by Stephen McKinney

In recent years, there has been a significant amount of research on the poverty experienced by children and young people in the United Kingdom and its impact on their school education. Academic researchers in Scotland have highlighted the increase in levels of child poverty, recently exacerbated by the enduring effects of Covid-19, and have exposed ‘hidden poverty’ such as that experienced by young carers. The Scottish Educational Research Association ‘Poverty and Education Network’ has been key in disseminating research findings from different universities and research bodies to a wider group of people (McKinney et. al., 2023).

Extending the issue of hidden poverty further, a team of researchers in the School of Education, University of Glasgow, has initiated research into the poverty experienced by students at university. Led by Evelyn McLaren, this team aims to explore the types and levels of poverty experienced by students on the undergraduate Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programme in a Scottish university (McLaren et. al., 2025). This began in 2023 and will be conducted over a period of years.

The team undertook a careful review of existing international academic literature on the issue of poverty experienced by students in higher education and in ITE. There are helpful studies from America, Australia and Ireland which address serious concerns like financial hardship, lack of affordable accommodation, food poverty and time poverty. There were very few studies from the UK.

In the first year of the research, the approach adopted by the team consisted of an online questionnaire and face to face interviews. These were conducted in late 2023 with students on a four-year undergraduate ITE programme and students who had committed to an extra 5th year Masters’ level. In total, 532 students were invited to participate in the online questionnaire. There was a very healthy response: 218 students (the vast majority of whom were female and aged between 18 and 26) completed the questionnaire, a response rate of 41%. Perhaps more disappointingly only ten students agreed to be interviewed, though the interviews did yield rich data.

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