Stand Alone has announced its closure and its higher education work is coming to an end. Will the sector continue to advocate for estranged students and drive policy change?
In 2015, Stand Alone, a small charity founded in 2013 to offer support to adults estranged from family, embarked on the ambitious project to change higher education for students whose relationship with their parents and wider family network had broken down, i.e. were estranged.
Why? Raising awareness by writing about many different facets of estrangement in the press and media opened a floodgate: Stand Alone was contacted by university students sharing their experiences of the obstacles they faced to succeed in higher education and asking the charity to help. Quickly Stand Alone understood that ‘estrangement’ was unrecognised as a barrier to higher education. These students who were living independently and were totally self-reliant faced an uphill battle. And they called on Stand Alone to help.
Stand Alone needed to find out more and gather evidence. The first piece of research ‘New Starts: the challenges of higher education without the support of a family network’ in collaboration with the Unite Foundation and published in 2015 highlighted the profiles and vulnerabilities of both care leavers and estranged students and the differences in the support available to the two groups. Further research on the risks for those estranged or disowned by their family to access and succeed in higher education painted a bleak picture of an unseen, unrecognised, vulnerable group of students.
