Dr. Andrea (Andy) Todd is Associate Professor of Active Citizenship at the University of Chester, a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a National Teaching Fellow. Described by QAA Scotland as ‘the UK’s leading researcher into the lived experiences of student-parents’, her 2024 report, ‘Student-Parents’ experiences of academic and non-academic support in UK Higher Education’ informed the Office for Students’ decision to include student-parents as an at-risk group in the Equality of Opportunity Risk Register. 

A strong advocate for improving support for student-parents in higher education, Andy has authored several research-informed guides, including The Student-Parent’s Guide to Navigating University and The Personal Tutor’s Guide to Supporting Student-Parents.  Andy works closely with UCAS on their advice and guidance for student-parents and was invited to produce ‘The Student-Parent’s Guide to Open Days’ for the UCAS website, a short research-informed guide designed to assist student-parents in making an informed choice of university provider.  Andy has twice been awarded the Universities Association for Lifelong Learning (UALL) Prize for Research Impact for her student-parent research.

Lyndsey Carmichael is a lecturer at the University of Exeter, researcher, and advocate for students with parental responsibility in higher education. She teaches in the School of Education as a Postgraduate Teaching Associate and works as an Associate Lecturer in English and Social Sciences at the International Study Centre, University of Exeter. Her teaching focuses on academic practice, critical reflection, widening participation, and supporting students to develop confidence in higher education.

Lyndsey is the founder of Parents and Family Support, known as PAFs, a funded university wide initiative that provides advocacy, events, peer support, and community for postgraduate researchers and staff with caring responsibilities. Through this work, she has been recognised receiving various awards such as success for all awards , Student Guild Awards for peer mentoring and Dean commendation for academic citizenship. Furthermore, she has supported student parents to build belonging, access practical guidance, and make their experiences more visible within the university.

Her doctoral research explores international students’ experiences of online higher education, with a particular focus on equity, belonging, and progression for under represented groups. More broadly, Lyndsey’s work brings together research, teaching, and lived experience to advocate for more inclusive institutional practices for student parents across higher education. She has recently published a report on the barriers student-parents face in higher-education.

Dr Sandra Clare is a member of both the Heseltine Institute for Public Policy, Practice and Place, and the Department of Public Health, Policy and Systems at the University of Liverpool. She is a community educator and researcher committed to challenging the invisibility of mothering in higher education and wider society through creative participatory research and policy-engaged scholarship. Her work is profoundly shaped by more than twenty years at the Pen Green Centre for Children and Families where she ran community education groups, supported mothers in accessing higher education, and researched all aspects of local family life. She writes from lived experience as a young-student-mother and an older academic caring for adult offspring.

Her PhD in Education from the University of Manchester employed a feminist standpoint to examine young student-mothering by combining storytelling, secondary analysis of population data, and legal-herstorical research to illuminate intersecting structural barriers and injustices. As part of the Power, Inequality and Activism research group she recently supported mothers as researchers to uncover local women activists missing from history and is currently a volunteer for Sandblast working with mothers in the Western Sahara refugee camps to develop a pedagogy of liberation.