Caring about student carers

This project aims to better understand and support students who are carers. Recognising that student carers often face multiple challenges, this project investigated student experience of distance learning. Framing experience of study as emerging out of the affordances for learning offered by an institution and student subjectivities, the project foregrounded how students negotiated their learning trajectory through their modules. The project had two aims: 1. To explore how students who are carers experience and manage Open University (OU) study 2. To provide a sound foundation for further University-wide research in this area 20 telephone interviews were conducted with HWSC students with caring responsibilities. These were transcribed and analysed using a combination of Framework analysis and Thematic analysis. Student-carers faced similar challenges to carers elsewhere – financial and time limitations, along with challenging, exhausting and unpredictable demands. While the OU was chosen for its flexibility and affordability, caring could be incompatible with the time demands and routines of successful study. Carers actively managed their time, boundaries and others to maintain their study. Study was enjoyable, confidence building, potentially career enhancing and offered the potential to improve care. Student-carers were ambivalent about OU support with some keeping their caring responsibilities private. Some tutors were very supportive and others less so. Student tutor groups were not a priority. For carers, caring responsibilities represented continuities in their sense of self. The layering on of university commitments potentially created tensions but did not disrupt the primacy of their caring role. Rather, study reinforced carer sense of personal integrity. Increased university flexibility would enhance affordances for carer learning. Follow-up interviews with the same students are planned for a year’s time.