furthermore, Harrison et al. (2022) have estimated that around one-quarter of care-experienced graduates progress immediately into postgraduate study.  However, almost nothing is currently known about those approaching the top of the academic ladder (Baker, 2022). 

This paper therefore explores the experiences of care-experienced people who are now pursuing an academic career (i.e. as professors, lecturers, research fellows and similar), addressing the following research questions:

• RQ1: What insights do the lived lives of the participants offer into successful pathways into and through higher education for people with experience of children’s social care?
• RQ2: Why did the participants choose a career in academia, what challenges have they had to address to establish their careers and how have they overcome these?
• RQ3: What mechanisms, if any, exist within universities to support the professional development of care-experienced academics (e.g. mentoring or funding streams)?
• RQ4: How have the participants navigated issues of identity formation/renegotiation and communities of practice in academia?

We use Archer’s concept of reflexivity (2007, 2012) to explore the balance between individual agency and societal structures, with a focus on the ‘internal conversations’ that we have with ourselves.  These help to guide our decisions and actions in relation to the enablements and constraints posed by the prevailing social structures.  We also draw on the concept of ‘identity work’ (Brown, 2015) to explore the decisions that academics make about their professional lives.  This is predicated on the idea that we can concurrently hold and project multiple identities that can be complementary, overlapping or even contradictory.  Identity work captures the mental, emotional, social and physical labour that is invested in creating, maintaining and reconciling the identities that we deploy in professional settings.

While our study is focused exclusively on the United Kingdom, it has a wider relevance across European settings.  There has been an increasing focus on care-experienced students in higher education, for example, in Ireland (e.g. Brady et al., 2019) and other European nations (e.g. Jackson and Cameron, 2014).  We believe, however, that this is the first study to specifically address the lives of care-experienced academics.

Our study is situated in the critical realist tradition which combines realist ontology with interpretivist epistemology (e.g. Sayer, 2000). This is powerful when seeking to understand the lives of individuals who encounter rigid societal structures, such as the care and education systems (Pawson, 2013). Critical realist enquiry particularly seeks to shed light on how those systems can be adapted to challenge deep-rooted inequalities and support marginalised groups. We believe this is the first study anywhere in the world to engage with care-experienced academics as a group of interest. Our first aim was therefore to learn more about the group’s size and composition, based on an assumption that the numbers are very small. To this end, we devised a short online questionnaire and publicised an anonymous weblink that was distributed extensively through relevant organisations, online forums and key individuals, aiming to reach as many care-experienced academics as possible. After four months, we received 31 valid responses. The questionnaire’s second purpose was to collect contact details for those interested in being interviewed. Twenty-five were invited, of whom 21 agreed. Semi-structured interviews lasting 45-70 minutes were undertaken using Microsoft Teams, professionally transcribed and carefully anonymised, before being uploaded into Nvivo for analysis. A brief interim report was then circulated to the interviewees by e-mail as a form of member checking and to invite any further thoughts. The British Educational Research Association’s 2018 guidelines for ethical research practice informed the study, which was developed in conjunction with care-experienced people at all points. To analyse the data, we used thematic analysis based on Braun and Clarke (2021). This involved a close reading of the transcripts, a phase of open coding of relevant sections and then cycles of discussion to ensure shared understandings and to combine similar codes. We then assembled the codes into overarching themes, again taking a dialogic approach to resolve any differences in interpretation. We eventually agreed on eight themes to adequately describe the content of the interviews.

The eight themes that we constructed from the interview data were: (1) Contrasting experiences of school, (2) Academic pathways and plans, (3) Precarities and safety nets, (4) Identity, academia and feelings of success, (5) Professional relationships and belonging, (6) Enablers for career progression, (7) Discourses of luck, and (8) Removing constraints and forging enablements. This paper will focus primarily on three findings from the study. Firstly, that the precarity increasingly associated with higher education careers (e.g. Leathwood and Read, 2022) is particularly profound for care-experienced academics who generally lack the familial ‘safety nets’ that most early career academics enjoy. This is particularly marked in relation to an ongoing quest for stability that has its origins in the educational and social disruption that they underwent in childhood. Secondly, there was a tension between narratives of self-reliance and help-seeking which was playing out through our participants’ academic careers. Many discussed how they had become accustomed to relying on their own resources during childhood and early adulthood due to limited support or advice from family and professionals. Others felt that their success was partly attributable to their willingness to ask for support from knowledgeable others who were able to provide practical help with career development. Thirdly, a significant question for many participants was whether or not to reveal their care-experienced status to colleagues or students, and, if so, the limits to the information shared. This was contextualised around fears about stigma, microaggressions or other negative reactions, although some of our participants were purposively open as part of a wider role in advocating around care or to act as a role model for students. Being a care-experienced academic thus required substantial identity work that was not required of their peers.

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