Words by Smiley Team
Having cared for her mum throughout her studies, Open University learning partnerships officer Gill Ryan understood the added burden the pandemic would put on student carers. Since 2016, the Open University had been planning a staff training programme to support carers with their studies, but it was only with the added urgency of Covid-19 that they lept to put it to the test in Scotland.
Together with Carers Trust Scotland, the distance learning provider collected testimonies from student carers explaining how their unpaid care work impacted their studies. They used the real-life stories to create an online course for teachers that will help improve support to thousands of people in Scotland, who are studying alongside providing unpaid care for a family member or friend who is ill, frail, disabled or has mental health or addiction problems.
“While caring for someone else, students sometimes miss school or become very distracted. That was my experience,” explained Gill. “I had to put my degree on hold to care for my mum. Initially, I was asking for extensions on assignments. But eventually, I realised I couldn’t study and work at the same time and the staff let me bank my assessments. I left and came back later.”
Thanks to funding from the Scottish Funding Council, the new online training module, Carer Aware, will help university staff to better understand the challenges faced by many student carers and provides guidance on how to improve support for these students at university.
“We want to provide consistency,” said Gill, “because there is a lot of staff who are carer aware, but we want to offer a course that will be rolled out very quickly so that all staff have the same level of awareness, something that’s all the more important during the pandemic.”
Prior to the pandemic, a survey by the Carers Trust found that student carers are four times more likely to drop out of college and university than those who are not carers. Over 80 per cent struggle to maintain good mental health while balancing studies with care work, and nearly 90 per cent have difficulty concentrating on assignments.
Lockdown has only exacerbated these challenges, putting an added strain on students’ mental health with the isolation and stress of living through the pandemic while caring for a vulnerable person.
With the help of the new training programme, staff will be able to support students deal with these difficulties and create an environment where education will offer the respite they need.
Carers Trust campaigns and runs initiatives to support unpaid care workers across the UK.
To support their work donate to Carers Trust via their website.
