Forcibly Displaced Students in Higher Education

Background

In 2022 the number of forcibly displaced people (FDP) globally surpassed 100 million for the first time. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) aims to enrol 30% of eligible FDPs into HE by 2030. However, only 6% of the world’s eligible FDPs can access Higher Education (HE) currently.

Although an increasing number of UK universities promote the access of FDPs to HE, questions remain over how effectively they can engage, even after admission. Inflexible curricula, cultural differences, resource constraints, and personal and family concerns present formidable learning barriers.

An international, multidisciplinary, long-term research programme is required to examine how universities in high GDP countries can improve refugees’ HE access. Building on our new working relationships and momentum, this initial research project represents a first step towards establishing that programme.

Our research question for this project was: ‘how could the British personal tutoring system support forcibly displaced students more effectively?’  FDSs prefer the personalised support of a staff member they can trust, compared to other more formal types of support (Baker et al, 2018). Their relationship with their tutor is important to their academic experience, especially for undergraduates (Schäfer, 2022).

Project Summary

The community wanted to understand how FDSs view their tutors and how the tutoring system can best support FDSs; to that end the Generator Fund supported an entire research project from conception and design, through empirical data collection, to analysis and writing up. The community held focus groups with Forcibly Displaced Students across 4 institutions which explored FDSs’ experiences of personal tutoring, and held further focus groups with professional services and academic staff from across the 4 institutions to understand their perspectives.

Following the focus groups, a workshop was held with FDSs, academic and professional university staff. The workshop discussed the findings of the focus groups and explored potential training options for personal tutors; and gave space for the community to build collaborations and brainstorm new possibilities for joint research and initiatives. The resulting community has brought together scholars and staff who worked independently on very similar topics (e.g. integration of refugees and asylum seekers, displaced students in higher education) to develop new collaborations in this space.

As a result of the research focus groups and the workshop, the community produced two leaflets which provide guidelines for (i) personal tutors, academic advisors and supervisors on supporting FDSs more effectively and (ii) FDSs on that personal tutor relationship. These will be distributed through the University of Sanctuary network. An academic journal article will also be written. Additional funding was secured to host a follow up workshop on careers of forcibly displaced students.

Image credit: University of Edinburgh, Universities of Sanctuary Conference