Service children in HE

Hi, I'm Minnie, and I'm a service child. My stepfather met my mother when he was deployed in Northern Ireland on active duty.

Hi, my name is Charlotte. My dad was in the forces. I'm from when I was born up until the age of 16.

Hello, my name is Izaak Walton. I am a child of a service family. I'm originally from the northeast of England, from a small town near Durham, and my dad was an engineering officer in the Royal Navy.

My stepfather wasn't there a lot. His rotas were. I think half of the time he spent with us, and half of the time he spent away. At the best of times, that's how it was. You know, as good as it can get with him being away half of the time. I think people don't realize. I think a lot of people think it's the same as their way at work all week, and then you get that big break when they come back. It's not like that. You know he missed important events that he had no control over. Things like parents' evenings or competitions, he just couldn't attend those, and it wasn't fair. But it was something we had to deal with. It's a problem that I think is definitely only experienced by service children.

When I was at school, my dad wasn't really around, so he couldn't attend parents' evenings or school shows. At the time, this wasn't something I was really aware of. I knew that my dad worked away and that he was sometimes away for long periods of time, and that was something I always accepted because I would have never known anything different. He missed birthdays and Christmases, but it never really resonated that this was because I was a service child; it was just his job, and I accepted that.

Like many Royal Navy personnel, he was there for about half of my childhood. He worked half on, half off, and alongside that, my mum worked abroad independently of the forces. Primary schooling and being a service child, even up to secondary school, was challenging because, in Northern Ireland, due to the tenuous peace, it was typically protocol not to mention any family members in the army or anything related to where they were deployed. This was because it could be dangerous for my family if I let people know things that were supposed to be kept private about my stepfather's job.

At school, we didn't really receive any support because the school was largely unaware, and it wasn't a big thing. There were a few children that had parents in the forces, but because we didn't move, the school felt like they didn't need to get involved.

I was lucky not to move around; I stayed in one town for all of my schooling. But, like many service children, I had to grow up very quickly, very early on. There were a few friends at school who had parents in the forces or were ex-forces, and their parents didn't really move around, so I thought it was normal that if you had a parent in the forces, they would go away and do what they needed to do and then come back. I never had any experience of any service groups available to me as a service child. It would have been nice, but I understand why it wasn't available.

Being involved with the SCiP alliance has made me realize that some children have to move around, and I'm not the only one. Maybe I should have had support at school, but because I never really realized it affected me, I didn't reach out. For my dissertation at Uni, I'm researching service children, looking at how events that support them can help their mental health and their progression to higher education. I'm doing a lot of research at the moment, and it's nice to look at my own experiences and attend events put on for service children and talk to their families about how it's affected them as well.

I never met any other service children when I was at school. You don't talk about it, so you can't really find anyone who's going through the same situation because you don't let people know that you're in that situation. At times, it does feel like you're the only person who has to deal with it, and it might not have been the case, but that's the way it felt. I definitely didn't know anyone who was going through the same situation as me.

I think as a service child, you are a bit limited when it comes to further education, not by the universities or the government, but just by your upbringing. If you're like me and didn't have any parents in further education, you had to learn how to apply and what university was like for yourself. I didn't get any guidance on a family level, so going to uni created a few barriers. My dad wasn't there to help me look at universities or move me in, which most people have both parents for, but my dad wasn't there because he was away. There were some barriers when I applied to university. Both my parents were supportive, but they didn't have a good understanding of the UCAS system, and my school, although good with sixth form applications, didn't send many people to Oxford or Cambridge, so they couldn't provide as much support as some other schools.

I think there is a lot of support at Harper for service children. We have the UOTC, and Harper works with them. It's nice that it's much more open here than what I'm used to, which is nice. It's nice to be able to talk about it without worrying about talking to the wrong person. There's a lot of support available here, and you're able to create a better support network.

In Northern Ireland, there really isn't much of a support network. It's not necessarily the government's fault; it's because you can't advertise a support network for children when they won't come to it due to safety concerns. It's something I wish I had when I was younger because it would have made me realize that I'm not alone, and I would have reached out for more support.