Tag: navigating

  • Navigating the path to higher education after local authority care

    Navigating the path to higher education after local authority care

    Young people in England with experience of children’s social care face significant barriers to entering and succeeding in higher education.

    Our research at TASO – Pathways into and through higher education for young people with experience of children’s social care – conducted alongside the Rees Centre, University of Oxford, highlights significant and concerning disparities.

    For example, at the age of 22, compared with the general population, care leavers and those who have ever been in care are four times less likely to enter higher education – 14 per cent of care-experienced people versus 56 per cent of the general population. Of those care leavers who do make it into higher education, 18 per cent drop out, more than double the withdrawal rate of their peers in the general population.

    And it’s not just care leavers who experience unequal outcomes. The research looked more widely at anyone with experience of children’s social care – a group that is around 20 times larger than the care leaver population – and found stark inequalities in their access to and experience of higher education compared not only to the general population, but also compared to those eligible for free school meals. For example, “children in need” are two to three times less likely to attend higher education than the general population.

    These results suggest that the experience of children’s social care has a lasting impact on educational prospects, and that the needs of affected young people are not being met by the current support system. Although the findings are perhaps not surprising, they are still shocking. Our report aims to act as a call to action for universities, policymakers and those seeking to close equality gaps in higher education.

    Routes to an unlevel playing field

    Not only is there an uphill struggle to the higher education “playing field” for those who have been in care, once there, the playing field itself is far from level. The data shows that getting those with experience of children’s social care into university is only the first challenge to address, and the high dropout rate demonstrates that targeted work is required to improve retention and support systems.

    Care leavers – and others with experience of children’s social care – often take alternative routes to university. Over one-third (36 per cent) of care leavers take a vocational pathway, compared to just 13 per cent of the general population, and they are more likely to start university later in life rather than at the traditional age of 18. This suggests that the traditional academic pipeline does not serve them effectively, and that policymakers should aim to support these alternative pathways and set strategies for recruiting mature learners.

    Care leavers and entry rates

    There are some differences between those with experience of children’s social care overall and care leavers specifically. Although care leavers have poorer outcomes on most measures, care leavers have a relatively high entry rate at age 18/19, compared to other groups who have experienced children’s social care.

    This could be due to a higher level of support being made available for this group in the transition from post-16 settings to higher education, reinforcing the importance of targeted interventions.

    Accommodation outside of term time

    Accommodation is another crucial area where care-experienced people are at a disadvantage, often without a stable home to go to during the term breaks. We need closer collaboration between local authorities and higher education providers to ensure they are collectively meeting their duty of support to care-experienced learners, and especially care leavers where the state has a corporate-parent responsibility.

    This is one clear area where more joined-up working is needed to help ensure that care-experienced students have somewhere suitable to stay when universities close their doors outside of term time.

    The people within the statistics

    It is also important to note that many with experience of children’s social care enter higher education and thrive. As with all statistical reports, focusing on averages, however derived, risks missing the many important exceptions. That is, some individuals succeed despite the relatively long odds of doing so, and we should not interpret statistical results in a causal or absolute way.

    We hope, in particular, that Virtual School Heads – a regional role that acts as a headteacher for all children with a social worker within a particular local authority – will find the research helpful when working on the strategic goal of improving educational inclusion and participation for care-experienced children and young people.

    A call for change

    The research underscores the fact that universities – including more selective or prestigious institutions – should rethink their approach to recruiting and supporting those with experience of children’s social care.

    We outline some of the ways to support these groups – by recruiting mature learners, those from vocational pathways, and by strengthening retention strategies. One possible idea, previously suggested by the Social Market Foundation, is that providers could be offered an additional £1,000 for each care leaver they recruit as a “student premium”, beyond existing accommodation support. At TASO, we want to see higher education providers evaluating their interventions to attract and support those with experience of children’s social care, so we can start to build a picture of what works to benefit these students.

    Our report makes it clear: universities, policymakers and local authorities must work together to ensure that those with experience of children’s social care are not left behind. The challenges they face in accessing and completing higher education are not inevitable but significant and targeted support is required to change the status quo. If higher education is a vehicle for social mobility, the continued focus on underrepresented groups – including those with experience of children’s social care – is vital.

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  • Resilience and Psychological Safety: Navigating Uncertainty

    Resilience and Psychological Safety: Navigating Uncertainty

    by Julie Burrell | February 26, 2025

    The first two months of 2025 have brought no shortage of change and uncertainty to higher ed institutions. Amid that uncertainty, you may find yourself not only navigating a wave of new compliance requirements, but also supporting employees who are feeling overwhelmed or worried. When change is happening at a rapid pace, it can be challenging to think strategically about how to manage emotional responses to change.

    However, two approaches you probably honed during the COVID-19 pandemic — fostering resilience and psychological safety — can be particularly useful in times like these.

    Resilience is a set of tools we use to regulate our response to stress. It’s what allows us to survive during moments of crisis and learn to grow. Psychological safety is a management approach that allows employees to thrive and adapt to stressful situations. We feel psychologically safe when we’re able to take risks knowing we’ll be supported.

    Combined, these workplace strategies tap into emotional resources we already have and can further develop and strengthen.

    Strengthening Internal Resilience

    You may never have stopped to reflect on how you endured the pandemic, but it likely took a great deal of resilience. Learning to survive, and even flourish, in tough times calls for a store of personal resilience, which the American Psychological Association defines as “successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility.”

    Some people just appear to be more naturally resilient than others. Maybe they seem tougher or more inclined to go with the flow. But resilience isn’t an innate trait we’re born with. It’s a skill that can be learned and practiced.

    In her Resilience in the Workplace webinar, Maureen De Armond, chief human resources officer at Des Moines University Medicine and Health Sciences, identified the four key factors that make up resilience:

    1. Identifying your purpose and values
    2. Gaining confidence
    3. Seeking support from your networks
    4. Learning adaptability

    A Quick Resilience Exercise on Personal Values

    Even a 15-minute resilience-building exercise can be effective, such as this brief reflection shared in the webinar.

    First, write down a list of five answers to the question, “why is it worth it to persevere and get through this challenging time?” For example, do you want to model certain behavior for your children? Do you want to be compassionate to your coworkers? Do you want to steward your team through change? Do you want to support your friends and family?

    Second, figure out the why behind each of these five answers by identifying the value behind each. Values can include achievement, compassion, economic security, humor, leadership, passion, etc. (Here’s a handy checklist.)

    Finally, be proactive about reminding yourself of these values:

    • Display photos that represent your values so that you see them every day — a loved one, beloved pet, a favorite spot on a hike, a trip you’re planning, an inspirational public figure.
    • Place quotes that illustrate these values around your workspace.
    • Craft an inspiration board, either on a digital whiteboard or as a physical craft, that contains photos, symbols, images and words that demonstrate your values.
    • Get out of your office and take a walk. Especially if you work on campus, this can be a reminder of your community and of the student population the higher ed workforce serves.

    Think of these proactive reminders as a “battery pack,” De Armond says, that will give you a boost or a nudge to get out of a negative head space. Helping employees tap into and strengthen their own resilience will equip them for whatever lies ahead.

    The Role of Psychological Safety in Managing Uncertainty

    While it’s natural for people to seek safety and solace in a time of upheaval, psychological safety isn’t about providing comfort or promoting kindness, as important as these are. Rather, it’s about candor, trust and accountability among teams. It allows team members to speak up about mistakes (including their own), tolerate risk, and embrace discomfort and change.

    Amy Edmonson, an expert on team psychological safety in the workplace, defines psychological safety as “the shared belief that’s it’s okay to take risks, express ideas and concerns, speak up with questions, and admit mistakes without fear of negative consequences.”

    For example, what happens when a team member goes to their supervisor with a question, admits a mistake, or notices a colleague’s error? If that supervisor gets angry or becomes dismissive, the employee may stay quiet in the future and even cover up mistakes to avoid that reaction again. But if the supervisor adopts some of the tips below, the team feels safe enough to take risks and can weather storms as a group.

    Recommendations to Increase Psychological Safety

    • Encourage people to come to you with problems and thank them for doing so. Also ask, “how can I help?”
    • Adopt a learning mindset. In the example above, an angry or dismissive supervisor also missed the chance to ask, “what did you learn?” As psychological safety experts know, “organizations characterized by a learning orientation focus on curiosity and continuous improvement, and they make it safe for organizational members to admit what they do not know or perhaps got wrong.” If you have a Learning and Development team, they can offer practices for adopting a learning mindset.
    • Listen rather than talk. Leaders are expected to have all the answers, but unless immediate action is needed, pausing and getting all the facts, and listening to feelings, can be an important leadership tool. Reflective listening — repeating or paraphrasing what’s said or reflecting a feeling that’s expressed — is a particularly useful skill for creating trust.
    • Say, “I don’t know.” Leaders modeling psychological safety admit when they don’t know something, allowing others in their organization to adopt a curious mindset. This is what Brené Brown calls “the courage to not know.”
    • Celebrate small wins. Appreciating your employees matters now more than ever.
    • Take care of yourself and your team. HR is often expected, fairly or not, to manage tension and conflicting emotions. How are you showing up for yourself and your team?

    For more tips on increasing psychological safety, see the article Why Psychological Safety Matters Now More Than Ever by Allison M. Vaillancourt, vice president and senior consultant at Segal.

    Finally, Give Grace

    Giving grace to others during stressful and uncertain times can be a small but critical daily practice, one that builds compassion and trust. But we need to extend that same grace to ourselves. Set boundaries, take breaks, practice going slow, and share the load.

    Related CUPA-HR Resources

    Resilience in the Workplace — This CUPA-HR webinar, recorded in 2021, was designed to serve as resilience training for attendees, as well as a model that could easily be replicated at your institution for HR teams and other employees.

    Why Psychological Safety Matters Now More Than Ever — This article offers practical advice for increasing psychological safety, specifically for the higher ed workplace.

    Recent Executive Orders and Higher Ed HR’s Role in Creating and Sustaining an Inclusive Campus Community — A message from CUPA-HR President and CEO Andy Brantley.

    Mental Health Toolkit — This HR toolkit includes resources on sustaining mental health programs on campus and addressing problems like burnout.

    The Great Pivot from Resilience to Adaptability — This article explains how to move from resilience to adaptability and, ultimately, growth in challenging times for higher education.

    Managing Stress and Self-Care: “No” Is a Complete Sentence — This highly rated webinar shows how and why setting boundaries is critical to thriving.

    Trauma-Informed Leadership for Higher Education — This webinar explores how to develop a supportive leadership style and how to create a culture where team members can depend on each other for support during times of hardship.



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  • Ideas for navigating editor-reviewer relationships (opinion)

    Ideas for navigating editor-reviewer relationships (opinion)

    An editor or reviewer can have an outsize impact on the career of a scholar, particularly in the early stages. The stakes can be high for an author. A negative review or edit can set back a research plan by months and harm a scholar’s chances for tenure or promotion. This reality creates a power imbalance between an editor or reviewer and an author that can be abused.

    Graduate schools offer few pointers on how to navigate editor and reviewer relationships. Our goal in this essay is to debunk the process and offer suggestions and observations for editors/reviewers and authors on how to approach the task in a more thoughtful and efficient way.

    Understanding the Reviewer and Editor Roles

    First, it is important to note that while reviewers and editors take part in a similar process—assessing the work of an author—the tasks are different. The editor is rarely an expert in the specific subject of an article and necessarily needs to rely on impartial reviewers to place the work in context. Nevertheless, the editor—and, at times, an editorial board—is the decision-maker in this equation. Having a clear and transparent line of communication between the author and the editor is critical.

    The task of the reviewer is to place the work in its scholarly context and to weigh its merit. Is the work breaking new ground? Is it challenging a long-held interpretation within the academy? Are the sources contemporary and the most relevant? Does the work fit the subject area of the journal or press? Can it be revised to make it suitable for publication?

    It is our strong belief that reviewers need to meet the authors where they are—that is, to understand the goal of the author, determine whether the work is suitable for the journal or press in question and, if so, help them reach the promised land of publication. Simply put: The reviewer should weigh the author’s case against the author’s intent.

    Unfortunately, this does not always happen: It is sometimes the case that reviewers stray from this path and insert suggestions that they would like to see addressed but that are not central to the submitted work. The dreaded “reviewer number 2” has become the bane of many an author’s existence. In this sort of review, the reviewer raises so many questions and objections that an author is left to ponder whether the two are reading the same text. And, it must be said, just as on social media, anonymity can at times lead to incivility. Instead of being helpful, sometimes a reviewer is unkind and cruel.

    The role of the editor is to referee between the goals of the author and the desires of the reviewer. Egos and politics often come into play in this process because reviewers in many cases are colleagues of the editor and contributors to the publication in question. Our experience suggests there are two major types of editors. Authors will need to adjust their approach based on which of these two types best describes their editor:

    • Sympathetic editor: This is the ideal. This editor will work with an author to publish a submission if the research is strong and will allow them to keep their own voice. They do not seek to impose their vision on the book or article. They do not allow their personal politics to influence the decision-making process. They are driven by one central question: Does the author accomplish what they set out to do? This type of editor tries to determine whether a reviewer is acting out of hubris by suggesting tangential and substantial changes or whether they are addressing core issues. On the opposite end of the spectrum, they are alert to the two-paragraph, lackadaisical reviewer who read the work over lunch while answering emails.
    • Visionary editor: It may sound counterintuitive, but an editor with their own vision for someone else’s work can mean frustration and ultimately rejection for an author. This type of editor sees someone else’s work as an opportunity to explore an aspect of a topic that interests them. They impose their own vision on someone else’s work rather than determining whether the author has achieved the goal they set for themselves. This typically takes the form of a lengthy response asking an author to fundamentally rethink their piece. The response contains so many critiques that to adhere to the suggestions would amount to writing a completely different piece of scholarship. This editor also tends to extend and even impede the process almost endlessly.

    As an example, upon the death of Fidel Castro in November 2016, the Latin American historian of this writing duo (Argote-Freyre) was asked by a journal editorial board member to author an article comparing the career of Castro with that of the prior dictator of Cuba, Fulgencio Batista. The resulting piece concluded that the two political figures shared more similarities than differences. The editor, although agreeing to the concept, was unhappy with the conclusions reached by the essay. The editor struck out paragraph after paragraph; a lecture on tone and thesis ensued.

    The editor suggested a piece analyzing the revisionist historiography on Batista—a subject outside the contours of the original assignment and one that would take many months to complete. The author made a rookie mistake in assuming that a member of the editorial board was vested with the authority to make assignments. In retrospect, it seems as if the assignment was foisted upon the working editor, who then wanted to steer the piece in a completely different direction. The author withdrew the piece; the only positive was that only a few months were lost in the process.

    The visionary editor is the type who is never satisfied. They forget that the piece is the author’s, not theirs. Yes, the editor is a gatekeeper for the journal or press, but if it is not a good fit, they should say so and move on. This picky editor sends a revision back to a new third (or fourth) reviewer, who is likely to ask for another, different round of revisions. This is nothing other than moving the goalposts. One of us had this occur with an editor who said, “As you know, we often send articles to several rounds of reviewers.” Well, we did not know, because the journal’s website did not say that. Such a process could go on forever and, to our eyes, makes no sense. The editor should decide on his or her own whether the author has revised sufficiently: It is clear from the reader reports what needed to be done, so just check and see. The editor needs to be decisive.

    At the point a work is about to be sent to an additional set of reviewers, an author needs to withdraw the article or book from consideration. Run as fast as you can in search of another editor and publication. Do not let someone waste your time, especially if your clock is ticking for tenure and promotion.

    How to Make Relationships Work— and When to Walk Away

    The author-editor relationship should be a dance, not a duel. An author is not at the mercy of the process; you are a partner. If you are not clicking with the editor, walk away. A bad first date rarely turns into a good second date. This is particularly true when working on a book project, given the many steps and long timeline involved.

    For a revise-and-resubmit, we suggest strongly that you be professionally assertive. Ask about the review of the resubmission before you do it. If the editor says it will go to new readers, withdraw the piece. This never goes well. Editors should be transparent about the steps involved. It is our experience that some editors are hesitant to divulge their process. If that is the case, the author needs to reassess the integrity of that process.

    Being fully transparent allows you to ask for transparency in return, whether you are an editor or an author. If, as we have experienced, two peer reviews come in that are quite opposed, the editor should get a third before returning to the author. If there are two or three reviews, the editor should synthesize them with a memo attached to the reports. The summary should go something like: “All reviewers agree chapter four needs to be revised with this material, but there is disagreement about chapter six.” There is also nothing wrong with asking the author to make the tough call on a contested point of interpretation. Once again, it is the author’s scholarship, not the editor’s, the journal’s or the press’s.

    For authors: Have a conversation with the editor. If it’s a call, follow up with a written summary. When responding to reader reports, especially when they disagree, say what you will and will not do. Do not say you will revise when you disagree—but don’t be stubborn. Give a little to get what you won’t compromise. If you disagree with a reviewer’s suggestion, say why, and ask the editor for approval not to make a specific change suggested in one of the reader reports. Get that approval. If the editor says the revision will go back to one or both original readers instead of making the final call himself, politely insist that the written exchange between the author and editor be sent along, too.

    It may not always work. Recently, one of us did just what we described and the editor said the plan sounded good, only to have the journal reject the revision. The editorial board said a specific change was not made even though the editor agreed that change would not be necessary. Poor communication and coordination between an editor and an editorial board should not penalize an author.

    Finally, we’d like to briefly weigh in on the argument that professors should reject peer reviewing because it is an unpaid task. If you do not want to do it, don’t—but there are compelling reasons to write responsible peer reviews. First, unpaid labor is not without merit. Even if your tenure and promotion committees might not value the task, that does not mean it is not worthwhile. You’re not paid to volunteer at your local food pantry, but you still do it. Second, people do this for you; it is time to be generous in return. Third, reviewing provides insights into the process for your own work. Peer reviewing keeps you current on trends in the field. Editing and peer reviewing make you a better writer and produce better scholarship. Isn’t that what we all want?

    Frank Argote-Freyre and Christopher M. Bellitto are professors of history at Kean University in Union, N.J., with extensive experience with peer review on both sides of the process. Argote-Freyre, a scholar of Latin American history, serves as a frequent peer reviewer and content editor on various book and article projects. Bellitto, a medievalist, is the series editor of Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition and academic editor at large of Paulist Press.

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