Conference Agenda

Research on school engagement has a long tradition in understanding students' feelings of connection with their academic surroundings, values surrounding educational goals (Orthner, Jones-Sanpei, Akos & Rose, 2013), and participation in academic success (Orthner et al., 2013). High engagement with school can be linked to students' overall success and is of fundamental importance for understanding positive youth development (Li & Lerner, 2011). Engagement with school is characterized by several components, including students' sense of belonging, identification with school, and a sense of relatedness, whereas academic engagement refers to time on task, earned credits, and homework completion (Salmela-Aro & Upadyaya, 2013). The affective or emotional component refers to students' enjoyment and interest in school-related challenges, positive and negative reactions to teachers and classmates, and willingness to do one's schoolwork. The cognitive component, in turn, refers to students’ investment in schoolwork, as well as their thoughtfulness and willingness to learn and exert the necessary effort while studying. Finally, the behavioral component is described in terms of involvement, being present at school, and complying with school discipline rules (Salmela-Aro & Upadyaya, 2013). The concepts of three school engagement dimensions also describe students’ participation, commitment, positive and negative emotions, investment, and willingness to exert effort in one’s schoolwork, all of which refer to patterns rather than causes behind one’s actions. Thus, school engagement can be described as a multidimensional, developing, and malleable construct, including students’ (Carter, Reschly, Lovelace, Appleton & Thompson, 2012).

Normally, girls often exhibit higher levels of behavioral, emotional, and overall school engagement than boys (Li, Lynch, Kalvin, Lin & Lerner, 2011; Salmela-Aro & Upadyaya, 2012; Wang & Eccles, 2012), which may be related to girls’ tendency to perform better at school. Students from lower-income families are more likely than girls and higher socioeconomic status students to experience rapid decreases and follow unstable school engagement trajectories, often leading to school dropouts (Li & Lerner, 2011).

Experiences of belonging, positive relationships, autonomy, and competence are essential to psychological well-being; they provide the psychological “nutriments” or “resources” that sustain and enhance autonomous motivation and the engagement, persistence, and effort that flow from it. Moreover, if one or more of these nutriments is thwarted or denied, we quickly experience negative impacts on well-being, performance, and motivation (Dotterer & Lowe, 2012). Student mental well-being will be supported when teaching and learning practices actively engage students' intrinsic interests and communicate the importance and value of the knowledge and skills being developed. In this sense, students that are engaged in their classes and their universities express more good feelings, good relationships, and accomplishment, and these elements are essential for improving well-being.

In this study, we sought to explore the relationship between the involvement of 1st-year students in the university according to age and gender. Since we have students attending both day and night classes, we decided to establish age categories between 19-23 and more than 23. The research hypotheses to be evaluated are the following: Q1: students’ school engagement in the 1st year varies according to age. Q2: students’ school engagement in the 1st year varies according to gender (male/female). One hundred university students attending the 1st year participated in this study. Participants have a mean age between 19 and 57 years old and a mean of 23.9 (SD: 6.6).

It is in universities’ interest to have high numbers of thriving and successful PhD candidates. PhD students are an essential part of the research system, as Larivière (2012) showed that one-third of the research output at universities was produced by PhD students. Moreover, the unsuccessful completion of a PhD trajectory goes hand in hand with major financial, societal and psychological costs (Allan and Dory 2001; Golde 2005).

Aggregated across Europe, about 34% of all PhD students do not obtain their PhD degree within six years (Hasgall, Saenen, and Borrell-Damian 2019). In Australian, British, Canadian, and American universities, average dropout rates range between 30% and 50%, depending on the discipline (Bowen and Rudenstine 2014; Lovitts 2002; Golde 2005; Council of Graduate Schools 2008).

the PhD track is very different from other phases of education and brings along its specific challenges. A substantial group of PhD students works alone on their project under the supervision of one or more supervisors. Working collaboratively with peers is not always part of the PhD trajectory, which can sometimes make it a lonely process and renders the role of the supervisor all the more important (Cantor 2020). Additionally, the academic environment in which PhD students work is characterized by ever-increasing job demands and competition, due to among other things a growing number of undergraduate students who increasingly fall under the responsibility of PhD students, an increasing pressure to get research funding and publish, and a growing demand to be involved in other activities next to research (Gill 2014). Both the high dependency on the supervisor and the demanding academic environment might incentivise PhD students to quit.

Indeed, research found that factors related to supervision, the project itself and psychosocial factors are associated with the intention to quit the PhD (van Rooij, Fokkens-Bruinsma, and Jansen 2021). However, turnover intention does not always reliably predict actual turnover, nor are the variables explaining turnover intention necessarily the same as those explaining actual turnover (Cohen, Blake, and Goodman 2016). Therefore, we add to this line of work by studying how the received support of the supervisor, the experienced time pressure during the project, and the amount of passion one has for research can predict actual dropout. Contrary to previous studies – that tend to focus solely on administrative data or survey data – we combine administrative data on actual dropout with survey data on the experiences of the doctoral trajectory (n=589).

In this study, special attention is paid to the heterogeneity within the group of PhD students. Previous research does suggest that dropout rates between disciplines differ (Golde 1994; Wright and Cochrane 2000), yet deeper knowledge on the mechanisms behind this is lacking. The aim of this study, then, is to investigate whether certain characteristics of PhD students and certain experiences of the PhD trajectory are associated with dropout, and how the importance of these variables varies between scientific disciplines. These insights will enable university policymakers to develop targeted measures to reduce dropout. Specifically, the two research questions for this article are: “to what extent do support, time pressure and passion for research predict dropout?” and “does their potential predictive power vary across scientific disciplines?”.

There has been increasing interest in understanding the higher education experiences of students who spent time ‘in care’ (e.g. with foster carers) as children, usually due to maltreatment or neglect within the birth family. Members of this group tend to have to overcome strong barriers to educational success, including social disruption, trauma, societal stigma and low expectations from professionals (Stein, 2012). Individuals who spent time in care are often referred to as ‘care-experienced’ and it is increasingly understood that their average educational outcomes are significantly lower than the general population (Berridge et al., 2020; Sebba et al., 2015).

Nevertheless, many care-experienced people thrive within the education system and achieve highly. Official figures for England (Department for Education, 2022) show that 13% of those in care at 16 enter higher education by 19; numbers appear to be growing, while care-experienced people often choose to study later (Harrison, 2020). Furthermore, Harrison et al. (2022) have estimated that around one-quarter of care-experienced graduates progress immediately into postgraduate study. However, almost nothing is currently known about those approaching the top of the academic ladder (Baker, 2022).

This paper therefore explores the experiences of care-experienced people who are now pursuing an academic career (i.e. as professors, lecturers, research fellows and similar), addressing the following research questions:

• RQ1: What insights do the lived lives of the participants offer into successful pathways into and through higher education for people with experience of children’s social care?
• RQ2: Why did the participants choose a career in academia, what challenges have they had to address to establish their careers and how have they overcome these?
• RQ3: What mechanisms, if any, exist within universities to support the professional development of care-experienced academics (e.g. mentoring or funding streams)?
• RQ4: How have the participants navigated issues of identity formation/renegotiation and communities of practice in academia?

We use Archer’s concept of reflexivity (2007, 2012) to explore the balance between individual agency and societal structures, with a focus on the ‘internal conversations’ that we have with ourselves. These help to guide our decisions and actions in relation to the enablements and constraints posed by the prevailing social structures. We also draw on the concept of ‘identity work’ (Brown, 2015) to explore the decisions that academics make about their professional lives. This is predicated on the idea that we can concurrently hold and project multiple identities that can be complementary, overlapping or even contradictory. Identity work captures the mental, emotional, social and physical labour that is invested in creating, maintaining and reconciling the identities that we deploy in professional settings.

While our study is focused exclusively on the United Kingdom, it has a wider relevance across European settings. There has been an increasing focus on care-experienced students in higher education, for example, in Ireland (e.g. Brady et al., 2019) and other European nations (e.g. Jackson and Cameron, 2014). We believe, however, that this is the first study to specifically address the lives of care-experienced academics.