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A long way away, always. By Leila

Hello lovely readers. My name is Leila and I am a psychology and anthropology student. I love getting lost in new places and geography or history trivia. One of my favourite London memories is seeing a whole community of wild deer in Epping Forest.

My image is self-portrait drawing I made as a child, aged 3 years old – and the title of my blog is a reference to the song “Inbetween” by Title Fight which I felt always spoke to the care and migration experience. You can listen on YouTube.

I moved alone to England as a teenager. People often assume that moving countries is mainly difficult because of what you leave behind. For me, leaving was not the hardest part: there was not much that felt like mine to leave.


I grew up care experienced in Switzerland as a third-generation immigrant, and then became a first-generation migrant in England. My experience of the care system shaped whether I had family, permanence, or somewhere and someone to go back to. My intergenerational migrant background shaped how I was read by others in relation to country, accent, name and skin colour. Neither gave me a straightforward sense of home. I was born in Switzerland, and so were both my parents, yet I was never considered Swiss enough. That kind of exclusion is hard to explain when the country questioning you is also the only country you have known.

Care experience added another layer to this exclusion. It placed me outside the ordinary social world children around me seemed to live in. Other children spoke casually about parents, siblings, holidays and what they were doing after school. I had a single standardised room to go back to, with staff who were waiting to clock out, and police called if I came back slightly late.


A lot of my life has been lived in suitcases. Moving between temporary rooms taught me to restart quickly. Many of those places were damp, overpriced and decrepit, because that is often what students, migrants, let alone people who are both, can afford. I have moved across London alone on the tube, going back and forth with busted suitcases. I have stayed in hostels between tenancies, slept with my passport under my pillow, and had people steal my toiletries. Instability becomes normal. Your term-time address is not just where you study from. It is your address. Your belongings are there. Your documents are there. Your life is there. Then the academic year ends, and you start all over again.

Family support often makes life survivable. It is the person who can lend money before student finance arrives, sign a form, collect your things, let you stay for a few weeks, call the landlord, help you move, or remind you who you are when things get difficult. Without it, independence can look like resilience from the outside while feeling very precarious from within. It also means working more than many other students, not for extra spending money but because your financial stability depends on yourself only. That work can take away from the parts of university people imagine as formative: societies, friendships, rest, unpaid opportunities, and the time to simply be a student.


In a way, education has become where I feel most able to belong. I am now in my eighth (and hopefully final!!) year of studying. Books, libraries, lectures and research have offered a form of continuity that places and people often did not. Seeking knowledge has given me a way to make sense of life, which has been senseless at times.


There is little to romanticise about rootlessness. There is grief in feeling that nothing belongs to you and that you belong to nothing. There is also freedom in not being defined by a single place or label. I think this has made me more attentive to people who live in the margins, and more aware of how much people need community to make life liveable.


Care experienced and estranged students do not only need advice about university. We need tangible support from the institutions that claim to care about young people’s wellbeing and opportunities. Spaces like All of Us matter because they recognise that care experienced students do not arrive with the same safety nets, and that belonging sometimes has to be made where it was not given.

Get Involved & Get Supported

Want to write your own blog? Submit a pitch here at https://bit.ly/AoUBlogPitch. Successful blogs are paid at £20.

There are several advocacy and support lines out there for care experienced and estranged students.

Wider Support