This blog was written by Mir Abdullah Miri, University of Bath; Corinne Squire, University of Bristol; and Holly Rooke, University of Sheffield. For the 2025 UKFIET conference, a record 37 individuals from 15 countries, including Mir, were provided with bursaries to assist them to participate and present at the conference. The researchers were asked to write a short piece about their research or experience of attending the conference.
‘Nothing about us without us’, a principle invoked in many struggles for social justice, only works if we mean it. When we talked with people from refugee backgrounds and those working with them for our research (‘It’s not just opening the doors’: Challenges and possibilities for refugees’ access to higher education), one thing kept coming up: nobody gets into higher education on their own. Behind every successful application, there was a string of emails, favours, commitments and workarounds, held together by fragile, relational work that was often messy and unequal. Behind every stalled plan, the same chain had one or two links missing.
UNHCR now estimates that 9% of refugees are in higher education worldwide – two-thirds of them men – with a goal of 15% by 2030. The progress is real, but the gap is still huge. Getting closer to that target depends in part on how we understand partnership. ‘Partnership’ is not a magic word in a funding bid – it can either open routes into higher education or quietly block them. It also depends on how we respond to what Nira Yuval-Davis and colleagues call ‘everyday bordering’, the way immigration permeates ordinary spaces like colleges, universities and council offices. Our research only touched the edges of this, but enough to see how often people encounter borders in everyday interactions. In the rest of this article, we draw on our research, and discussions at the 2025 UKFIET Conference where we presented our work, to set out what seems to work, what doesn’t, and what might work better.
Why partnerships matter more than projects
The barriers are familiar, but they interact in complex ways. Legal status, fees and funding rules, differences or ‘gaps’ in English and prior qualifications, racism, health, caring responsibilities and digital access… these things rarely arise alone. Recognising this, UNHCR’s 15by30 roadmap is clear that no single ‘fix’ can improve refugees’ higher education access. In the UK context, everyday bordering means that landlords, employers, universities, even health professionals, are asked to check documents, filter access and sometimes exclude people whose status is questioned, turning ordinary encounters into sites of immigration control. Higher education is not immune, and universities now operate as sites where immigration control, market logics and humanitarian and widening participation agendas collide. So when a refugee does make it into higher education, it is never just because they worked hard. It is because, for a while, a set of partners – often including, crucially, family, friends and refugee community members – managed to hold a route open for them through these layered borders.
What works: partnerships that changed trajectories
In our research, we saw long-term relationships enable fast and joined-up responses. Some of the most effective relied on sustained, holistic work, not on a perfect partnership model. A further education tutor spent years building trust with a nearby university so they could email named contacts, not generic inboxes. Some university staff understood how to pace a move from ESOL or Access into degree study. Many NGOs supported people over extended periods of time: first through an ESOL class, then a short course and a university information workshop or open visit, then a conversation about student finance, later, help to decipher a conditional offer. No single organisation could have offered the whole pathway, but together they succeeded.
Where universities worked for refugees, we found internal communication breaking down institutional borders. Admissions talked to Sanctuary teams; Widening Participation staff worked alongside international offices, Finance and Student Services; academic departments did not simply repeat policy, they engaged with colleagues and applicants to map possible routes into programmes. In further education, teachers from ESOL, maths, Access and Careers teams planned together, breaking harmful cycles, such as people spending years cycling through English courses without ever reaching the qualifications that university requires.
Refugee-centred, co-produced design of pathways into higher education must replace tokenistic consultation. Our most hopeful examples involved people from refugee backgrounds shaping decisions, not just sharing their stories. Refugee students and graduates co-facilitated information sessions for new arrivals considering university; community members helped coordinate outreach events; former scholarship holders advised on how to approach schemes and selection processes. These design processes were slower than university-or further education-run processes, and sometimes uncomfortable, as priorities and power had to be negotiated in real-time, but they produced decisions that made sense in the context of everyday life, not just institutional calendars.
What doesn’t work: partnerships that look good on PowerPoint slides
We also found a lot of partnership noise with little accompanying action. Almost every organisation claimed to be working in partnership, whilst individuals were bounced between them like pinballs. ‘Ask the NGO’. ‘Ask the college.’ ‘Ask the university.’ ‘Ask the council.’ ‘Ask the Home Office.’ Each redirection was rational from a narrow standpoint but together they formed a classic pattern of everyday bordering, within which responsibility was endlessly passed around and the person at the centre carried the cost.
Partnership plans also often treated refugees as a single group who could be served by just one pathway, with predictable results. The same English test for people who had just arrived in the country as for those with advanced degrees; outreach events scheduled as if nobody had care responsibilities or precarious work; limited attention to the specific circumstances of LGBTQ+ refugees or people whose disabilities were not formally recognised; a general neglect of refugees’ often low-income status, with for instance transport costs and digital poverty not considered. In other words, existing hierarchies around educational background, gender, sexuality, race, disability and class were quietly reproduced inside supposedly inclusive initiatives.
Finally, we saw ‘partnership’ used as a way to shift work without shifting funding. NGOs were expected to offer time-intensive, demanding application support they were not funded to provide; further education colleges were supposed to repair refugees’ years of disrupted schooling, in their own countries, during their journeys, and within the UK, on austerity budgets; local authorities were praised for integration work they had carried out without realistic resourcing. This is not collaboration, but extraction.
What could work: partnerships as infrastructure and resistance
The evidence shows that partnership working must start from what refugees say they are trying to do. This sounds obvious, but it is rarely how decisions are made. And when we do try to work this way, the process is rarely smooth. Co-designing and co-conceptualising programmes with refugees means sitting with disagreement, unequal power, different risks for different partners, and different understandings of higher education and its relation to the rest of people’s lives. Refugee-led advisory groups, paid properly and given real power, can reframe priorities, including which courses matter, how information is shared, what counts as a successful outcome. This moves ‘nothing about us without us’ from being the banner, to writing the agenda.
In our research, people often reached higher education because one person quietly bent the rules or refused to accept an initial refusal. Those individuals matter, but a system that relies on them is structurally unequal. Partnerships need clear, realistic and structurally equitable pathways from different starting points and statuses, with named contacts across sectors who share responsibility. This is also where everyday bordering can be documented and challenged, not just absorbed.
Cross-sector coordination should not rely on goodwill, unpaid evening meetings and professionals personally paying for unfunded essentials like refreshments and travel, but should be supported and funded as a public good. Dedicated staff time, small flexible funds for joint pilots, holistic funding for ongoing programmes, and continuity planning are all essential. Without them, we will continue to see short-term innovation projects that vanish on contact with the next funding round or are expected to be absorbed into institutional core costs without any new budget line.
Finally, refugee HE work has to connect to wider struggles over borders and justice. The same ‘hostile environment’ measures that shape access to housing, healthcare and welfare also shape who can study, on what terms, and for how long. Everyday bordering in higher education is part of that broader system, not an accident at the margins. Partnerships that acknowledge this, that work against bordering and for social justice, and that connect with wider movements for racial, gendered, economic and epistemic justice in education are more likely to make lasting change.
Partnering for social justice
Our research was small-scale, and focused on only one region in England, so does not pretend to offer a universal recipe. What it does show is that partnerships are key in refugee higher education work. When they work, people move into degrees, careers and community leadership. When they do not, the same people are left with low-level courses, precarious work, missed opportunities and wasted potential. If we are serious about 15% of refugees accessing higher education by 2030, then partnership has to be more than just a word in strategy documents. It has to shape what work is done, how it is done, and who it is done with, every day. It must always start with refugees themselves, and it must involve ongoing challenges to higher education bordering, and the consistent pursuit of educational justice.
