I went to live with my grandma when I started secondary school because my relationship with mum wasn’t good. The next year, when I was 12, grandma suffered a stroke, and from that point she started developing dementia. I became her primary carer, which made it hard to keep up with my GCSEs as grandma would sometimes go missing while I was away from the house. It was a stressful period.
Eventually she progressed to the point where it was no longer safe for us to live together without a 24-hour carer, so she was put into a home. I moved back in with my mum, but by Christmas she’d kicked me out.
I approached my local council for help and they directed me to social services. They were meant to find a solution – check where I was staying, talk to my mum – but they were really slow and I had to keep calling them. One morning, I went to their office with a black bin bag full of my clothes and I said I wasn’t going to move until they helped me.
By 4pm that same day, they put me in touch with the charity Centrepoint and my keyworker found me a place to stay. It took me a while to settle in. I had all the baggage of everything that had happened before to deal with. But it was a big thing to finally have a mentor – they helped me to apply for university by getting me to think about what questions I really wanted to explore. I decided on a course and they helped me with funding. The charity has a university bursary and through this I got some money to help with things like books and stationery.
I’ve just completed the first year of my sociology and criminology course, and I got a first. I’m not sure what I want to do yet but the more I explore the subject, the more I’m interested in human rights. I like this kind of education a lot more than school because I can tailor it to myself. I’m no longer just being given a text book and getting talked at.
I don’t feel like I stick out from the crowd at university just because of my experience – everyone comes from different backgrounds anyway. But the circumstances that led me here are different to what a lot of students have gone through. Most people have some family support – a sibling who has gone to university already or parents who can help them along the way. But just because you’ve been through something like homelessness you don’t need to feel like an outcast. There’s lots of support out there – my uni offers bursaries for people from a care background, for example. It’s about believing in yourself and seeking out that support.
There were definitely moments when I thought I wasn’t going to make it. I felt that my situation wouldn’t allow it – it seemed too much of a stretch. But it was something that I had always wanted, and that my grandma wanted for me. We’d always talk about her coming to watch my graduation. University was a dream we shared. For a lot of the time, that’s what has kept me going.
