Background about the survey:
As part of a long term work undertaken by VP Welfare Jordan ECSA has Teamed up With the homeless Charity Cyreannians to start a piece of long term work by creating a survey asking students who have experienced homelessness since 2014 what was their experience in a bid to try and identify the causes of homelessness and where more support provisions are needed.
This survey is completely anonymous but does ask questions that some may not wish to answer for this reason the survey is completely optional, but the core themes will be around the causes of homelessness if you have experienced homelessness repeatedly, and what were the impacts on your ability to continue on your course.
Why should you fill in this survey?
This survey is important to us as a movement Because the first indicative data published by NUS Scotland earlier on the 21st of February in the Broke: How Scotland is failing its students, found that 12% of respondents had declared they had experienced homelessness at some point during their studies. If this is an indicative figure of the whole student population this could mean as many as 72,000 students across Scotland have experienced homelessness.
Coupled with the fact that local authorities have a monopoly on providing support for homelessness and the median rates are over £1000 per month in Scotland this means that students who are ineligible for benefits are left footing an extraordinarily high Rent that is unaffordable.
By creating more data on this we hope to be able to start working with partners to implement the changes we need for the students across Scotland.
Survey link
If you would like to take part in the survey: