Climbing the ivory tower: agency, reflexivity and the career pathways of care-experienced academics in higher education

There has been increasing interest in understanding the higher education experiences of students who spent time ‘in care’ as children, who tend to have to overcome strong barriers to educational success. Care-experienced students often thrive in higher education, although little is currently known about those who build on this success to pursue their own academic career. This study sought to explore the educational trajectories and working lives of care-experienced academics in the UK for the first time. We used an online survey to identify potential interview participants, leading to 21 semi-structured online interviews. This article reports the findings from five of the eight themes developed through thematic analysis, focusing primarily on the diverse pathways into and through academic careers. We used Archer’s concepts of reflexivity and the ‘internal conversation’ to explore agency, enablements and constraints. Most participants highlighted the disrupted nature of their schooling, although school was a place of safety and success for some. Pathways into higher education were heterogeneous, including a group who had used their ‘expertise through experience’ to forge academic careers in disciplines like social work and psychology. Career precarity was common and particularly challenging without family ‘safety nets’. Our participants tended to show high levels of self-reliance and/or willingness to seek help, coupled with a scepticism around long-term planning. We argue that these factors are shaped by early lives and lead to specific forms of reflexivity, concluding that universities need to recognise care experience as a status deserving of additional career support.