Lauren Anderson was looking forward to starting at university – but worried about where she was going to live over the summer. Unlike most of her fellow students she didn’t have a comfortable bedroom in the family home waiting for her.

Lauren was living in a foyer, an organisation providing housing and training for young people. She went there when she was doing her A-levels at school and had serious problems at home. Moving there gave her the stability she needed to achieve decent grades.

Going to university meant that Lauren could move into halls of residence during term time, but when term ended, she would be homeless.

“I always thought I could get to university but I never foresaw the financial barriers,” she says.

Her course in Japanese and Korean is proving demanding, so Lauren doesn’t have the time to earn extra cash during the year to tide her over the summer. “You need to spend every waking moment studying, just to keep up,” she says. “You can’t work at the same time, you need a bed of support to fall back on and I don’t have that.”

Fortunately, she spotted an advert for the Foyer Federation’s bursary scheme for students. She applied and now gets £1,000 a year towards her accommodation costs.

Lauren says she only really came to appreciate the tremendous value of the scheme once she had got through her first year. “That’s when it really struck me how impossible it would be to survive without it,” she says.