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21 January 2025

By Aine McAllister

Highly skilled refugees and asylum seekers encounter multifaceted barriers to accessing postgraduate study in UK higher education. These include wider societal and structural barriers as well as those specific to university entry. Often, the latter is a twofold barrier: to access at all, and to access commensurate with existing qualifications, professional experience and achievements.

While there is a growing body of research on the barriers to access to higher education for refugees and asylum seekers in the UK, highly skilled refugees and asylum seekers remain “a specific adult target group that is currently under-researched and not well served by education providers“. My own research helps to address this. It includes work to share the voices of these refugees. Most recently, as part of a UCL Public Policy-funded Engagement and Impact Fellowship, I explored their experience in workshops and roundtable discussions with a range of stakeholders – from university experts in widening participation, to former participants on IOE’s Preparation for Higher Education Programme for highly skilled refugees and asylum seekers, funded by ReConnect. Below, I set out our findings and recommendations for change.

Barriers

Wider societal and structural barriers to accessing postgraduate study include:

• delayed asylum applications, fear of deportation, financial instability, and inadequate housing
• psychological and emotional traumas caused by experiences of displacement
• the absence of familial and community systems of support
• cultural and linguistic barriers to integration.

At the threshold of higher education, again, many experience:

• information from universities that is difficult to navigate
• non-recognition of existing qualifications and experiences
• complexities surrounding information about funding and a lack of joined up support prior to offer-dependent funding
• imposed language barriers.

These barriers are pernicious, shapeshifting and life-delaying, despite the persistence and hope of affected individuals. The combined result is to experience a systematic loss of voice in the process of attempting to navigate the higher education admissions process.

Recommendations

In seeking improvement, we focused on that university and college threshold, identifying the following priorities for institutions in order to better meet the needs of this particular cohort.

Tailored support structures

Recognize the diverse immigration experiences of highly skilled refugees, asylum seekers, and forced migrants. Recognize also the burden of resilience placed on them to remain engaged with application and admissions processes which mirror wider experiences of exclusion and misrecognition. Develop tailored support for ‘access to postgraduate education’ packages that takes into account the impact of, in particular, asylum seeker accommodation issues, financial circumstances, and wider immigration experiences.

Simplified and joined up processes

Connect processes related to fees, funding, widening participation and admissions. This could entail:

• revising admissions processes to enable applications from refugees and asylum seekers to be assessed on a case-by-case basis, considering nuances of their circumstances – and, to that end, enabling refugees and asylum seekers to self-identify at application stage
• mitigating barriers which manifest during the application process and pre offer; specifically, acknowledging that support in the form of funding does not mitigate for barriers to access – other support is required before this point.

Recognition of qualifications

Adopt a broader, less insular approach to recognizing the existing qualifications, professional experiences, and contextually evidenced language proficiency of highly skilled refugees and asylum seekers. Again, this will require consultation with relevant academic programme teams to contextually assess qualifications and applicant suitability for particular fields.

Cross-departmental collaboration

Break down silos and establish clear lines of communication between university and college departments involved in widening participation, admissions, student support, equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI), and funding. This could include:

• forming cross-departmental teams dedicated to supporting access for highly skilled refugees and asylum seekers
• training for these staff on the ways in which barriers and support needs are different for those seeking access at under- and post-graduate levels.

Refugees and asylum seekers seek access to higher education as a means of integration. For the highly skilled, access to postgraduate study is essential for re-establishing their professional lives and identities. However, layers of imposed vulnerability experienced on this journey are often manifest as prolonged displacement and marginalization. Universities have the opportunity to create inclusive environments by adopting supportive structures and simplified and transparent processes, recognizing diverse experiences, and fostering co-ordination and collaboration across their operations. By doing so, universities could serve a transformative role in enacting the concept of “the university as a refuge” within the context of a wider hostile environment for refugees and asylum seekers.