Edge Hill University
These numbers have stories”: The lived experience of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children studying English in further education settings in the North West of England when transitioning into adulthood
Unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASC) and youth are a vulnerable group of individuals pursuing refugee status in England (UKVI, 2024). Dispersed across the country, they represent diverse cultures across the world but are united with the common goal of acquiring proficiency in English (Nielson, 2023).
In accordance with the fourth UN Sustainable Development Goal, older UASC access ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) courses in further education settings if resources are available (Ott and O’Higgins, 2019). Although recent research illustrates how refugee education frameworks can be proposed to achieve UASC expectations when they navigate through spatial, temporal and maturational changes during their movement, they have mostly been developed based on practitioner perspectives without examining the true educational experiences of UASC in England (Kohli, 2014; McIntyre and Neuhaus, 2021). Furthermore, UASC encounter a plethora of emotional, social, economic and legal challenges during the process of becoming adults in absence of their primary attachment figures (Kohli and Connolly, 2009).
Resultantly, based on a qualitative approach, this project proposes multiple case studies of narrative inquiries to explore the lived experiences of UASC when studying English in further education settings in the North West of England. Importantly, based on narrative interview data collected from 6-10 purposively selected participants, before and after transitioning to 18 years of age, this study proposes to examine (using narrative thematic analysis) the impact of temporal and maturational changes on the lived experience of UASC studying English. By generating evidence of UASC experiences, it is the intention to guide potential refugee education policy reforms in England.