policy & reform
campusreview.com.au
It was obviously an option for me, and
it’s something I did end up doing, but my
concern is that if we’re not talking about
university with kids who are doing well,
then we’re certainly not talking about
university to young people in care who,
had they been born into a middle-class
family, would probably go to university.
Do you think some of the ideas behind
this kind of attitude is that, unless you
get a foster kid earning a wage as soon as
possible, they’ll become a taxpayer burden?
Well, I think that because there’s so little
support for kids coming out of care, there
is a very practical need for them as soon as
they turn 18 to start earning an income.
In fact, we’re not very good at tracking
post-school outcomes for kids in care,
so I’m not sure anybody actually spends
enough time thinking about what a
tax burden kids coming out of care end
up being.
What kind of support is currently being
offered by universities and the government
to help care leavers access university?
Anastasia Glushko at her
graduation from Oxford
University. Photo: Supplied
insofar as we expect very little in terms of
their outcomes. We don’t expect them
to go to university. We don’t even talk to
them about going to university.
While they’re young teenagers, they
have the same levels of aspiration for
university as the majority of the population
– but something happens between the
ages of 15 and 18 where it just doesn’t
translate into actual enrolment. There’s a
lot of work to do from a lot of angles.
Going back to that cultural issue, you
phrased this in an article you wrote for
The Guardian as “the bigotry of low
expectations”.
For sure. As a trivial example, I did very
well in my HSC, which was some years
ago now, but I was in the top 3 per cent of
my state and no-one spoke to me about
university outside of my school. None of
my social workers. Nobody mentioned
that it might be an option.
Very little. On the federal government
side, there is a one-off payment, which is
about $1500. It’s not much, but it would
cover the bond for particularly regional
universities.
Unfortunately most kids in care – over
60 per cent – don’t even know this
payment exists. It’s very difficult to access.
By the way, that payment is available to
all kids irrespective of whether they access
higher education or not, so there’s nothing
really at all explicitly available to support
the cost associated with going to uni.
Most Australian universities are likewise
guilty of not providing much support
to kids in care. That’s slowly, slowly
changing, and that’s part of what I’ve been
working on.
The reality is that universities provide
most of the support that young people
coming out of care need, it’s just not
explicitly available to this group. For
example, every university offers support
with housing and bursaries for low-income
students, but if you’ve come out of care,
you don’t realise that you’re eligible for
any of that. I didn’t realise until I was 28
that I was low-SES when I was doing my
undergrad. No-one told me.
Part of the idea is to encourage
universities to repackage the things that
they currently offer to disadvantaged
students and make them explicitly available
to kids coming out of care.
There is a small handful of universities
that do that, and do a lot more than that,
but relative to what equivalent countries
are doing, like the UK and the US, it’s
very modest.
I would like to get to a point where we’re
supporting young people coming out of
care, where we are with Indigenous young
people now, where every university has a
comprehensive system of support that’s
well-resourced and well-recognised as
something that is absolutely essential in
achieving equity diversity in that university.
There is an overlap there as well, in that
a high proportion of Indigenous children
have experienced foster care.
Yes. Depending on which state you’re
in, about 30–35 per cent of the care
population are Indigenous.
You undertook a Churchill Fellowship
looking into how Australia compares to
the rest of the world when it comes to
improving access to higher education.
What did you find?
The depressing part is that Australia is
light years behind most of the Western
world when it comes to supporting young
people coming out of care, and even
young people in care. Interestingly, our
care population per capita is double the
size of that of the UK and the US, and yet
we have a fraction of the support available
to those young people.
In both the UK and the US in particular,
but also most European countries, the
welfare of young people coming out of
care is a huge social priority now.
Similarly, in the US, it’s a huge national
issue, and there’s a wealth of resources
available across different sectors to
support young people going into university
Most Australian universities
are guilty of not providing much
support to kids in care, but
that’s slowly changing.
and doing more with their lives beyond
low-skilled work.
Especially when compared to the US,
we actually have a much more generous
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