SOCIAL MARKET FOUNDATION CHAPTER THREE – WHAT SUPPORT EXISTS FOR CARE EXPERIENCED AND ESTRANGED STUDENTS AND HOW WELL DOES IT WORK? Chapter summary • We estimate that universities collectively spend approximately £10-15 million per year on dedicated help for care experienced students. Support commonly includes bespoke or priority access to existing bursaries, dedicated support staff, and forms of accommodation support. • Increasingly, institutions offer support to all care experienced students, but some restrict eligibility to care leavers only, and help for estranged students is less common. • Support is inconsistent between institutions, and perversely it is often the institutions that admit more care experienced and estranged students that have fewer resources. • Of the support that does exist, evidence on the effectiveness of interventions is poor, often due to issues with data collection and accessibility. Overall, there is little confidence that existing resource is effectively distributed and spent across the sector. • Furthermore, the system is largely run on goodwill from institutions, and support for care experienced and estranged students is discretionary in nature. The risk of such support being cut back in the face of funding constraints across the sector is concerning. Having outlined the shape of the challenge facing care experienced and estranged students in the previous chapter, we now move on to examine what is being done to help them meet it. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the sorts of activities universities are undertaking, their scale, what we know about their effectiveness, and the issues that must be addressed to improve outcomes. There is a remarkable amount of support for care experienced students – at least on paper In our research, we went through the website for each UK university, as well as Propel, the online university guide for care leavers, to collect and compare the different forms of support on offer for care leavers. On the face of it, there is a lot. Figure 11 shows the number of institutions offering differing forms of support. Note that these are likely to be an undercount, as some universities may provide forms of support without having advertised them explicitly. Some things are near enough universal. Basically every university we looked at claimed to offer specialised academic support. More impressively, almost all provide 34