Transforming Access to Hardship Funding at the Hub for Success
Author
NIAMH MCCROSSAN
Hub Coordinator
Hub for Success
Summery
The Hub for Success wanted to make discretionary hardship funding more accessible to care-experienced students. It helped institutions streamline processes by training funding teams in trauma-informed, professional curiosity, drawing on direct input from students with lived experience.
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The challenge
Across many institutions, students struggle to access discretionary hardship funding — government funds that universities and colleges can distribute at their own discretion. Institutional approaches vary considerably: some apply set eligibility criteria, while others have more flexibility. Although institutions report that the vast majority of students who complete an application receive funding, many students who would be eligible don’t complete their application and therefore are not captured in any statistics or award allocations. An added complexity of this is students progressing from college to university, who often find the transition to unfamiliar funding systems difficult to navigate.
Part of the problem lies in the process: funding teams, keen to maximise the support available to each student, often require detailed applications and extensive evidence of need. But many students don’t want or need a large award; they need a small amount quickly to resolve an immediate problem. The thoroughness of the process, intended to help, can easily become a barrier.
The approach
The Hub for Success is a cross-institutional collaboration hosted by Edinburgh Napier University, bringing together all of Edinburgh's colleges and universities to help care-experienced students access and remain in education. As well as providing one-to-one support covering everything from funding applications and appeals to practical matters like finding housing, the Hub has worked with partner institutions to change their approach to student support.
A key element of this partnership was training delivered to funding teams across institutions, centred on professional curiosity and trauma-informed practice. Rather than approaching students through a lens of scrutiny, staff were encouraged to lead with curiosity and a genuine desire to understand. The training addressed practical realities for students with experience of the care system that funding staff might not otherwise consider. This included things like spending patterns that could appear on bank statements and why expenditure may vary for care experienced students compared to their non care experienced peers.
Crucially, students with lived experience were brought into the training sessions themselves, offering honest insight from their own encounters with funding processes, and the communications around funding decisions. Listening to these students prompted mutual understanding and genuine shifts in perspective. One key piece of student advice was simply: the most helpful question is not ‘tell me about your care experience,’ but ‘how can I help you right now?’
The Impact
Adopting a trauma-informed approach centred on professional curiosity rather than judgement has given students greater agency and choice in how they access support. Staff are better equipped to meet students where they are, rather than requiring students to navigate processes designed around institutional expectations. Similarly, one funding team have created a model that is proactive in teaching financial literacy and budgeting through building relationships with care experienced students, instead of solely reacting to financial hardship.
The work has also highlighted a broader lesson for institutions supporting diverse student groups. Care experienced students may be small in numbers and are typically not a very homogenous group, but they are statistically more likely to also belong to other underrepresented groups at our institutions, including SIMD20, careers, estranged from their families, additional learning needs, mature students, parents, or articulation students. Meeting the needs of this diverse group, then, produces approaches that work better for everyone. Through their experience of supporting care-experienced students, the Hub for Success has found that designing for those with the greatest need improves access for all students.