CARE AND LEARNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION Recommendation one – introducing a Care Experienced and Estranged Student Premium scheme. To guaranteed adequate levels of funding to support care experienced and estranged students, there should be a Care Experienced and estranged Student Pupil Premium scheme in HE and FE. This should be set at £1,000 per pupil and follow the student. For HE, the Office for Students should source this funding from their current student premium streams. A review of the current effectiveness of those streams should follow. For FE, this funding should be provided by the Department for Education, in recognition of the importance of supporting alternative pathways for care experienced and estranged students, the higher number of care experienced pupils in FE, and the existing financial difficulties FE faces. Eligible groups: Care experienced, defined as those who have had experience with the care system at any point in their childhood, identified through local authority data; Estranged, identified through Student Finance. While our focus in this report is on care experienced and estranged students, we could envisage the pupil premium principle being expanded to other forms of disadvantage. The wider trends we have discussed in this report – of financial pressure on universities, and pressure to restrict university places – suggest that the government may have to provide more direct funding to institutions, and that access for disadvantaged groups may become harder. Linking that direct funding to admission of disadvantaged students is one way to lean against the wind when it comes to those risks. Reforms to the student finance system in England should recognise the distinctive financial needs of care experienced and estranged students We have outlined in this report that care experienced and estranged students have distinctive needs. Each person’s own experience and identity will be different, and there is by no means a ‘universal’ experience for all who fall under these categories. However, there are a number of fundamental needs that all students need to have met in order to study, which care experienced or estranged students find harder to meet. These most basic needs include housing, food, and warmth, and by extension the financial ability to obtain these securely. In particular, structures which assume that students have support of family – financial support to contribute to maintenance costs, and practical support to provide a family home to which students can return outside of term time – contribute to this disadvantage. It is widely documented that the current level of maintenance support for students is insufficient to cover the cost of studying at university. One report by the Higher Education Policy Institute calculated the gap between the maximum maintenance 49