policy & reform
campusreview.com.au
Fostering opportunity
A former foster kid and Oxford
graduate is advocating to make
universities more accessible for
young people like her.
Anastasia Glushko interviewed by
Kate Prendergast
T
here are close to 50,000 children
living in out-of-home care in
Australia. This experience will often
represent a huge disruption to what other
kids would consider normal life. Many will
face profound challenges that will ripple
through into adulthood. Thirty per cent will
at some point find themselves homeless,
and many will end up in low paying, low
skilled jobs.
Anastasia Glushko, who became a
ward of the state at 12 years of age,
considers herself one of the lucky ones.
And, the biggest source of this luck she
12
believes comes from her decision to enrol
in university.
Her time at ANU and then later at
Oxford she found utterly transformative.
She wants more foster kids to have the
same benefits that university gave her. In
2016 she founded Why Not You, a project
dedicated to making higher education as
accessible as possible for care leavers.
Glushko shared her story and insights
with Campus Review.
CR: Around 41 per cent of Australian high
school graduates enrol in higher education,
but for those who’ve grown up in state care,
it’s less than 3 per cent. How can we explain
this difference?
AG: Children in care face many more
challenges than the majority of young
people in Australia. In fact, as far as
indicators of social disadvantage go,
it’s probably one of the most reliable
indicators we have in Australia.
Children in care have almost always had
significant educational disruption. I myself
went to five different high schools – that’s
considered to be a very stable placement.
It’s common for that number to be in the
20s and 30s, and much higher still.
Obviously you don’t end up in foster
care at the drop of a hat – quite a lot of
steps need to happen before you end up
there. Usually those steps are traumatic for
the children. That will create psychosocial
and emotional differences that can take a
long time to address.
Also, a lot of children in care might have
had delays to their schooling, particularly if
they’ve come into care around school age.
So they’re behind on a lot of those really
basic academic skills as well. There is also
a massive cultural issue in terms of how
the social sector and the university sector
process children in care.
With kids in care, we are where we were
with Indigenous kids about 30 years ago,