Introduction

Roughly 100,000 children in the United Kingdom (UK) are in the care of the state, being looked after by foster carers, residential homes or extended family, usually due to neglect or maltreatment within the birth family. Some are reunited with birth families or adopted, but others ultimately leave care upon adulthood. Individuals who spent time in care as children are often referred to as ‘care-experienced’. Due to the legacy of childhood trauma, frequent changes in school and care placements, societal stigma, low expectations from professionals and other factors, they have significantly lower educational outcomes than the general population, on average (e.g. Berridge et al., 2020; Harrison et al., 2023a; Sebba et al., 2015).

Nevertheless, many care-experienced learners thrive within the education system, achieving highly. Official figures for England (Department for Education, 2023a) show that 14% of those in care at 16 enter higher education by 19; this is considerably lower than for the general population (47%), but numbers are growing and care-experienced people often access higher education later (Harrison, 2020). Furthermore, around one-quarter of care-experienced undergraduates progress immediately from their first degree into postgraduate study and are therefore on pathways into professional occupations (Baker et al., 2022; Harrison et al., 2022), although there are concerns about retention (Baker, 2024). However, little is known about those approaching the top of the academic ladder (Baker, 2022a).

This study explores the group of care-experienced people currently pursuing an academic career. We undertook this study expecting them to have encountered (and overcome) significant challenges to flourish academically and enter a notoriously competitive profession. We believe there is a strong case for researching the lives of care-experienced adults and exploring how to break well-worn cycles of inequality; we also wanted to disrupt the dominant focus on negative outcomes which can feed back into stigmatisation and low societal expectations. We sought to answer four empirical research questions:

  • What insights do the lived lives of participants offer into successful pathways into and through higher education?

  • Why did participants choose an academic career, what challenges have they addressed to establish their careers and how have they overcome these?

  • What mechanisms, if any, exist within universities to support the professional development of care-experienced academics?

  • How have participants navigated issues of identity formation/renegotiation and communities of practice in academia?

This article addresses the first three—the fourth will be addressed in a subsequent article. While the reference population in this novel study is small, there is wider applicability in understanding how severely disadvantaged and/or marginalised groups achieve significant educational and career success. This study provides a starting point for future research and informs both practice and policymaking, when life outcomes for care-experienced people are under scrutiny (Department for Education, 2023b). In addition, we aimed to make a theoretical contribution by applying Margaret Archer’s (e.g. 2007, 2012) work on reflexivity and interrogating its relevance to a novel setting.

Literature and conceptual framework

Research about care-experienced students in UK higher education has flourished in recent years. This has focused on better understanding demographics and study pathways (e.g. Harrison, 2017, 2020; Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS), 2023) or students’ experiences and the challenges faced (e.g. Child & Marvell, 2024; Ellis & Johnston, 2024; Stevenson et al., 2020). The latter have demonstrated the importance of adequate funding, appropriate housing, inclusive communities and mental health support. Worryingly, care-experienced students are significantly more likely to withdraw early from their studies than peers (Harrison, 2017; Office for Students, 2020). Similar findings have emerged in the USA (e.g. Johnson, 2021), Australia (e.g. Wilson, Harvey, & Mendes, 2019) and elsewhere. However, there is also evidence that care-experienced students who complete their studies have strong graduate outcomes that are comparable to similarly-qualified peers, including entry to graduate-level jobs (Harrison et al., 2022) and, importantly here, progression into postgraduate study (Baker et al., 2022). Baker (2022b) contextualises care-experienced graduate transitions in terms of a desire for stability, in contrast to early-life instabilities, with higher education viewed as an environment that has been supportive. However, we believe there are no previous studies looking at care-experienced people in academic careers.

An adjacent literature around social class and academia is potentially useful. Recent works by Binns (2019) and Crew (2020) provide vivid accounts of contemporary working-class academic lives. Of particular relevance here, Crew (2020) highlights how job insecurity in academic careers, which has been growing in the UK and elsewhere (e.g. Leathwood & Read, 2022), disproportionately impacts on working-class academics who have lower access to financial safety nets. This precarity, typified by short-term and part-time contracts (especially in the early career stage), is implicated in heightened anxiety and mental ill health. Loveday (2018) also notes that staff on precarious contracts report less agency in their careers, while Jones and Maguire (2021) find that the exclusionary nature of higher education’s hierarchies and processes make them less readily navigable for those with working-class backgrounds (Binns, 2019; Crew, 2020). We are, of course, not assuming care experience maps readily onto social class—young people enter care from a range of backgrounds, while care arrangements can cause rapid moves across class settings. However, this literature does provide a useful starting point in acknowledging academic voices that have not generally been heard.

In considering our data, we draw on Archer’s (2007, 2012) concept of reflexivity to explore the balance between social structures and individual agency. This is particularly salient given the strong—and often constraining—influences of the care and education systems, while recognising young people’s increasing scope to make active decisions through adolescence and into adulthood. Archer’s work has previously been used in empirical studies with care-experienced young people (e.g. Barratt et al., 2020; Hung & Appleton, 2015; Matchett & Appleton, 2024) and exploring pathways into higher education (e.g. Baker, 2019; Dyke et al., 2012; Kahn, 2016; Luckett & Luckett, 2009).

Archer’s starting point is that we all construct personal projects based on the individual concerns in our lives, and it is these projects (e.g. pursuing a career) that motivate our practical action. She stresses that these ‘concerns are not preferences’, but rather ‘commitments that are ends in themselves and constitutive of who we are’ (Archer, 2012, 15). She argues our projects are advanced through ‘internal conversation’—a process of discernment (what concerns matter), deliberation (how to fit these concerns into one’s life) and dedication (how they might be pursued). Importantly, however, these conversations are moulded by social context:

Structural and cultural properties objectively shape the situations that agents confront involuntarily, and inter alia possess generative powers of constraint and enablement … Courses of action are produced through the reflexive deliberations of subjects who subjectively determine their practical projects in relation to their objective circumstances. (Archer, 2007, 17)

This focus on constraints and enablements in the discernment, deliberation and dedication of projects over time is salient as ‘the perception (or anticipation) of constraints and enablements can serve as a deterrent or an encouragement’ to action (Archer, 2007, 9). Importantly, constraints and enablements are not randomly distributed, reflecting social circumstances at birth and shifting throughout the life course.

Archer sees reflexivity as a dialectic between both the individual’s historical and contemporary contexts and their concerns in the present. She argues that this leads to us each having a dominant ‘mode’ of reflexivity which influences our concerns, projects and actions. Of particular relevance here, she draws a distinction between those individuals who have ‘contextual continuity’ from the circumstances of their birth and those who undergo discontinuity. She argues the former tends towards close interlocutory relationships with significant others, leading to more conservative actions in the world that maintain harmony; she defines this as communicative reflexivity. Conversely, those who experience ‘contextual discontinuity’ (e.g. through instabilities within the family) tend towards high levels of self-reliance and creative strategising towards upward social mobility which she calls autonomous reflexivity. Archer also identifies a third grouping who experience a ‘contextual incongruity’ between strongly-held personal values and societal/familial context, leading to a tendency towards societal critique, self-exploration and a desire to make positive contributions. She defines this as meta-reflexivity and notes that it is often associated with a cost to happiness or social advancement.Footnote 1

Several authors have questioned Archer’s assertion of the existence of dominant modes, preferring a formulation that ‘modes of reflexivity should not be seen as fixed traits of the individual but as an approach that people can adopt in different situations and context’ (Dyke et al., 2012, 833) or arguing that individuals can draw on ‘dual modes’ (Baker, 2019, 7). Matchett and Appleton (2024) suggest that care-experienced learners may have unique modes that are linked to their early life experiences.

In this article, we will interrogate agency through Archer’s modes of reflexivity and consider their relevance to care-experienced academics. We will consider the constraints and enablements invoked through our participants’ circumstances, foregrounding data that illustrates their internal conversations on the path to (and through) an academic career. Archer’s focus on contextual upheaval in early life as the crucible for reflexivity is particularly apposite given our participants’ experiences of being removed from their birth family and often experiencing multiple care arrangements and/or schools. Also, an emphasis on agency may illuminate why this group of care-experienced people were able to forge highly successful careers, despite the individual and structural disadvantages of their childhood.

Methodology

Consistent with Archer’s theoretical framework, our study was conceptualised within the tradition of the critical realist paradigm, which combines realist ontology with interpretivist epistemology (e.g. Bhaskar, 1998; Sayer, 2000). This is powerful when seeking to understand the lives of individuals who encounter rigid social structures, such as the care and education systems. The underpinning axiology of critical realism particularly seeks to shed light on how systems should be amended to challenge deep-rooted inequalities and support marginalised groups (Pawson, 2013). Within the constraints of this study, we were not able to explore the objective structures of higher education careers directly, but rather through our participants’ perceptions of their experiences and the agentic meaning made from them. In this sense, it offers only a partial picture, not least as the structures (and the mechanisms by which they constrain or enable agency) will vary markedly between universities.

As an initial step, we sought to learn more about the size and composition of the group of care-experienced academics, aiming to engage with as many as possible within the resources available. We devised a short online questionnaire using the Qualtrics platform, collecting details about demographic profile, current/previous academic roles and type/duration of care. An anonymous weblink was distributed via (a) organisations working with care-experienced people,Footnote 2 (b) organisations focused on academic careers,Footnote 3 (c) social media accounts of research centresFootnote 4 and high-profile individuals working with care-experienced people and (d) online message boards led by care-experienced people. We also asked our interview participants (see below) to pass the weblink to any care-experienced academics they knew, although nearly all said they knew no others. Open from September to December 2022, the questionnaire received 31 valid responses.

The questionnaire’s second purpose was to collect contact details from individuals who were interested in being interviewed. Twenty-five respondents were sent more information, of whom 21 were interviewed between October 2022 and January 2023. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken online using Microsoft Teams, lasting between 45 and 70 minutes. While not designed in this way, the interviews tended to follow a broadly sequential life history approach, moving from school through study in further and/or higher education to current career and onward plans (see Appendix). They were recorded and professionally transcribed, before being fully anonymised and uploaded into NVivo for analysis. A brief interim report was then circulated to interviewees to invite further thoughts. We used thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021) to examine transcripts and responses to the interim report, with initial inductive coding followed by iterative discussions to refine the code list and assemble them into eight themes.

Ethics

We were keenly aware of the sensitivity of this work and cognisant that discussing experiences with researchers could be difficult for some participants. Moreover, many had not disclosed their care histories to colleagues or students, partly due to fears about stigmatisation. Drawing on the 2018 British Educational Research Association guidelines for ethical practice, we therefore took several steps to reduce the risk of harm. Firstly, we purposively avoided unduly invasive questions about participants’ childhoods and care experiences. Secondly, we provided the interview questions to participants in advance so they could consider what they were willing to share; we made additional checks at the start and end of the interview. Thirdly, we have deliberately obfuscated participants’ details to avoid accidental identifiability. This includes using pseudonyms, providing limited contextual information, altering minor details and using relatively short quotes from each. The study received ethical clearance from the University of Exeter.

Limitations

As there are no national data on care-experienced academics, the population size is unknown. When planning the study, we spoke informally to several well-networked care-experienced academics, leading us to an estimate that the population might number 50 to 100. We made extensive efforts to contact as many as possible, but the questionnaire responses inevitably provide only a partial picture. Furthermore, some people who knew about the questionnaire may have chosen not to complete it due to fears about revealing their identity. The responses nevertheless provide a minimum enumeration of the group and some indication of its composition. The interview sample likely represents a meaningful proportion of the total population of care-experienced academics in the UK, although is it presently impossible to know. This gives us confidence in our findings, although we are cognisant that our sample was self-selecting and participants may have limited what they were willing to share.

Questionnaire results and participant profile

The questionnaire results are presented in Table 1 below, showing both the total valid responses received and the subset who were interviewed. The subset of interview participants broadly mirrored the profile of questionnaire respondents, although women and those in research-intensive institutions were slightly less likely to have been interviewed.

Table 1 Profile of survey respondents (n = 31) and interviewees (n = 21)
Full size table

There are several noteworthy patterns within the responses. Women predominated, in keeping with their higher representation among care-experienced undergraduates (Harrison, 2020). Only five respondents self-identified as disabled; in the interviews, more discussed mental health issues that were (or had previously been) disabling. Around two-thirds had spent over three years in care, while 26 out of 31 had left care in their teens or on transition to adulthood. The relatively small numbers who spent short periods in care and/or left care early in childhood may reflect a lower propensity to consider themselves ‘care-experienced’ (and therefore engage with the study).

Just over two-thirds were working in social science disciplines (including social work, psychology, sociology, law, criminology and politics) or education. This is consistent with previous research identifying these disciplines as disproportionately popular with care-experienced undergraduates (Harrison, 2020; UCAS, 2023). There was a slight preponderance of responses from teaching-focused institutions, which account for more academics overall. Finally, three-fifths of respondents held doctorates; several others revealed at interview that they were currently pursuing one.

Interview findings

Eight themes were developed from the interview transcripts (see Table 2 above). In this article, we discuss the five themes relating to entry into and progress within academic careers, with the remaining three to be addressed in a future article. A key feature of the interviews was the heterogeneity of accounts; their narratives were highly individualised and often at odds with stereotypical assumptions about academic careers. We have therefore aimed to capture both points of similarity and difference within themes.Footnote 5 The number of participants is small, and therefore, no attempt has been made to look at subgroups (e.g. by gender). To provide a degree of ‘richness’ without risking identifiability, we have provided two pieces of contextual information for each participant—their disciplinary area and the focus of the university in which they work. Names have been randomly generated and should not be taken to imply gender or ethnicity.

Table 2 Summary of interview themes
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Contrasting experiences of school

We asked participants to outline their experience of school and, specifically, the interaction between school and care in framing their subsequent educational success. Most participants reported a disrupted engagement with school due to moves resulting from family circumstances or changes in their care arrangements, such as in this account from Sara (social science, teaching-intensive university):

By the time I was 13, the homes that I know, I’d had 18 different places to live. And they were scattered all over the place, up and down the country […] I didn’t really get any formal education, really, particularly primary years.

This disruption arising from the logics of the care system, sometimes alongside mental health issues associated with trauma, made it particularly challenging to achieve highly and acted as a key constraint. Curricula were not often aligned when they moved, leading to feelings of dislocation and gaps in knowledge; one participant recounted how moves meant they covered the same topic four times. Some participants became frustrated or disengaged from school, sometimes leading to exclusions or long periods of absence: ‘I left school at 16 for a year, I didn’t actually want to […] I was actually doing really well before then’ (Ben, social science, research-intensive university).

However, a smaller group had a substantively more positive experience. For them, school was an enabling source of structure, stability and/or achievement in their lives, when their home circumstances were unsafe or chaotic: ‘school provided that sense of constancy and that sense of positive nurturing, supportive figures, very compassionate’ (John, social science, teaching-intensive university). Around half mentioned influential teachers with high levels of empathy and/or expectation who were willing to ‘go the extra mile’. Nicholas (social science, research-intensive university) described the formative experience of encountering a teacher willing to take a different approach:

The sociology teacher, he should have kicked me out … We had a massive argument in front of the whole class … he just didn’t get annoyed at me. He was like, “Tell me why you are angry, then. Come on, let’s have a conversation”. Because he didn’t do what everybody else did, and just kick me out, and I didn’t sit in isolation messing around all day … He broke me down and made me laugh. He didn’t get angry at me challenging him.

Academic pathways and plans

Planning is a key purpose of internal conversations within Archer’s framework of reflexivity. As outlined above, she sees this as the subjective appreciation of objective constraints and enablements. When we plan, we discern what options are available, deliberate on which suit us best and then dedicate ourselves to agentic action. However, these processes are mediated by our modes of reflexivity. Within this theme, we explore how participants planned their academic careers, both historically and looking to the future.

While the individual narratives were diverse, we noted three broad pathways into academic careers. The first most closely echoes the well-trodden route taken by most academics, starting undergraduate study at 18 and moving through postgraduate study and into academic work in their mid-20s. This was associated with success at school and relatively automatic progress from one step to the next, albeit often with significant challenge along the way. For Stuart (social science, teaching-intensive university):

Applying was incredibly difficult, because I had to fill in all of my UCAS forms myself. I had to fill in all of the student loans things myself. I had no help, because my mum wouldn’t know the first thing […] My stepdad was an alcoholic. He was saying to me, “You’ll never get through uni. You will end up dropping out”. So, I used to hide the prospectuses, because I knew that we would get into some kind of row about it.

The second was associated with disrupted schooling, as described above, where the individual actively chose to return to further education in adulthood to accumulate qualifications that afforded them entry to higher education, usually in their late 20s or 30s, like Becky (social science, research-intensive university):

I was doing minimum wage jobs everywhere and I thought, “I’m worth more than this. I need to get to university, because if I don’t get to university, I’m going to be stuck waiting on tables forever”. And it was my social mobility move, as it were, to go to university.

Becky’s internal conversation here is clear and typical of autonomous reflexivity, with its focus on strategic action associated with improving one’s life chances. Their decision to enter higher education was planned and agentic, set against the perceived constraints of existing employment opportunities.

The third reflected ‘expertise through experience’, generally coming to academia later by transforming their lived experiences in childhood or early adulthood into academically-valued knowledge. These routes were very unconventional, generally forged through supportive and enabling contacts within academia who could help them navigate into job roles drawing on experience rather than formal qualifications. This group was mainly pursuing careers in social work, psychology or criminology; several were working on doctorates to cement their academic status. Nicholas epitomises this pathway, explaining,

If I wasn’t care-experienced, I wouldn’t have had an academic career […] I spent my entire life living and breathing and working in the care system. That is where I shine, that is what I know, that’s what I can do.

Across all three pathways, few participants had anticipated or planned a career in academia. Trisha (social science, research-intensive university) was typical in explaining, ‘I don’t think there was any point that I thought, “That’s what I want to do” – I kind of just ended up here’, while others never ‘really made a conscious decision to pursue an academic career’ (Steve, social science, research-intensive university) or felt it was ‘an accident, a total accident’ (Megan, social science, teaching-intensive university). More important were incremental enabling steps that each reinforced ideas of success and opened up new opportunities. For example, Sophie (social science, teaching-intensive university) describes how each phase led to the next within their internal conversations:

So, I kind of fell into it really. It wasn’t a plan. It wasn’t, “This is what I want to do”. I like to think I was very lucky at that point because an opportunity arose, a colleague had left the university and there was some teaching, I picked it up […] At the same time, they were offering scholarships for PhDs, so part-funded PhDs. So, I went for it. Again, I fell into that.

It was the accumulated reaffirmations that built aspirations over time and gradually solidified an emergent project in the form of an academic career. This prima facie provides something of a challenge to Archer’s model of discernment → deliberation → dedication within internal conversations, with most participants taking largely unplanned action as opportunities arose. Most commonly, the articulated concern was a long-term quest for stability and security, in sharp contrast with the manifest instability and involuntary mobility of early lives: ‘knowing you are going to be somewhere for three years or longer is really appealing to me’ (Maddy, natural science, research-intensive university). Reliable work was one element, but the construction of a family unit and home ownership also framed this for some. Baker (2022b, 3), in her study of graduate transitions, finds a similar desire where ‘the absence of stability in childhood meant that this was a priority for them in adulthood’. Within Archer’s framework, internal conversations about stability are generally associated with communicative reflexivity, but there was little indication that our participants were framing their actions around the views of others.

Another common concern was around helping people. This included students in general—‘I love supporting students and watching them thrive’ (Gretchen, social science, teaching-intensive university)—but also care-experienced people and associated groups in society: ‘I’ve just done a reference for a student of mine who was also a care leaver because he’s now going on to do his Masters at a very prestigious university’ (Sophie). This was particularly true for those entering academia through the third pathway outlined above, where their career afforded them the opportunity to ‘make a difference’ (Jordan, social science, research-intensive university) by transferring experiential knowledge and skills. Archer associates these motivations with meta-reflexivity, with its strong connection to values-based action. Other participants foregrounded the contribution they were making to their academic discipline.

Interestingly, the pattern of incremental embedding into academia was not yet concluded for our participants. Most had no definite onwards career plans, either being content in their current role or waiting to see which future opportunities might present themselves: ‘Looking ahead, I just feel like I’ll just continue doing what I’m doing really rather than expecting anything spectacular, I’ll just carry on doing it’ (Josey, social science, research-intensive university). Some associated this contingent approach with their limited knowledge of the pathways available—in Archerian terms, they were still in the discernment phase of this internal conversation. Others, like Steve, linked their reticence to plan back to their own histories:

You might not want to dwell on the past – if you’re care experienced – too much. And you might realise you can’t guarantee what’s happening in the future. You don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know, maybe there is something about that – just kind of appreciate what you’ve got, while you’ve got it, enjoy it and … see where things go.

This was consistent with earlier findings with young care leavers where ‘harmful earlier life experiences were interpreted as having had an effect upon their willingness to think about the future [which] was seen as risky and unknowable’ (Barratt et al., 2020, 878). This surfaces the possibility that scepticism about planning may form early (Hung & Appleton, 2015), but persist into later life. Baker (2022b) finds more of a willingness to deliberate graduate transitions as part of a drive for stability, albeit with contingencies and fall-back options.

Clearly, we are not suggesting our participants were unable to make plans, but rather there was an underlying reluctance, perhaps reflecting instability in their early lives and historic constraints on their agency: ‘I am anticipating threats and trying to solve them, but always at short notice – I am never planning and thinking’ (Jordan). Those who discussed plans tended to express them as generalised discourses of ‘working their way up’ academic hierarchies or achieving a positive work/life balance, rather than being dedicated to specific goals or elaborated projects for achieving them.

Precarities and safety nets

While the previous theme explored participants’ planning processes, this one looks in more depth at a common area of constraint that shaped reflexive deliberation about academic careers. In common with many academics, most participants had undergone (or were still in) a period of occupational precarity, characterised by short-term, part-time or sessional contracts. This led to substantial uncertainty about finances as, for example, recounted through Rosey’s (social science, research-intensive university) internal conversation about the end of their postdoctoral fellowship:

During the pandemic when it hit, this was before [funding body] said there would be any extensions or anything like that, I was, like, “Okay, well I’ve got six months left on my funding” or whatever it is, “And if I don’t have a job after that six months, then how do we pay the rent? How do we eat?” All of that stuff.

Indeed, many had cycled through time-limited contracts without job security before securing a permanent role, echoing reports by working-class academics (Binns, 2019; Crew, 2020). For our participants, worries could be heightened by previous experiences during or after care, even impacting on their work, as Trisha describes:

I get quite high anxiety around being able to pay my rent because I’ve been homeless in the past. So, as soon as my contract is coming to an end, [managers] know that my anxiety is going to be going up, so I might not be as productive with work.

Participants often mentioned the absence of family ‘safety nets’—either presently or recalling the past (Crew, 2020). This meant fewer resources to ‘ride out’ any periods of unemployment or back-up housing options; compared to peers, they felt at a marked disadvantage with less agentic freedom to pursue their career. While spouses/partners could provide a (growing) sense of shared security, offsetting the precarity and enabling more confidence about the future, two had recently left or were considering leaving academia because of the repeating cycle of seeking new jobs and financial insecurity.

More broadly, participants often contextualised feelings of occupational precarity within the wider quest for stability outlined above. The prospect of a permanent job was juxtaposed with the uncertainty, dislocation and mobilities associated with care, as epitomised by Gretchen:

We moved at least every three years, so new schools, new countries […] I guess that’s where that idea about wanting stability, as well, it’s not just the money side; it’s also about developing relationships to a place and people for longer than just the shortest time in the world.

The precarities and instabilities of contemporary academia therefore represented a strong constraint for participants that limited their ability to exercise agency to advance their careers (Loveday, 2018). It evoked earlier periods in their lives, generated additional anxiety and, for some, became a structural ‘deterrent’ (Archer, 2007) that made them reconsider or even reject this pathway, such as with Becky, here discussing trying to get their research published:

When I got my first rejection letter back, it was just devastating. The way they write, the comments they give, the feedback and you just think, “Bloody hell”. And my boss said to me, “Look, you’ve got to develop a thick skin”, because I was in tears about it. I think that’s key for me as a care leaver because I’ve experienced so much rejection in my life, and then being in a workplace where rejection is the norm […] It’s not good for my mental health to keep on being rejected all the time.

Enablers for career progression

In juxtaposition to the structural constraints embodied in academic precarity, participants also identified enablements that supported their sense of agency; these too influenced their internal deliberations about what seemed possible and desirable. Some participants, like John, discussed drawing on reserves of self-belief and/or self-reliance to progress and prosper:

I’ve always had a drive to just keep going for my goals and I’ve got a strong sense of self-efficacy, I think, in terms of being able to achieve my particular goals […] I also recognise the strength of being independent as well. I have a strong sense of resourcefulness as well within myself, that I’m not reliant on family, I can do stuff myself, which I think is a strength.

Hung and Appleton (2015, 49) also noted a ‘profound self-reliance’ among young care leavers, forged by the need to develop individual coping strategies, and it could be argued that our participants’ negative historic encounters with the structures of the care and school systems had, perversely, engendered an internalised ‘resource’ on which they could draw later in life. As Rosey said, ‘I guess I have been always very driven because if it wasn’t me that was doing it, then it wasn’t going to happen […] if you didn’t speak up for yourself when I was a kid and a young adult, then there was nobody that was going to do it for you’. This is indicative of the autonomous reflexivity mode and an internal conversation that emphasises individual agency for positive change with limited reference to others.

Conversely, several talked about being comfortable asking for help and gave examples of being substantially helped by a knowledgeable other—in school, university or work. They saw this willingness to ask for help as a key attribute allowing them to achieve highly and progress within academia, drawing on colleagues with ‘insider knowledge’ of higher education: ‘I’m well aware of my strengths and my limitations, and I’ll seek out people that can help me’ (Yvonne, social science, teaching-intensive university). Several participants reported benefiting from their network of professional contacts, for example, by being alerted to job opportunities or supported to make applications. They acknowledged that they were often at a disadvantage compared to peers and that others could help them to ‘level the playing field’. Sara noted the importance of academics with backgrounds similar to their own:

So, I’ve got a supportive team. I’ve got one person that’s particularly supportive, who I contacted yesterday. But the funny thing is, my support really has always come from other people with similar experiences.

These juxtapositions of self-reliance and help-seeking in internal conversations were both enabling, either by providing a strong intrinsic motivation for a better life or recognising the tangible help that others could provide. However, somewhat contra Archer, they were neither mutually exclusive nor fixed in time. For example, Steve discussed how their own perspective was shifting away from a position of extreme self-reliance:

I’ve always been, yes, very independent, not a good sharer and one who has survived and got on by keeping my own counsel … it is only in later years I’ve thought, “Oh, perhaps there is merit in talking to people and seeking support”.

Nearly all participants drew significantly on informal emotional support to enable them to prosper in their career. Networks were broad and diverse, taking in not only spouses/partners, siblings and colleagues, but also extended family, birth parents and even former foster carers. These often-close relationships provided stability and mitigated work stresses, but they did not generally evoke Archer’s description of communicative reflexivity with its continuity-driven ‘micro-worlds’ that worked to maintain the social status quo. Rather, they tended to act as counterpoint enablements to the precarity constraints described earlier.

Strikingly, none of our participants mentioned formal support for their working lives or career development that explicitly recognised care and its implications. Several alluded to ongoing issues around mental health that might intrude unpredictably in the workplace (also see Baker, 2022b), including Sara, who was frustrated at their employer’s tacit assumption that they had no distinct needs:

Is it that I’m just completely normal, and everybody’s got these things that are going on? Is it that I’ve had these profound experiences in childhood, and throughout adolescence, and early adulthood as well, that carry this residue that means that maybe, potentially, I need some additional support in certain areas?

Individual colleagues or managers could be supportive, but the primary discourse was about being expected to find one’s own way and discovering by doing; engaging with ‘the unknown’, with its precarity and limited information, could be variously exciting, confusing or unsettling. In some instances, an indirect benefit from working within a discipline which concerned itself with care as a topic (e.g. social work) was reported, reflecting a baseline of empathy where colleagues were aware that someone was care-experienced. Trisha talked about how their mental health could impact their work and how colleagues helped in managing this:

There are extra benefits because they understand what it’s like being a care leaver. You know, if I’m having an off day, I’d say they’re more understanding of stuff like that. Or if I turn up and I’m completely scatty and I’ve got a million and one things in my head, I think there’s more understanding […] than there might be in other places.

Conversely, Ben described how they had tried to seek help, but immediate colleagues did not appreciate the legacy of their care experience and its inherent positional disadvantages. Ben then sought more formal options: ‘I went to look for support [through] the equality and diversity initiatives because I would have thought that would be mainly where it would come in, and support for staff and that sort of thing’. When they contacted the appropriate institutional team, they were rebuffed as the support available was focused on gender and ethnicity. Rather than offering an enablement, this reinforced the constraints that Ben felt in managing the long-term effects of their care experience within their career.

Removing constraints and forging enablements

Our final theme relates to actions to facilitate care-experienced academic careers and therefore responds directly to the two previous themes, with their emphasis on constraints and enablements. Participants wanted mitigation for the strong disincentive of precarious employment and more transparency about career paths within academia (Jones & Maguire, 2021), in the absence of ready insight from their social networks. Sara suggested that universities could promote ‘a community for absolutely anybody’ working in higher education who had not taken ‘traditional’ career paths, whereas Terry (social science, research-intensive university) wanted to see more targeted, practical assistance: ‘I really do think that financial help, counselling and [mentoring] schemes are more the way to go’.

Many also referred to challenges faced during undergraduate study and their progression into postgraduate study, suggesting that universities needed to invest more heavily in bursaries, year-round housing, mentoring or study support for care-experienced students to increase the flow into academic careers. These elements have improved rapidly in recent years (Become, 2023) and are likely more advanced than when our participants were at this stage in their education. Trisha wanted to look back even further to school and college:

Children can go through such significant trauma and not be entitled to mental health support, because they’re not “bad enough” or “struggling enough” […] Definitely more financial support. How can you study at college when you’re getting £30 a week to pay your bills and food and transport? […] And housing, if you’ve got the stability of housing, it makes everything else so much easier.

Stuart also picked up the thread around mental health and the relationship between childhood trauma and educational success, drawing on their own previous job as a schoolteacher:

I have had kids where, if I started talking about university to them, it would be ridiculous, because their immediate thoughts aren’t even thinking about tomorrow sometimes. They are that mired in trauma.

Finally, several participants focused on the need for schools, colleges and universities to challenge low societal expectations around care, which they felt acted as a constraint on future success by suppressing motivation for education. Stuart suggested that ‘there needs to be more visible role models, because you have got to see it to be it’, while Nicholas argued that,

It is about giving them knowledge, from a young age, that academic pathways are for them. University is for you. You could be a lecturer. You could be a researcher. You can be whatever you want to be […] We don’t celebrate care leavers in a way that recognises their journeys.

Discussion and conclusion

We have presented what we believe to be the first empirical account of care-experienced academics, drawing primarily on 21 semi-structured interviews. Their pathways into and through careers were diverse. While some followed relatively conventional routes into higher education as young adults or mature students, albeit facing important constraints, many drew directly on ‘expertise through experience’ to equip them as authentic and effective educators and/or researchers.

We elected to use Archer’s (2007, 2012) concept of reflexivity to foreground participants’ agency through ‘internal conversations’ about their evolving careers, emphasising the interplay between highly individualised lived experiences and encounters with social structures like education systems. Congruent with Barratt et al., (2020, 883), we found that ‘internal conversations and meaning-making [were] powerfully shaped by their experiences of trauma and disappointment’. Common reflexive concerns included building stability/security, contributing to their academic discipline and helping students, care-experienced people and other disadvantaged groups.

Following Archer’s terminology, we have identified structural constraints and enablements as mechanisms that impacted on our participants’ career projects. Foremost among the constraints was precarity within academia, which is endemic in the UK (Leathwood & Read, 2022). We cannot know how many care-experienced people might have been prevented from pursuing this path due to structure trumping agentic choices (Baker, 2019). The opacity of academic careers was also highlighted. Conversely, participants were often enabled through a strong sense of self-reliance derived from their childhood experiences in the care and education systems, as well as the intervention of individual professionals who provided encouragement or concrete opportunities for career advancement.

In addition to presenting our empirical findings, we have engaged with the relevance of Archer’s theoretical framework for this context. As noted earlier, several previous authors (e.g. Baker, 2019; Matchett & Appleton, 2024) have questioned whether her idea of dominant modes of reflexivity applies readily to care-experienced people, especially given the marked instability of their early lives, where Archer argues that reflexivity emerges; our data would tend to support this growing critique. Clear examples of Archer’s modes emerged from our data, but not as a coherent picture. For example, participants described high levels of self-reliance and a tendency to grasp opportunities that would be associated with autonomous reflexivity, but there was relatively little concern with long-term strategic planning or discovering future career routes. Many sought challenging work and had the strong values-driven motivations associated with meta-reflexivity, but few appeared to be unduly frustrated by the axiological compromises of their job. Personal relationships with family, former carers, friends and colleagues were strong, as underpins communicative reflexivity, but there was no sign these were constraining or requiring of occupational self-sacrifice—rather, they were presented as facilitative and career enabling.

Entering care causes significant upheaval for young people, potentially leading to the ‘forced independence’ that Archer (2012, 174) associates with autonomous reflexivity. However, this runs in parallel with an early and intense exposure to societal problems and the limited capacity of welfare systems to address them. This might engender the critical and questioning worldview indicative of meta-reflexivity and its driving concerns around making a positive contribution. Meta-reflexivity can be associated with profound childhood events (Archer, 2007) or feelings of being ‘a loner within [one’s] own family’ (Archer, 2012, 213). One possibility is that our participants experienced both contextual discontinuity and incongruity before, during and after care, leading to a ‘dual mode’ (Baker, 2019) where both autonomous reflexivity and meta-reflexivity are drawn upon fluidly, but where neither is dominant. We also noted the importance of others in participants’ accounts, particularly with respect to mitigating the precarities and stresses of an academic career. In some ways, the importance placed on these personal relationships is redolent of communicative reflexivity, although without the constraining effects usually associated with this mode. Instead, they may reflect participants’ desire for a contextual stability that was absent from their early lives.

We therefore tentatively conclude that care-experienced academics express unique forms of reflexivity that reflect, to a greater or lesser extent, their unusual and profound circumstances (Matchett & Appleton, 2024). In this, we differ slightly from Dyke et al. (2012), who argue that the modes are more akin to approaches that may be manifest at different times. Rather, we are suggesting that none of Archer’s modes is unambiguously identifiable among our participants, who appeared to embody elements of several modes. We are conscious, however, that our focus on those who were sufficiently secure in their occupation to agree to be interviewed may have limited our scope to explore longer-term reflexivity patterns, so more research is needed.

Turning finally to the implications of the study, our participants were explicit about the need for an effective pipeline to augment the number of future care-experienced academics. Schools could do more to inspire learners and demystify professional careers, with stronger and more visible ‘second opportunity’ routes for young people whose education is disrupted. There have been marked improvements in university support for care-experienced students in recent years, with targeted bursary, housing, employment and community-building schemes, but more work remains to be done (Child & Marvell, 2024; Harrison et al., 2023b). Little attention has yet been paid to career planning for care-experienced graduates or supporting transition into postgraduate study (Baker, 2022b).

No participants reported receiving formal support from their institution that referenced their care-experienced status. While some were purposefully ‘visible’ as care-experienced academics, partly in order to disrupt stereotypes, most were not due to fears of stigmatisation (to be explored in a future article). While recognising individual choice, there is a risk that this partial visibility limits the priority afforded by institutions to supporting their care-experienced staff. Given the recent efforts by universities to recognise care experience as a site of inequality for their students, there is an important parallel need to recognise the needs of their care-experienced staff within their equality, diversity and inclusion programmes alongside the more established needs related to gender, ethnicity and disability. Based on our findings, targeted interventions to reduce precarity, manage mental health and make academic careers transparent would all help care-experienced academics to thrive.