Abstract

The Stand Alone Pledge was first devised by the charity Stand Alone (SA) in 2016 to garner publicly declared support from institutions providing Higher Education (HE) in support of estranged students: “Young people studying without the support and approval of a family network” (Stand Alone, 2016a, np). As of November 2022, 112 institutions, including universities and colleges, have made the Pledge. In August 2022, Dr. Rachel Spacey and Rebecca Sanderson from the Lincoln Higher Education Research Institute at the University of Lincoln (UoL) were awarded the tender to evaluate the Stand Alone Pledge. This report details the findings of that analysis completed in November 2022 (Ethics Reference: UoL2022_10126). The evaluators reviewed all 112 SA Pledge letters (a statement of commitment signed by an institution’s Vice-Chancellor or deputy) in conjunction with the information provided on each institution’s profile page on the SA website. The support offered was then mapped according to key indicators agreed with SA and analysed descriptively using both MS Excel and IBM SPSS Software.