The Care Experienced Society provides peer support for all Care Experienced students and creates a sense of belonging and family when we need it.

Here’s what we’ve achieved so far…

• Trained key staff in understanding Care Experience, so they can use it in everyday practice
• Alongside the Renfrewshire Ace hub, UWS and the Students’ Union we hosted our Connected Communities event. Understanding care experience means knowing that services become our family when we need support, so bringing together as many services as we could to show a connected community was really important
• Had a policy introduced to support Care Experienced students in Student Council
• Changed uni induction packs to make them more inclusive for Care Experienced students, enabling them to access more support right from the start
• Created videos explaining Care Experience and why it’s beneficial to tick the Care Experienced box. These are helping to reduce the stigma attached to ticking the box
• We’re working together with UWS to write their corporate parenting policy so that it has lived experience at its heart. We have the university acknowledging the importance of understanding the challenges that their Care Experienced students face and the incredible hurdles it takes to make it to university

We’ve had many highlights of this year it would be hard to pick one...

• The facebook page is incredible.... there’s a sense of family within it, we can go for advice without worry
• The Connected Communities event went incredibly and we’ve been asked to host another one
• Providing the training was incredible. We ended up with individuals telling us they were care experienced and that they had family who were care experienced (that’s why it matters). We had someone tell us that they knew how to treat a student who had disclosed Care Experience and it gave her confidence in treating her with Respect and Love.
• The induction packs and videos were incredible achievements because hopefully now we won’t miss supporting a single Care Experienced student that comes to study at UWS.

We’re looking forward to continuing as a working group for Care Experienced students and the Corporate Parenting plan being completed. We’ll hopefully host another Connected Communities event and of course have a Celebratory Lunch for the Care Experienced students!