Category: Access & WP

  • Sleepwalking into criminal liability? Accessibility and the future of universities

    Sleepwalking into criminal liability? Accessibility and the future of universities

    If accessibility was being treated as an afterthought in higher education, then that ended in June 2025.

    The European Accessibility Act (EAA) came into force on 28 June 2025, and it applies to all UK universities that serve EU disabled students, sell into EU markets, or run EU-based partnerships and enterprises.

    Meanwhile, for those universities looking to expand operations into other international markets, India has gone further.

    Its Supreme Court has declared accessibility a constitutional right, new standards are enforceable in law, and fines are already being issued.

    Global convergence is happening. Universities that think they can ignore it may be sleepwalking into criminal liability.

    Beyond PSBAR

    The UK already has the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations (PSBAR), which legal eagles will recall came into force in 2019 across public-sector bodies in Europe and the UK. PSBAR already monitors the accessibility of digital products such as websites and apps, and sanctions are civil.

    The EAA goes further and extends the remit of what’s covered. While some member states are still determining their sanctions, Ireland issues fines of up to €60,000, with the possibility of time in prison. France issues fines of €20,000 per non-compliant website, per year. Germany’s Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz (BFSG) or “Accessibility Strengthening Act” includes fines of up to €100,000.

    For vice chancellors and chief operating officers, this is no longer a compliance box to tick. It’s a personal risk.

    Both PSBAR and EAA cover:

    • Virtual Learning Environments, Continuing Professional Development platforms, and publishing systems
    • Websites, apps, digital documents, and email attachments
    • Audiovisual media and cultural collections

    Now hardware is also in scope for EAA, from smartphones to laboratory kit. That means every corner of the institution must be born accessible – IT, procurement, estates, marketing, research, teaching, enterprise, and the university press. And don’t forget the sector’s elephant in the room – legacy systems. Retrofitting is messy, costly, and in many cases unworkable.

    Faced with ageing platforms and the difficulty of retrofitting legacy systems and content, many institutions are turning to so-called “quick-fix” tools such as overlays that promise to make websites accessible and compliant at the flick of a switch.

    While these can appear to improve surface-level usability, regulators have made clear that they do not replace compliance with core standards such as Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

    For leaders, the risk is assuming that bolt-ons have solved the problem – when in reality, only intentional design, governance, and testing with disabled people will stand up to regulatory scrutiny.

    Who owns accessibility?

    The uncomfortable truth is that many universities don’t know who owns accessibility. Governance is weak, responsibilities diffuse, and decisions are made without the right expertise in the room.

    Too often, a shiny new rebrand is unveiled before anyone realises it isn’t accessible. By then, fixes are expensive and reputationally embarrassing. The solution? Put digital experience and accessibility specialists at the table from the start, to help with scoping, strategy, procurement, governance, and sign-off. These governance challenges have been raised across the sector.

    Fans of Cartesian dualism may suggest the sector faces a choice:

    • Basic compliance – scramble to patch systems, pray regulators don’t look too closely.
    • Inclusive excellence – embed accessibility in governance, procurement, and culture.

    The second option unlocks real gains – improved student experience with a knock-on for NSS scores, stronger international recruitment, efficiencies in procurement, and staff upskilling. It can also help secure routes to research funding, given Research Council and Horizon priorities for EDIA (Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and… Accessibility).

    Some universities are deploying accessibility apprenticeships and paid accessibility internships, as well as disabled student panels for accessibility. This is the kind of initiative that could give the UK sector a genuine competitive edge, and is testament to the great work taking place at a grassroots level across the sector.

    For those teams managing universities’ sprawling and complex digital estates, clear plans and roadmaps are needed to guide procurement, commissioning, audits, and improvements.

    Having a well-defined strategy, proper planning, and good digital governance can make the process much smoother. However, without sustained backing from the top, and the mandate or authority to decommission ineffective systems and websites, these teams are limited in what they can achieve.

    The global direction of travel

    If Europe feels far away, look at India. In 2025, over 150 organisations were fined under new accessibility rules. Educational institutions are explicitly in scope. Early adoption of EAA standards positions UK universities ahead of this regulatory convergence. While UK laws may differ in some respects from India’s, they are all pointing in the same direction – accessibility is an essential requirement for the physical environment, digital systems, documents, media, hardware, and services.

    Accessibility is about disabled students. It’s also a test of digital maturity, institutional leadership, and international credibility. The European Accessibility Act is a wake-up call. The only real choice left is whether universities treat it as a burden or seize it as an opportunity for inclusive excellence.

    Global accessibility standards are coming. The only question is whether the UK sector will be ahead of the curve or behind it.

    Source link

  • UCAS End of Cycle, 2025: access and participation

    UCAS End of Cycle, 2025: access and participation

    While one end of your university is focused entirely on the number of undergraduate students that get a place (and pay a fee) each year, another equally important driver is who these students are and where they come from.

    A part of the initial quid pro quo offered to the sector when we lost the last vestiges of student number control and managed expansion in 2012 was that some of this new capacity would be made available for students from non-traditional backgrounds – and that this would happen from everywhere: from the poshest ancient university to the most practical and locally-focused further education college.

    Though regulators all over the UK do keep an eye on how providers are doing at making this egalitarian dream a reality, in England at least the focus has been more on what providers are doing to widen access (and how they know it is working) and less on the actual numbers or entry rates.

    Deprivation

    UCAS has always provided data on what proportion of main scheme UK applicants from major demographics end up with an offer. Because of some smart choices by UCAS in its data design, I can also offer you an main scheme acceptance rate: the proportion of applications that end up with an accepted offer.

    (UCAS main scheme? That’s the one where an applicant applies to up to five courses before the 30 June deadline. It doesn’t include stuff like direct entry to clearing, or records of prior acceptance – where someone applies directly to the provider.)

    We don’t get as many metrics as we used to (what’s happened to UCAS’ own Multiple Equality Measure, or MEMs, I wonder) – and I’ve chosen to look at indices of multiple deprivation as a common way of thinking about participation from economically disadvantaged small areas. There are four of them (SIMD, WIMD, NIMD, and IMD – one for each home nation) and it makes no sense to see them all on one graph. By default we are seeing England (more data points!) but you can also choose to see Wales, Scotland, or Northern Ireland using the “nations/regions” filter.

    You choose your quintile of interest at the top (default is one, the most deprived 20 per cent), a year (default is 2025), chosen measure (offer rate or acceptance rate) and Age (default is “all”). This changes the display at the top: an ordered plot of providers, with the size of the dot showing the number of accepted students. Mouse over a dot to show annual proportions by quintile for main scheme applications, offers, and accepted applicants.

    [Full screen]

    By default you can see the proportion of applications that end with an accepted applicant – but a low score does not mean a provider is terrible at widening access. Recall there are a lot of variables here, with as much to do with student choice (or portfolio) and performance as what the provider does. For this reason the offer rate (how many applications end with an offer being made) is a more popular measure.

    Entry qualifications

    I feel like I keep saying this, but you can’t really talk about access without talking about what qualifications an applicant is likely to be bringing with them. A level performance is a spectacular proxy for how rich your parents are and how nice your house is – even the choice to take A levels is less common among disadvantaged groups.

    On the first issue we still don’t get data on actual (A level or tariff) points at provider level as structured data. The data exists – it’s on course pages at an individual course level, but supposedly it is far too commercially powerful to publish openly in a structured way at provider level. It feels like a policy from another age, and it doesn’t make anyone look good.

    The best we get is a provider-level look at the types of qualification held by accepted applicants (and those that get offers). I’ve not plotted this to enable comparison, but it is fascinating to find individual providers slowly moving away from recruiting A level students only and into the “other” qualification that suggest mature learners, and (less clearly) local rather than national recruitment.

    [Full screen]

    Unconditional

    Back at the end of the 2010s there was a great deal of policy concern around the idea of unconditional offers. This was eventually refined into the “conditional unconditional offer”, a situation where a “firm” commitment from an applicant was rewarded with a lack of insistence on a particular set of grades or tariff points.

    Though there were often valid reasons given for direct unconditional offers (for example, when admission to an arts course was by portfolio, or where – rarely – a provider set its own entrance exams or used a detailed interview process to inform selection) nobody ever really managed to convincingly defend the conditional unconditional offer in a way that stopped being banned (with the briefest of blips when it was accidentally unbanned for a month or so in the 2022 cycle). It was odd as the best available evidence showed that such offers didn’t have an impact on student outcomes.

    I’ve been starting to hear stories about a growth in other forms of unconditional offers in this last cycle – the pressure to lock in applicants may be prompting usual academic requirements to be suspended or lowered. The available data suggest a very slight growth in “other unconditional offers” that regulators may want to keep an eye on, but only back to roughly 2023 levels from a slight dip last year.

    [Full screen]

    In England, at least, we’ve rather taken our eye off the ball when it comes to participation metrics – they exist, but there’s very little (other than the required existence of an access and participation plan for those who want to charge higher fees) to connect them to regulation. There have been some suggestions from ministers that this may change, and if you are in planning or strategy you may wish to get yourself reacquainted with the state of the art in 2025.

    Source link

  • What Covid restrictions meant for participation and belonging

    What Covid restrictions meant for participation and belonging

    The emergency online pivot is long gone, yet the “new normal” turned out to be neither of those things.

    The sector continues to wrestle with problems that look suspiciously like academic long covid: falling attendance, concerns about disengagement, and a steep rise in the number of disabled and neurodivergent students and mental health conditions.

    It is tempting to attribute these problems to student attitudes, “Gen Z personalities,” or to blame online provision and the emergence of GenAI. It is equally tempting to respond by going to either extreme, either by doubling down on surveillance and policing student behaviour, or by promising ever greater flexibility.

    But both responses risk forgetting the nuances that the pandemic revealed about inclusion, particularly for students from widening participation backgrounds.

    The best year?

    In our new paper, “The best year / ‘I struggled with everything’: widening participation experiences of pandemic online learning”, we worked with 23 widening participation students at two Scottish universities to understand which aspects of the online pivot supported or undermined their participation. Much of what they recounted echoes the broader literature on Covid and higher education; however, their relative disadvantage magnified their experience.

    The themes we report are particularly salient for current debates about engagement and inclusion, notably, participants kept returning to the question of agency and resources. For many, lockdown removed their commute which made it easier to combine study with caring responsibilities, jobs, and health conditions. But it also gave them back hours they would have otherwise spent on public transport as well as the associated cost, a change described as transformative and for one student “The best year.”

    At the same time, the very flexibility that some students valued intensified existing inequalities for others. Many struggled with poor broadband, limited devices shared with family members, and the absence of quiet spaces. One student described how “online learning brought my work to a grinding halt” because without a dedicated study space they “struggled with everything.” Without access to campus libraries and study spaces, watching recordings rather than coming in for lectures actually reduced their control over the learning environment.

    Belonging and the incidental

    Participants also emphasised that belonging and authentic connection underlies so much of what we do as educators. Widening participation students have long described the effort of trying to “fit in” to institutions that were not built with them in mind, and the tension between wanting to succeed academically and not wanting to stand out socially. The relative anonymity made possible by online learning made some students more willing to type questions in the chat or attend virtual office hours. However, participants were also clear that online interactions with staff felt transactional and when every meeting had to be booked and justified, it made everything feel more formal.

    What they missed were the incidental conversations before and after class, the chance encounters in corridors and libraries, and seemingly purposeless chit-chat with peers that allowed them to compare progress, make sense of expectations, and realise that they were not the only ones struggling.

    And our study draws attention to the hidden curriculum and the role of self-regulation. Widening participation students are less likely to arrive at university familiar with tacit rules about how to study, when it is acceptable to ask for help, or how to navigate institutional systems. Our participants described how moving online removed opportunities to learn vicariously by watching how others behaved in class, by overhearing peers ask questions, or by observing how more experienced students managed their workload. Without these cues, those who already felt they did not belong were even more reluctant to reach out, particularly if they worried about adding to staff workload.

    Psychologically, these experiences connect to work on self-efficacy and self-regulated learning, which show that students who doubt their academic capability are less likely to seek help, persist with difficult tasks, or adapt their strategies after setbacks. We also saw strong links with self-determination theory, which argues that three basic needs underpin intrinsic motivation: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Flexible engagement can clearly enhance autonomy, especially for students with complex lives. However, if we neglect competence and relatedness, greater autonomy simply becomes greater responsibility without corresponding support.

    A bit of distance

    Part of the reason we’re writing about this now is that thanks to the timeline of academic publishing, the authorship team collectively experienced double digit covid infections, three promotions, two College restructures, and the creation and birth of two humans in the time it took to publish our study. But part of the reason is that sometimes a bit of distance is needed to truly understand the most important lessons and to see that our new problems and potential solutions, are actually rather familiar.

    Universities must protect and normalise flexible learning options that confer genuine agency and must not use concerns about engagement to punish the most vulnerable. For example, the evidence that recorded lectures improve accessibility for disabled students and those from widening participation backgrounds is now substantial and removing this flexibility in the name of “getting students back” risks penalising those for whom education might be the only way out.

    But it is also just as vital that we conceptualise campus presence as an inclusion issue and recognise that to frame the need to attend as exclusionary is to misunderstand the issue. Students who lack quiet study space at home are disadvantaged when too much learning is pushed out of the timetable. Our participants were clear that regular, structured time on campus was not the enemy of flexibility; it was the scaffold that allowed them to make use of flexible resources. When deciding whether to keep online exams, flip a module, or consolidate teaching into fewer longer blocks, it is essential to ask where and when students will actually be able to study and how their contact with both staff and students will be impacted if campus time is reduced.

    If we want higher education to be genuinely inclusive, we need to resist trying to find simple solutions to complex problems – banning lecture recordings and arguing that in-person exams are always/never (in)appropriate are comforting solutions because they’re concrete, not because they’re right. The experiences of widening participation students during lockdown reinforce that inclusion is less about offering students unlimited choice and more about designing flexible structures that combine agency, support, and connection. Those structures are likely to benefit all students but if we ignore them, we will once again ask those with the least social and material capital to shoulder the greatest share of the risk.

    This article is based on research carried out with colleagues Jacqui Hutchison, Alison Browitt and Jill MacKay, whose contributions we gratefully acknowledge.

    Source link

  • The Renters’ Rights Act is a disaster for independent students

    The Renters’ Rights Act is a disaster for independent students

    The Renters’ Rights Act is a transformative piece of legislation set to benefit renters through greater security and lower costs, except for one major blind spot.

    In particular, it may act as a homelessness pipeline for independent students – the status given by Student Finance England to students without external familial support while at university.

    Particularly vulnerable are those who are estranged, without living parents, or are care-leavers.

    The summer gap

    One of the key measures in the Renters’ Rights Act is the replacement of fixed-term tenancies with periodic tenancies, i.e., tenancies will be rolling, not fixed-term.

    This benefits most students, as it means that contracts can be terminated by tenants in May or June when the academic year is over, instead of being trapped in a twelve-month fixed-term contract.

    This creates the first major problem for independent students.

    Independent students rarely live exclusively with others who require year-round accommodation, and for many doing so may not be an option. So, instead of the security of a year-long contract guaranteeing accommodation, the landscape may shift so that most shared student rentals are only available between September and June.

    If independent students do manage to seek one another out and live together, this may seem to be one fix to this issue; it isn’t.

    Another key measure in the Renters’ Rights Act is to end no-fault evictions. However, there is a carve-out for student landlords to be able to evict students on a no-fault basis between June and September, provided they live in a student-only HMO. This is a major issue for students who do not have a home to return to.

    Then, there is the option for independent students to live in university halls. Unfortunately, this isn’t a secure option in many universities either. The Renters’ Rights Act allows purpose-built student accommodation to maintain fixed-term contracts. They are often only available from September to June, with providers utilising their accommodation over summer months for other uses.

    Where twelve-month tenancies are available, many purpose-built student accommodation blocks are significantly more expensive than student house shares.

    An independence tax

    Every option available to independent students is likely to add substantial costs. It seems improbable that student landlords will simply swallow the cost of having two or three fewer months of rental income over the academic year. So, there is a strong incentive for student landlords to up the cost of renting for the September to June period to a similar level to what it currently costs for twelve-month contracts.

    While the Renters’ Rights Act allows tenants to challenge unfair rises in rent, this isn’t a particularly effective measure for student housing; students are an incredibly transient group of tenants who can’t challenge an increase prior to being a tenant.

    All that is before considering the loss of the only cost-free workaround for students without a guarantor – upfront rental payments. Often, independent students have avoided the need for a UK-based guarantor by paying several months of rent in advance.

    However, the Renters’ Rights Act is set to curtail this practice by capping the amount of rent a landlord can request upfront. Without the option to pay upfront, these students will be forced toward private guarantor schemes, which are commercial services that typically charge a non-refundable fee in the region of 10 per cent of annual rent.

    Time for an extended maintenance loan

    Without substantially changing the Renters’ Rights Act to the detriment of most students, there seems to be no easy fix available beyond providing additional financial support for independent students.

    Last year, I called for the government to implement an extended maintenance loan aligned with the uplift available for other students who need year-long maintenance support – those on a “long course” – the name for those on a course which runs longer than thirty weeks and three days.

    When I wrote for Wonkhe to launch the campaign for an extended maintenance loan, I predicted that the government would make good on their promise of grants primarily to benefit the Department for Education’s public relations department. This prediction has come true – the government reintroduced grants for the poorest students, on specific courses.

    Unfortunately, this isn’t the progressive silver bullet it sounds like. It means that those students on those courses eligible for grants will repay less in the future. This benefit only materialises if, at some point in the future, their income is of an adequate level to be able to repay their loan in full – which is predicted to be about half of borrowers by the government.

    It’s a nice middle-earner’s income bonus in middle-age for a small number of students. While a step in the right direction and not to be scorned, it’s not the radical progressive reform it’s touted as. It changes nothing for the students struggling to cover basic living costs and, for example, being forced to live at home during their degree, which is around one-third of undergraduates according to UCAS, the highest level ever recorded – and not an option for independent students.

    There were some incremental improvements for care-leavers last year, who are no longer to be means assessed if entering higher education after the age of twenty-five. Indeed, the government is making progress on strengthening support for care-leavers.

    Ensuring more robust implementation of care-leaver “Pathway Plans” – a statutory duty which means local authorities must support care-leavers up to the age of twenty-five – would go a long way to helping this specific group with additional costs due to the aforementioned issues, too.

    A new barrier to be broken

    So, the Renters’ Rights Act, which I should be clear that I largely support and will myself benefit from, has a blind spot. It’s one I’ve raised, and multiple supportive MPs have raised, too.Independent students, particularly care-leavers, estranged students, and students with no living parents, already have a much higher attrition rate and a large attainment gap.

    This blind spot may lead to homelessness and act as a further deterrent for this group to access higher education and reach their full potential.You could say it is a barrier to opportunity, hoisted up by a government committed to breaking all the other barriers down.

    If the government is serious about its “Barriers to Opportunity” mission, it cannot allow a housing reform to become a homelessness pipeline for the very students who have already overcome the most to get to university.

    Source link

  • What is going on at Trinity Hall?

    What is going on at Trinity Hall?

    The Guardian has reported that Cambridge college Trinity Hall is to target “elite private schools” for student recruitment.

    To the disquiet of many college fellows a memo from director of admissions Marcus Tomalin, argues that:

    The best students from such schools arrive at Cambridge with expertise and interests that align well with the intellectual demands of Tripos courses

    specifically including subjects including languages, music, and classics.

    He recommends that the college develops a “targeted recruitment strategy” for UK independent schools that focus on these (and a handful of other) subjects where the university already sees more than 40 per cent of applications come from independent schools, and that these efforts are further reinforced by a specific concentration on specific schools that have “sent plausible applicants to Cambridge” in the past.

    To be very clear, there is nothing in the memo to suggest that this will be done to the detriment of other students. And the interventions recommended – contacting the schools to let them know about what Trinity Hall offers for these subjects, creating webinars or other social media material for those subjects and alerting those schools – are hardly evidence of discriminatory behaviour.

    Reading between the lines, this is less an effort to get more independent school kids into Cambridge and more an attempt to encourage the ones that are applying for these subjects anyway to consider Trinity Hall rather than one of the other 28 available colleges.

    Applying for these courses

    Music at Cambridge more generally is a very specialised endeavor. Applicants require either A level music or a grade 8 music qualification at merit or above, with those seeking to make a “strong application” recommended to add other A levels in English, history, mathematics, or (“ancient or modern”) languages. All this is on top of “general requirements” that include an acquaintance with the standard (classical) musical repertory, play to a grade 5 or above standard at the (piano) keyboard, and some basic knowledge of counterpoint.

    Your application will include the submission of two school essays in music and two harmony exercises. If shortlisted for interview, you would be required to take a written assessment (harmonisation of a chorale melody, recognition of musical forms, and chord analysis). All this for a chance at one of the one to three places a year available at Trinity Hall.

    For the three year course in classics you would instead need an A level in Latin (“if you do not study Latin but instead study Classical Greek, please contact us for advice”). There are between two and four places on the course available each year.

    The other route mentioned in the memo, the four year modern and medieval languages course (incorporating a year abroad), is much larger than these more specialised subjects – with between six and eight places available every year at Trinity Hall. Candidates for this four year course need an A level in at least one of the languages they want to study, and a “strong application” would have another. A portion of the interview would be conducted in one of these languages.

    By the numbers

    I mention all this to illustrate just how few students these measures would potentially have an impact on. The numbers of students that would meet the entry requirements for these courses are vanishingly low – and the subset of those that would consider the course at this particular Cambridge college as their first choice is even lower.

    In 2025 just two students applied to music at Trinity Hall (four were accepted, the college clearly topped up via the winter pool). Six applied to the three year classics programme (two offers, two acceptances), while twelve applied to modern and medieval languages (six offers, four acceptances).

    Overall, Trinity Hall saw 617 applications in 2024 (the last year of data available at this resolution), made 139 offers, and accepted 107 students. This is at the lower end of Cambridge colleges For independent schools, the numbers were 118, 31, and 28 – for UK maintained (state) schools it was 281, 78, and 53. Less than ten of these state school acceptances were in the music, classics, or languages courses we are concerned with – based on a very low level of applications to these courses from such backgrounds (we’re facing the HESA-esque rounding to the nearest five for low numbers problem here).

    A failure?

    It would be tempting to make an argument that this represents a failure in access and participation. But it is also very possible that this is not a failing on behalf of the university. There are very few schools (independent or otherwise) that can prepare people for these particular entry requirements, and that’s before we get into family and social backgrounds that are able to support sustained musical practice, or learning multiple (ancient or modern) languages.

    This isn’t the case for all courses. Trinity Hall (like other selective, prestigious providers) does a huge amount of work in broadening access and participation to undergraduate study. It works with potential applicants from underrepresented ethnic groups, and works particularly with schools in Bristol and the South West.

    A Trinity Hall spokesperson told me that:

    There has been no change to Trinity Hall’s widening participation policy. This modest additional activity is aimed at ensuring we get the best applications from talented students from all backgrounds. The college is very proud of the progress it has made in widening access. Average admissions from state schools at the college in the past 3 years has been 73 per cent and Trinity Hall admitted 20.4 per cent of its UK students from the most disadvantaged backgrounds last year, an increase on previous years.

    Language about “reverse discrimination” is unhelpful. If there really is reverse discrimination a look at recruitment to these courses at Cambridge suggests it isn’t working very well. As applicant numbers are falling, to various degrees, for classics, languages, and (classical) music across the sector, Trinity Hall (like providers of all types) is looking to maximise recruitment by making an effort to encourage students already likely to apply – in this case, students almost certain to apply to Cambridge in the hope they would choose Trinity Hall rather than St John’s or Clare.

    This is not a replacement for broader and more sustained work on access: it is simply evidence that recruitment pressures (and the linked financial pressures) are everywhere.

    [Full screen]

    Source link

  • How to level the PhD playing field

    How to level the PhD playing field

    To most undergraduate and postgraduate students, deciding to undertake a doctoral degree is not common.

    What is involved can be rather opaque – if not completely mysterious – with many potential applicants unaware of how to navigate the PhD journey.

    Unfortunately, there is evidence of underrepresentation for some groups at doctoral level. For example, 59 per cent of the undergraduate population identify as White, rising to 68 per cent of taught postgraduates and 74 per cent for research degrees as of 2022-23.

    This broken pipeline is demonstrated by just 1.2 per cent of the 19,868 studentships awarded by all UKRI research councils from 2016-17 – 2018-19 went to Black or Black Mixed students, with just 30 of those being from a Black Caribbean background.

    In addition, those from underrepresented groups have fewer role models in PhD study and in academia. For academic staff, HESA data for 2023-24 shows that just 3.4 per cent of all academic staff are Black, with data from 2022-23 showing that 1 per cent of all professors are Black (and just 31 per cent of professors are female).

    The value of personal contact

    One of the most effective ways to help potential applicants understand what is involved in a doctorate is a face-to-face event, where current doctoral researchers and supervisors can deliver presentations, answer questions and talk one-to-one with attendees. However, such in-person events can be challenging for many students including those with physical disabilities and may not be suitable for those who are neurodivergent. In addition, they can be costly in terms of travel, time not available for paid employment and/or requiring the expense of childcare. Last, but not least, the idea of attending such an event can simply be intimidating, especially to those who do not come from a middle-class background.

    Working with the Bloomsbury Learning Exchange, we surveyed over 200 PhD students about their application journey. Most gained understanding through personal contacts rather than formal events, with significant numbers regretting their lack of preparation for the intensity of doctoral study.

    Guided by these survey results and input from academics, support staff and students, we developed “Is a PhD Right for Me?”, a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on FutureLearn as a readily available resource for potential PhD applicants coming from a wide range of backgrounds and circumstances. The MOOC format allows the students to engage with it at times that suit them best. We focused on information regarding preparation, funding, and commitment, but also factors which may cause a potential PhD student to pre-emptively talk themselves out of applying, such as personal circumstances like ethnicity, disability, gender, age, psychological wellbeing, and insecurities about intellectual fitness to engage in high level academic study. Through frank interviews and diverse representation, we show authentic experiences of doctoral study. The feedback we have received suggests that our approach is proving effective.

    Participants who have completed the whole course have told us that it has empowered them to make a better-informed decision about whether or not to proceed with a PhD application:

    I haven’t been in paid employment for many years due to ill health. I am very tenacious and adaptable, I am disabled so have to be. Yes, I feel ready for a PhD. This course has been really helpful thank you. I feel more confident on the application process and the time management aspects in particular.

    It has also changed how some potential applicants see more personal aspects of PhD study:

    This course overturned the stereotype I had. I learned that there could be PhD students who are easy-going and enjoy life and work and who are not serious all the time.

    Supervision

    The gatekeepers to PhD study are usually the staff who work in a supervisory capacity. In many institutions, the initial contact is made with a potential supervisor before a formal application is made. At such a stage there is no monitoring of the characteristics of the inquirer (not yet formally an applicant) so biases – conscious or otherwise – will not be apparent.

    Some barriers can be inadvertent: such as requiring a master’s for PhD study or requiring a publication. The former is expensive, especially for students carrying substantial financial burdens from undergraduate study and the latter can be harder for those with caring responsibilities or for those who are not already familiar with the focus on publication in academia.

    It is important that universities do not focus only on the application process but also ensure appropriate support during doctoral study for those from traditionally under-represented groups. In particular, universities can facilitate peer-support groups similar to existing examples such as the Blackett Lab Family, developed at Imperial from Mark Richards’ decision to take on two Black students as their academic and social mentor and now a national collective who share a passion for physics and positive representations of the Black community.

    While supervisor training exists, uptake is often low. Universities might instead integrate inclusion discussions into regular departmental activities, making these conversations harder to avoid.

    New deal

    If we are to truly level the playing field for PhD study, the sector needs coordinated action across multiple fronts. While UKRI’s New Deal for Postgraduate Research represents important progress, its reach extends to only 20% of UK doctoral researchers, leaving the majority of provision unmonitored and unregulated. The current system’s reliance on individual supervisors as informal gatekeepers perpetuates existing inequalities, often unconsciously.

    What is needed is a more systematic approach: a national framework that standardises PhD admission processes, monitors equity outcomes across all institutions, and mandates inclusive practices rather than leaving them to institutional discretion. This could include establishing minimum standards for supervisor training on unconscious bias, requiring transparent reporting of demographic data at inquiry and application stages, and creating pathways that do not penalise those without traditional academic capital.

    Universities must also recognise that widening participation cannot end at enrolment; it requires sustained support structures that acknowledge the different challenges faced by doctoral students from underrepresented backgrounds. The prize is significant: a more diverse doctoral cohort will not only address issues of fairness and representation but will ultimately strengthen the quality and relevance of research itself. The question is whether the sector has the collective will to move beyond well-intentioned initiatives toward the structural changes that genuine equity demands.

    Contributing authors from the Bloomsbury Learning Exchange: Tom Graham, Nancy Weitz, Sarah Sherman

    Source link

  • Removing the rent guarantor barrier to safe and stable accommodation

    Removing the rent guarantor barrier to safe and stable accommodation

    Universities talk about widening participation – but how many ensure every student has a home to go to, so they really can participate?

    Rent guarantor requirements are a routine part of student housing, yet they exclude those without family support. It’s time for the sector to take responsibility for removing this barrier.

    Most students will need a rent guarantor to secure university halls or private housing.

    Imagine how much harder that is if you can’t turn to family members for that support – often the case for young people that have experience of the care system or are estranged from their parents.

    Young people in this position can face sofa surfing, dangerous housing situations and dropping out of university. According to NUS research in 2024, 14 per cent of low-income students are reconsidering university due to accommodation costs – with guarantor requirements cited as a major barrier.

    Lack of information is a compounding issue. Students without easy access to a guarantor might not even know they need one until the moment they go to sign a new contract with peers – often with whom they have not shared their status and only known for a matter of weeks.

    Getting things clear

    At the Unite Foundation, we encourage all universities to include clear information about rent guarantors on their housing webpages and on any other pages specifically for students like care leavers, estranged, or international students. It’s vital that any student without UK family to rely on knows what a rent guarantor is before having to suddenly find one or miss out on a home at university.

    In Summer 2025, we commissioned a student-led audit of over 180 university websites. 60% included clear information about rent guarantors. This is positive progress, up from 45% in 2024 and 36% in 2022 when we started this work. But that’s still 40% of university websites that don’t provide clear information about this key element of the university accommodation journey.

    Impact of Renters Rights Act

    When the Renters Rights Act comes into force in 2026, it will shift the challenge faced by students unable to secure a guarantor.

    Despite lobbying by NUS for the abolition of guarantor requirements entirely, the Act will not stop landlords from requiring a guarantor, but it will limit upfront rent payments to a maximum of one month’s rent.

    Whilst a positive step for the majority of students, the unintended consequence may be to prevent students who are unable to source a guarantor from making a large advance rent payment instead. Paying large advances causes its own set of issues for students, but is often seen as the lesser of two evils compared to homelessness.

    It’s anticipated that the legislation may stimulate an increased market for commercial guarantor providers. Commercial providers – companies which act as guarantor for a fee – can be a valuable service, but it is a varied market that sits outside Financial Conduct Authority regulation.

    Emerging fees can be between 4 and 15 per cent of annual rent if paying upfront, and up to 20 per cent if paying monthly. Disadvantaged students paying an unregulated premium to access a routine tenancy would be a perverse outcome of measures intended to strengthen tenant rights.

    What are the alternatives?

    The Unite Foundation has launched our Blueprint for a #HomeAtUniversity – a guide to support universities in ensuring a safe and stable home for care experienced and estranged students. We set out six areas through which universities and PBSA providers can use housing as a widening participation tool. And removing the rent guarantor barrier is one of these.

    We know that the context of each university is different, and there are different ways to approach removing the rent guarantor barrier.

    Universities like Imperial and Cardiff offer their own guarantor schemes. Some university halls don’t require a guarantor at all. Other universities cover the cost of a commercial guarantor provider, through a negotiated partnership between provider and university.

    And it’s great to see Unite Students, our founder and long-term champion, pilot an approach enabling their university partners to step into the role of guarantor for care-experienced and estranged students, at zero cost or risk.

    Availability of safe, affordable accommodation is at the heart of many current social policy debates and like wise is fundamental to the sustainability and accessibility of higher education.

    There are significant structural issues at a national level in ensuring a home at university for all students – including lack of coordination between universities and local authorities and the level of student maintenance loan. At the Unite Foundation, we do not believe that practice in universities and PBSA providers should replace systemic change. But we also believe that whilst we wait for that change, there is more impact that accommodation providers at university can make.

    At the Unite Foundation we are here to help with case studies and peer support webinars sharing what is happening on the ground in the sector. If you deliver an intervention evidenced to support a safe and stable home at university for care experienced and estranged students, or if you want to learn more about what your university could be doing, please get in touch.

    A safe and stable #HomeAtUniversity isn’t a luxury — it’s a prerequisite for participation, success, and equity in higher education.

    Source link

  • The future of financial hardship support needs to be flexible

    The future of financial hardship support needs to be flexible

    The government’s recent white paper on Post-16 Education and Skills places flexibility and choice at the centre of the future student experience.

    When it comes to students, the government wants universities and colleges to adapt to a much wider range of demographics and to further embrace diversity – while continuing to break down the barriers to opportunity for students from all backgrounds.

    One of the ways to strengthen opportunity is through the additional forms of financial support (via bursaries, scholarships and special-case funds) that higher education institutions provide for those students most at risk of dropping out, or those simply denied opportunity in the first place.

    When it comes to this funding, the sector needs to work much harder in supporting a more varied set of future students, whilst making better use of data to design support packages, and adapting to the real-time user requirements for this type of funding.

    Beyond the post-school model

    The majority model of financial support is still designed primarily for a post-school entrant market (in line with access and participation plans) but we now need to evolve this for a much broader range of working students, part-time students, later life students and so on – based on the white paper’s steer for different student demographics and for more support for students from lower income backgrounds. This will require more agility. It will also require a closer and more strategic, data driven approach to the timing, delivery and use of such student funding.

    Universities will increasingly be expected to meet the needs of a more diverse and complex learner population, one that is typically older, more financially stretched, and balancing work, family, caring responsibilities, and study. While the student body is evolving at pace, and there are encouraging signs of greater flexibility and adaptability across the sector, as highlighted in The Shape of Student Financial Support in 2025, there is also clear recognition that more progress is needed.

    In our work with universities (designed to strengthen the effective delivery and impact of student financial support) we refer to this sea-change in funding as enabling both more optionality (for the funders) and greater agency (for the beneficiaries). Too much of the sector’s current model still assumes the profile and rhythms of the traditional 18-year-old school leaver. Policy momentum is pushing us firmly beyond this, and institutions will need to rethink not just how much financial support they provide, but how, when and in what form it is provided, and crucially, who it is designed for.

    A new student majority

    Commuter students, part-time learners, those studying while working full-time, and individuals returning to education later in life are no longer outliers. They are becoming a significant and growing segment of the student population, and the white paper’s direction of travel signals that this growth will continue.

    These learners typically have different cost profiles, different pressures, and different expectations around support. Rent and food costs matter, of course, but so do childcare, caring responsibilities, travel to placements and campus, and the financial instability that often comes with shift-based or zero-hours work. Their support needs do not fall neatly around term dates.

    A modern student support system must reflect that reality.

    Beyond the “once-a-year” mindset

    One of the strongest messages emerging from our work with universities is that timing of support is as critical as the pound value that support. Students increasingly need support that works with the grain of real life, not against it. That means agility: funds that can be released quickly during a crisis; support that can be drawn down in a way that helps with budgeting; and options that reflect different lifestyles, responsibilities, and individuals preferences around how they manage their finances.

    For mature learners, the notion of a predictable “start of term” pressure point is often irrelevant. Housing, employment and family commitments create fluctuating financial pinch-points throughout the year. A forward-looking and agile hardship and support model must therefore allow universities to intervene dynamically, reacting to student need rather than institutional calendar.

    Across the more than 40 institutions we partner with, we see a growing shift toward more targeted, purpose-led and flexible support. Although institutions are facing significant financial constraints, they are adapting, often rapidly, to ensure funding reaches the right students in a way that genuinely makes a difference.

    We are seeing:

    • A move toward more tailored interventions, with universities reshaping bursaries and hardship schemes around specific learner profiles, including mature and commuter students.
    • Increased use of real-time payment mechanisms, enabling rapid support when a financial shock threatens continuation.
    • Greater use of data to understand how different types of students use support, and what interventions are most likely to prevent financial distress, disengagement or withdrawal.
    • Growing recognition that support must be designed around lived experience, responsive to trends and feedback, not just institutional tradition.

    This shift is encouraging, but the system as a whole is not yet optimised for the demographic change that the White Paper anticipates.

    Where policy meets practice: recommendations for a modernised support model

    To prepare for a more diverse learner population, the sector will need to reimagine its support architecture. From our work with universities and our ongoing analysis of funding patterns, several recommendations emerge:

    We should build support models around life-stage, not simply level of study. Mature and non-traditional learners experience costs and vulnerabilities that differ from the archetypal school-leaver. Support schemes should explicitly recognise this, particularly around childcare, travel, digital access, and household stability.

    There is a need to shift from fixed-cycle payments to flexible, real-time support. Financial crises rarely occur conveniently during scheduled disbursement windows. Universities need mechanisms that allow for rapid, secure, and dignified disbursement of funds whenever needed.

    It is time to explore hybrid support models that blend cash, credit and vouchers. Different pressures require different tools. Cash support is essential in alleviating hardship. Credit and voucher mechanisms can help direct funds toward participation, learning, and targeting food poverty. Mature learners often benefit from a mixture of both.

    We must make data central to decision-making. With financial pressure mounting across the sector, institutions must allocate limited resources with precision. Data on spending patterns, draw-down behaviour and student feedback can inform more effective and equitable holistic support strategies.

    We should co-design support with the students who rely on it. There is no substitute for listening to those living the experience. Mature and non-traditional students frequently report that support systems “aren’t designed for people like me”. Bringing their voices into design and evaluation will be vital.

    A financial support system fit for the future

    The white paper’s direction is clear: widening participation will no longer be defined simply by access for school leavers from underrepresented groups. It will increasingly require a system capable of supporting learners from every life stage, people retraining, upskilling, switching careers, balancing caring responsibilities, or returning to education for the first time in decades.

    This transition will require institutions to be flexible, evidence-led, and prepared to evolve their traditional models of support. Our latest annual report provides one lens on how this evolution is taking place, and where further change is needed. But the wider policy moment demands more than reflection: it demands intentional redesign.

    If universities are to deliver opportunity for all, as the white paper sets out, they will need financial support systems that reflect the real, diverse, year-round lives of today’s and tomorrow’s students. Flexibility is no longer a helpful addition; it is the foundation on which effective, equitable support must be built.

    Source link

  • Efforts to build belonging may get the problem the wrong way around

    Efforts to build belonging may get the problem the wrong way around

    Back in January 2024, John Blake, the now-departing Office for Students’ Director for Fair Access and Participation, was talking about the future of access and participation plans.

    Alongside announcing additional groups of students who might be at risk – service children, young carers, prisoners, commuter students, parents, and Jewish students – noted that “sense of belonging” had appeared in lots of evidence reviews as relevant to many of the risks.

    I’d urge providers to think hard about practical, enduringly impactful work they might do around that idea as part of new APPs.

    Now that all the approved APPs are in, I’ve had a look at what providers are actually proposing.

    I’ve reviewed approved access and participation plans from across the sector in England, extracting every mention of belonging as a strategic priority, every identification of belonging deficits as a risk, and every intervention designed to address them.

    The result is a picture of how the sector understands and responds to belonging challenges. The pattern I’ve found is so consistent across provider types, mission groups, and geographical locations that it ought to amount to a sector-wide consensus about how to “do” belonging.

    The problem is that that consensus appears to be fundamentally at odds with what research tells us about how belonging actually works.

    The deficit model at scale

    Nearly every university identifies that specific disadvantaged groups – Black students, mature students, care-experienced students, disabled students, commuter students, students from IMD Quintile 1 – report lower belonging scores than their peers.

    They then design targeted interventions to address this deficit – peer mentoring schemes for Black students, mature student networks and “mingles”, care-experienced student buddy schemes, disability-specific student groups, commuter-specific transition support.

    The interventions are pretty homogeneous. Birkbeck is running “sustained programmes of Black Unity Events” to “provide a space for Black students to authentically be themselves, form connections and friendships”. Leeds Arts has created “My/Your/Our Space” – a “safer space and community relevant to background” specifically for students of minoritised ethnicities. Northampton has developed a “Black Excellence Programme” designed “to empower Black undergraduate students early on in their transition to level 4 courses with the confidence, sense of belonging and mattering to become resilient leaders and role models”.

    Greenwich has implemented the “Living Black at University Project to support BAME students develop a sense of belonging and community outside of the classroom”. Liverpool John Moores is “developing a Black students peer network via JMSU, focusing on creating a black student community”.

    It’s not just ethnicity. For mature students, East Anglia will “continue specific co-created sense of belonging opportunities for groups of students to meet socially” through a mature student network. Leeds is expanding a “middle ground network pilot” – “co-creating spaces (virtual, physical) for mature and ‘younger mature’ students to help develop a greater sense of belonging”. Bristol is implementing “enhanced mature student community building through mingles, student advocate-led events, and an extended mature student welcome and transition programme”.

    The pattern is almost identical across every characteristic. Care-experienced students get targeted belonging interventions at York (“Achieve HE program aims for increased sense of belonging socially and academically”), Durham (“dedicated mature learners coordinator” aims for “increased sense of belonging”), and Portsmouth (specialist support for “enhanced sense of belonging”). Disabled students get belonging-focused societies and groups. Commuter students get special spaces. And so on.

    Nearly every institution frames belonging as something that specific groups lack, and that requires special intervention to remedy. The language is consistent – students from disadvantaged backgrounds “may struggle to feel they fit in”, “can lack a sense of belonging at university”, “feel disconnected from their academics/tutors and/or fellow students”, and “feel isolated or unsupported from the moment they arrived at University”.

    The Wisconsin problem

    I’ve talked about this before here, but about a decade ago, there was a problem at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Across a collection of STEM courses, there was a significant achievement gap between marginalised groups (all religious minorities and non-White students) and privileged students.

    Psychology professor Markus Brauer had an idea based on his previous research on social norms messaging – communicating to people that most of their peers hold certain pro-social attitudes or engage in certain pro-social behaviours.

    He started by trying out posters, then showed two groups of students videos. One saw an off-the-shelf explanation of bias and micro-aggressions. The other saw lots of students describing the day-to-day benefits of diversity – a “social norms” video revealing that 87 per cent of students actively supported diversity and inclusion.

    The latter video had a strong, significant, positive effect on inclusive climate scores for students from marginalised backgrounds. They reported that their peers behaved more inclusively and treated them with more respect.

    But by the end of the semester, the achievement gap was completely eliminated. Not through remedial support for struggling students, not through special programmes for disadvantaged groups, but through changing what everyone believed about what everyone else valued.

    The Wisconsin intervention didn’t create a “Black Student Success Program”, didn’t offer “enhanced support for marginalised students”, and didn’t build “safe spaces” for specific groups or train “allies” to support disadvantaged students. It told all students the truth about what their peers already valued – and behaviour changed dramatically.

    The research found that while most students genuinely valued diversity, they incorrectly believed their peers didn’t share these values, and the misperception created a false social norm that discouraged inclusive behaviour.

    Students who might naturally reach out across cultural boundaries held back, thinking they’d be the odd ones out. When you correct that misperception – when you say “actually, 87 per cent of your peers actively support diversity” – you transform intervention from an exceptional act requiring special training into standard behaviour.

    But most elements of the dominant APP approach do the opposite:

    • Wisconsin said: “Most students already value diversity – here’s proof”. UK universities say: “We need to create spaces where Black students can feel they belong”
    • Wisconsin said: “Inclusive behaviour is normal here”. UK universities say: “We’ll train mature students how to access support networks”
    • Wisconsin said: “Let’s change what everyone thinks everyone else believes”. UK universities say: “Let’s give disadvantaged groups the resources they lack”

    The Wisconsin research explicitly warns against the dominant approach. As the researchers note:

    “…empowering marginalised groups through special initiatives can paradoxically highlight their ‘different’ status, reinforcing the hierarchies we’re trying to dismantle.

    Power and perception

    To understand why the targeted approach fails, we need to examine how power operates in university settings. Brauer’s research identifies several key dynamics.

    Power shapes perception – those with social power tend to stereotype less powerful groups while seeing their own group as diverse individuals. Power also affects behaviour – powerful individuals act more freely, take bigger risks, and break social rules more often. In seminars, confident students dominate discussions while others remain silent – not because they lack ideas, but because power dynamics constrain their behaviour.

    Most importantly, power creates attribution biases. When powerful people succeed, we attribute it to their personal qualities. When less powerful people fail, we blame their circumstances. This creates self-fulfilling prophecies that reinforce existing hierarchies.

    The dynamics explain why traditional EDI initiatives often fail. Telling powerful groups they’re biased can actually reinforce stereotyping by making them defensive. Meanwhile, “empowering” marginalised groups through special initiatives paradoxically highlights their “different” status, reinforcing the hierarchies we’re trying to dismantle.

    For Brauer, the students don’t lack belonging. The institution lacks inclusive structures that make belonging feel normal. There’s a profound difference between “you need help fitting in because you’re different” and “this is how we all do things here – welcome to the crew.”

    Ticking the boxes

    So why are universities doing this? Partly because OfS asked them to think about belonging, partly because APP spend has to be “on” the disadvantaged groups, and partly because “we’re doing a thing” makes sense in a compliance environment.

    It’s easily documented, measurable by group, defensible to regulators, and demonstrably “doing something”. The Wisconsin approach would be much harder to report in an APP. How do you document “we told everyone that most students already value diversity”? Which “target group” got the “intervention”? What’s the “spend per head”? How do you prove that changing perceived social norms reduced the achievement gap when you didn’t target any specific demographic?

    As such, the APP architecture itself pushes providers toward deficit-model interventions. You can’t write “we’re going to make peer support universal and student-led because that’s just how induction works here”, because that doesn’t read as an access and participation intervention.

    You can’t write “we’re going to survey students and publicize that 78 per cent actively welcome international students”. That doesn’t look like you’re spending money on disadvantaged groups, or map onto the OfS risk register.

    The result is targeted compliance theatre that the evidence suggests will entrench the hierarchies it claims to dismantle.

    To be fair, universities are also responding to a genuine perception that students from disadvantaged backgrounds need additional support to succeed. And they’re not wrong about the support needs – they may be wrong about the delivery mechanism.

    When continuation, completion, and attainment gaps persist for Black students, care-experienced students, and students from deprived areas, the institutional instinct is to create support structures for those specific groups – it feels like the responsible, caring response. But in practice, they are initiatives that are characteristic first, student second. You need special help because you’re different.

    What would actually work

    What would an alternative approach entail? The research suggests five key departures from current practice.

    First is normalising rather than targeting. Instead of creating programmes that make intervention seem exceptional, universities would need to reveal what’s already normal. The Wisconsin approach costs almost nothing – a video, an email, some posters showing that 87 per cent of students actively support diversity. But it requires actually surveying students to discover (they probably would) that most already hold pro-social attitudes, then making that visible. “We surveyed 2,000 students here – 78 per cent actively welcome international students” changes the perceived norm without targeting anyone.

    Universal design rather than special fixes also matters. This means asking different questions. Not “what enhanced personal tutoring do disadvantaged groups need?” but “what if the default tutorial system worked properly for everyone?” Not “what mature student networks should we create?” but “what if study groups and peer support were structured to include all ages and backgrounds by default?” Not “what transition support do care-experienced students need?” but “what if induction assumed zero prior knowledge and no family support for everyone?”

    This wouldn’t mean removing targeted financial support or specialist services (hardship funds, mental health provision, disability services). Those remain separate. It’s about ensuring the basic architecture of belonging – induction, peer support, community-building – works for everyone by default rather than requiring special programmes for specific groups.

    Student leadership of essential functions matters too. European models show students running welcome week, managing housing cooperatives, delivering careers support, organizing social activities – not as add-ons but as how the institution functions. Belonging becomes structural rather than programmatic.

    The challenge there is that UK universities have spent decades professionalizing student engagement – student experience teams, transition coordinators, wellbeing advisors, residence life programmes, delivered by professionals, for students, rather than by students, for each other. Reversing this requires actually giving functions back to students, with appropriate support structures and (dare we say) compensation for significant roles.

    But most important is working on the advantaged. If you want Black students to feel they belong, the Wisconsin research suggests you work with white students to change what they believe about what their peers value. The achievement gap closed partly because white students changed their behaviour.

    If you want mature students to feel integrated, you create structures where all students work together on meaningful projects, where collaboration across demographics is normal and expected. If you want care-experienced students to feel they matter, you create environments where all students contribute to running their community, where everyone assumes they’ll both need help and provide it to others.

    Little of this appears in approved APPs, which at best read as well-meaning, and at worst like victim blaming. Whether alternatives could appear in a future APP iteration – whether the architecture of the APP process would even recognise these as access and participation interventions – is an open question.

    What happens now

    The challenge both for OfS and for universities is significant. Every APP currently includes detailed commitments to targeted belonging interventions, complete with evaluation frameworks and expected outcomes. Universities have staff, allocated budgets, designed programmes, and set objectives based on the deficit model approach. Rowing back isn’t straightforward.

    But the evidence is increasingly clear that the approach, however well-intentioned, is unlikely to work – and may indeed backfire. More fundamentally, the sector needs to grapple with some uncomfortable questions. If most UK students already hold pro-social and pro-diversity attitudes (and research suggests they probably do), why don’t they act on them? What structural barriers prevent students from forming friendships and study groups across demographic boundaries?

    John Blake asked for “practical, enduringly impactful work” around belonging. What universities have delivered is well-intentioned, carefully designed, and probably counterproductive.

    The good news is that what actually works – changing social norms, creating universal structures, enabling student leadership – is arguably easier and cheaper than what the sector is intending. The bad news is that it requires the sector to admit it’s been thinking about the problem the wrong way around.

    Source link

  • The one where they still don’t have any friends

    The one where they still don’t have any friends

    As I’ve been doomscrolling on TikTok this term, my feed seems to have been dominated by university related videos.

    Either the algorithm thinks I’m a fresher or that I’m a HE policy wonk (it’s probably the latter).

    The videos that keep appearing are either fun trends from universities and students’ unions, or something a bit more worrying. There’s been an influx of students posting that they haven’t found any friends yet and are fearing that they will drop out.

    These videos include text like “day 2 at uni no friends,” “walked 10 miles alone just to not be alone in my room,” “being at uni for a month having made no friends and haven’t been out once” and “freshers please hmu my flatmates don’t leave their rooms.”

    A few weeks ago, one addition to my feed was:

    I genuinely think I’m having the worst experience ever…I wanted to go to the freshers fayre and had no one to go with.

    And it’s not just TikTok – a quick scroll of a few online threads about university (not the most sophisticated social listening, but go with me) speak of students feeling lonely, not knowing how to make friends with responses telling them to stick it out until Christmas and the original author saying “being here just feels so wrong.”

    Over the past few years there’s been a shift towards more inclusive and accessible induction activities, more realistic expectation setting, renaming freshers to welcome and a more non-drinking socials, so it begs the question – what is stopping students from making friends?

    Back to the drawing board

    What’s striking about these TikToks and Reddit threads is that they’re essentially public cries for help – and they get thousands of likes and hundreds of responses.

    The public tries to alleviate some of their anxieties in the comments – “you do make friends, give it time, 2 days is not enough to build connections,” “go to stuff on your own” and “join societies, your friends don’t have to be ur flat mates.” Solid but not groundbreaking advice.

    You hope that students take this advice and run with it – but it’s not the advice that’s particularly interesting, it’s the method of communication. Students are reaching out to the void asking for either help or some validation that they’re not feeling this alone.

    It says something about student confidence levels to engage in social activities, however accessible they are designed. It poses an opportunity to integrate social activities into pedagogy and into the classroom, if they’re less confident in engaging in the extra-curricular. It also reminds us that horizontal communication (student-student) seems to be more effective.

    I’m a people person

    This summer I spent the best part of 12 weeks of training student leaders across the country. In the first exercise I ask officers to draw out each others’ student journey. After presenting back I asked them all:

    …when things were going well for you during your student experience, what was it that made it good?

    After the third or fourth training session I got pretty good at predicting what they would say and 90 per cent of the time the answer was “friends.”

    It was friendships that made the difference – those that were there to support them when things were tough or made the good times even better. It wasn’t the lecture content or that field trip or academic support – although many had ideas on how to make these things better – it was people.

    This year’s student leaders are not naive. They’d go into detail about the different barriers to engagement, for many it’s about increased costs, time poverty (often spent working), increases in commuting but also homesickness and a lack of confidence to engage.

    These are new phenomena but often their biggest reflection was they wished staff understood the realities of the pressures on students, even if they couldn’t adapt their offer.

    They wouldn’t always see the university as having a responsibility to present opportunities for students to make friends – but when presented with B3 data, their access and participation plan and their university’s strategy that said something on belonging, they changed their tune.

    What students say

    But these student leader reflections only tell part of the story. To really understand the scale and texture of student loneliness, you need to read what students are posting when they think university staff aren’t watching.

    We’ve spent some time trawling through Reddit and The Student Room – and the posts are miserable. Not dramatic-devastating, but quietly, persistently crushing in their ordinariness. Student after student describing identical patterns of isolation, often in eerily similar language.

    When halls don’t help

    We design halls around the assumption that proximity creates friendship. Stick students in the same building, give them a shared kitchen, and community will naturally emerge. Except it doesn’t.

    One student writes:

    …my flatmates don’t use the kitchen at all, except for the fridge and the oven occasionally… i’m just terribly lonely and in the past two weeks i haven’t had a single conversation with any of my flatmates.

    Another echoes:

    Who do you eat with? No one. With who do you socialise? No one. My flatmates… eat in their rooms and never hang out in the kitchen.

    The pattern repeats across dozens of posts. En-suite rooms plus food delivery apps equals what students call “dead kitchens” – empty communal spaces that mock the idea of community. One thread about this phenomenon attracted hundreds of responses, with students confirming that the only things living in their kitchens are unopened spice racks.

    The emotional toll is immediate. A first-year Australian student (though the experience mirrors UK students exactly) wrote:

    I am in my first year of uni and basically know no one here and have not made any friends so far. I feel awkward and don’t know what to do in between classes so I usually end up sitting in the library by myself and studying. I’m at the point where I’m even too nervous to go and get food by myself despite being on campus for 8 hours, so I am not eating.

    Students are going hungry because eating alone feels too exposing.

    The commuter trap

    If halls students struggle, commuters face something worse – they’re missing the infrastructure entirely. One student explains:

    It’s isolating because you’re missing out on the little spontaneous moments like going to your friends place at 12am to just talk… I commuted for a year and it made me depressed.

    Another captured the structural impossibility:

    I just feel so left out… i wasn’t able to move out like i wished… i feel im missing out on being with my friends and being able to have the uni experience.

    A 19-year-old architecture student who commutes shared a particularly harrowing story about being excluded from their course group:

    When we all met in person, most of them excluded a few of us. I ended up in a smaller friend group, but I was always the one left out. I wasn’t ‘interesting’ enough, and being a commuter meant I couldn’t stay late or go out spontaneously.

    They added:

    I feel like a failure. I hate that this is upsetting my parents too—I know they’re proud of me, and I really want to make them happy. But I’m just so drained.

    The sense of failure is echoed by another commuter who chose to live at home:

    I decided to live at home during first year since I stayed in my home town but I’ve really struggled to make friends. I joined some sport societies but there were v few 1st years there and the other people already sort of have friends (those in older years) so it’s hard to get integrated in a group. I really don’t know my course mates very well due to everything being mostly online this year so it’s just been hard to meet people and click with them. I guess not being in halls has prevented me from meeting people… I just don’t really know what to do and I’m feeling quite lonely and like a failure for not having friend. Just sort of ruins your mood.

    The practical barriers compound. As one student put it:

    Commuting to uni can be lonely… there aren’t many social spaces, only study spaces… lectures end and ninety-five per cent leave in two minutes.

    No lockers, no warm spaces to linger, no time between the last train home and the evening social. HE has built an offer that excludes by timetable.

    Class, culture and not fitting the script

    Identity matters in ways universities don’t always acknowledge. A student from a deprived area wrote:

    i’m from a deprived area… there’s a lot of drug/drink culture at my uni… sometimes I feel like a weirdo for it.

    Another added:

    The majority of people who attend university are wild and very cliquey… It’s a very lonely experience unless you are into partying.

    For international students, the cultural friction is sharper:

    I moved to england 3 months ago… it’s just starting to hit me that i really am alone… my flatmates… need to drink and party like they need oxygen… lonely isn’t the word to describe how i feel.

    These aren’t just about personal preference – they’re about economic and cultural scripts that determine who feels they belong and who doesn’t.

    “Join societies” doesn’t always work

    The default advice. Can’t make friends? Join a society. And for some students, it works. But scroll through enough posts and you’ll see why it fails for many others.

    One student writes:

    Societies… aren’t what I expected… it feels so awkward… they’re already in groups.

    A third year adds:

    I’m a third year, still have no friends… the societies i tried were cliquey… seeing people with their groups on campus or on instagram stories… it’s so shit.

    The cost barrier is real too. While one student counsels:

    My advice is don’t do anything you don’t wanna do to try and make friends… be you and do what you want to do.

    Another counters the practical reality – joining multiple societies to increase your odds gets expensive fast when you don’t yet know if you’ll click with anyone.

    The timing trap

    Multiple students describe a narrow window for friendship formation, after which groups solidify and become hard to penetrate. A first-year, just a month in, writes:

    Hi everyone I feel so lonely I have been here nealy 4 weeks but havent found people who I click with it feels like I’m so different to everyone else here… everyone has already made their friends circle and I have no friends.

    The summer break breaks weak ties:

    Lonely as a third year… I struggle a lot with friendships… in first year I made some friends… after summer no one talked to me or reached out.

    And by third year, it can feel like starting over without any scaffolding:

    im a third year, still have no friends… the societies i tried were cliquey… seeing people with their groups on campus or on instagram stories… it’s so shit.

    One student captured the arbitrary nature of it:

    A huge part of it is also luck… I happened to be in a flat with really nice people… other flats had antisocial or downright horrible people.

    The mental health spiral

    Loneliness and mental health loop into each other. One student writes:

    I’m struggling with depression… my flatmates don’t talk to each other… everyone has got their own groups… I just feel like an Outsider.

    Another describes the avoidance cycle:

    I haven’t been able to make friends… I live in halls… never went to lectures due to paranoia, anxiety and depression… haven’t gone to society events because I haven’t got anyone to go with.

    A first-year in London shared:

    I have no idea when this happened but clearly I missed the memo lol. I am lagging in my studies, sometime I feel so down and anxious that I spend the entire day in the dark in bed because I have no motivation to attend lectures. I want to go out and club like other first years but I don’t really have anyone to go with.

    A 21-year-old woman in her second year described the visibility of her isolation:

    I’m 21 (female) and have no friends (I know how pathetic that sounds). I’m in my second year at uni and it’s so miserable having to attend lectures and seminars alone, it feels like it must be really obvious to other people how alone I am and it’s embarrassing. I have tried hard to connect with others but I have terrible social anxiety, making it pretty difficult, and the people I have spoken with/met online always seem to get bored with me very quickly.

    A student battling severe anxiety captured the intersection of mental health and neurodivergence:

    I’m lonely, have social anxiety, might have autism, low mood, low confidence & self esteem, no motivation for careers, seeing people live their best lives while I’m at my lowest, and I’m not sure why I’m carrying on anymore, it feels pointless. I feel like I’m invisible, on the sidelines, I don’t even feel like I belong here.

    For neurodivergent students, the executive function required to keep trying when effort isn’t reciprocated becomes an additional barrier. Students explicitly describe what researchers call “avoidance loops” – missing events because they have no one to go with, which means they can’t meet anyone, which means they keep missing events. The spiral tightens.

    The loneliness of having “friends”

    Perhaps most insidious is a different kind of loneliness – the kind where you technically have friends but still feel fundamentally alone. A student described this six months into university:

    I settled into uni well, I made a nice group of friends that I’m living with next year. It’s just 6 months in I’ve realised I’m not really that happy? I feel like I’m not really that similar to my two best friends here – and not in a good way. I just don’t really know what to do because it’s not like I can just drop them and make new friends? I feel like I just rushed into getting close with people so I wouldn’t be alone but I feel lonely anyway because I don’t feel like they really get me?

    This reflects something universities rarely measure – not just whether students have friends, but whether those friendships meet their actual needs. When students settle for proximity over genuine connection because the window for making friends feels so narrow, they end up locked into relationships that don’t sustain them.

    What’s also striking is how students describe the everyday humiliations of trying and failing:

    I even had free cinema tickets at one point and couldn’t even find anyone to go to the cinema with me for free lol. It’s making me feel really bad about myself and Im starting to feel as if there’s something wrong with me.

    Another:

    I came to uni thinking I would find people I could vibe with and chill with… I know I’m partially to blame because I’m also a naturally quiet and shy person but I feel like everyone has found their groups and it’s only November still the first term of uni and I’m just on my own… when I try to talk to people it feels like I’m begging it and not authentic.

    A second-year wrote:

    I have hundreds of acquaintances, but non of those i can call ‘friends’. When im not in uni, i spend the majority of my time alone, do things alone, go shopping alone, go to the cinema alone – all this to try and make me feel better, but just confirms my suspicions of being depressed, lonely and without any friends. I ******* hate it!

    And perhaps most painful – the contrast between the public and private self:

    I could literally cry bc I am so bored and lonely. Completely friendless… I just feel so emotionally alone and non existent when I am in university. Outside of university with my family it is positive attitudes and happy happy. But I don’t want to put up a facade that everything is peaches and cream when in uni because it is not.

    One student who failed their first year explained:

    I flopped, and I flopped bad. I failed 3 modules… The reason I flopped was…and I hate to openly say this but I was in a stage of manic depression; I’d lost all my friends from back home and I didn’t get on with my flatmates. They found me weird and geeky (which I am) I was very lonely throughout most of uni, had no friends… I flopped my exams because I had no motivation at life.

    What all of this adds up to

    Strip away the platitudes and a pattern emerges – in a mass system, students aren’t failing at friendship, the system is failing at social architecture.

    En-suite accommodation means students rarely bump into each other, food delivery apps mean kitchens stay empty, and mismatched timetables mean flatmates never overlap. Mass lectures that empty immediately don’t build connections, and when only one or two academics know a student’s name, academic spaces aren’t doing the social work we assume they are.

    Commuters can’t access evening socials due to travel costs and last trains, and they have nowhere to linger between classes with no warm spaces and no lockers. The default social offer remains alcohol-focused, excluding non-drinkers, international students unfamiliar with UK drinking culture, students from lower-income backgrounds, and those with anxiety or neurodivergence who find the format inaccessible.

    Friendships form early and groups solidify fast – often within the first few weeks. Students arriving late or missing that window describe groups as impenetrable by November, summer breaks dissolve weak ties, and third years start again without halls to facilitate contact. And even when students make friends, they often describe them as superficial, settling for proximity because the window for genuine connection felt too narrow.

    It’s a bit risky

    Over the summer with student leaders, a follow up activity that Jim and I deployed involved some student leaders coming up with a risk register for the student experience and then some mitigations. Some of their interventions about loneliness (modelled without funding or capacity constraints) are insightful and offer some food for thought:

    • More dedicated space for students to “exist” including communal lounges, lockers, microwaves and study space
    • Accessibility guides to rooms and spaces, pictures of what activities, seminar rooms and office hours might look like to set expectations and build confidence
    • Opportunities to chat, talk to other students and build connection built into the curriculum – through seminar activities, assessment or group projects
    • Comprehensive peer mentoring and buddy schemes that support students through their first few weeks
    • Longer processes of induction
    • Deliberately generating groupwork and discussion in the first teaching episodes of a module

    Some of this isn’t new and might be things that already take place on various campuses. But it’s becoming clear that without curated and designated interventions on student loneliness from student unions and their universities, one of the core parts of the student experience risks becoming a luxury good for a select few.

    And as money gets tighter and different parts of the student experience get shaved off, that might look like the social event the department runs with free pizza disappears or it could be bigger class sizes – either way the ability to form connections gets harder. Connection, belonging and mattering don’t always require vast funds, but they do reap huge rewards.

    Each cut makes forming friendships harder. Connection and belonging don’t always require huge budgets, but they do require intention. Notably, few interventions that remain focus specifically on helping students meet each other, despite this cutting across multiple institutional KPIs.

    If accommodation kitchens are dead, they can be made alive through regular subsidised socials and RA-hosted drop-ins. Commuters need staffed spaces with lockers and microwaves, clustered timetables, travel bursaries, and social calendars starting at 12:15 not 19:15. Social contact needs embedding in teaching through discussion, assessed group work, and academics knowing students’ names.

    The societies model needs fixing – month-one free trials to reduce experimentation costs, incentivising daytime and sober formats, normalising Week 5 sign-ups as much as Week 1, running “come alone” events. Addressing class and cultural barriers can be done through multiple entry points that don’t require drinking culture or cultural capital. Neurodivergent students need clear guides and structured formats. International students need mixed-group activities with staff introductions in weeks 2 and 6, not just induction.

    Funding this infrastructure properly isn’t expensive – and anyway, pizza socials and welcome events aren’t frivolous extras, they’re the scaffolding for measured outcomes. Engineer repeated face-to-face contact and friendships follow.

    There’s something else worth paying attention to, and it’s hiding in plain sight across Europe. In most countries we’ve visited on our Study Tours, universities allocate every new student to small groups of 5-15 with trained student mentors before they arrive. It’s universal, not optional or targeted at “at risk” groups. These second or third-year mentors guide groups through first term – campus tours, city exploration, and crucially, turning up to things together.

    When UK students explain why they didn’t engage in extracurricular activities, one answer dominates: “I had nobody to go with.” Universal mentoring solves this by design. Research shows these schemes improve retention, belonging and mental health, particularly for first-generation and international students. Aalto University credits their tutoring system for creating “the world’s best student experience.”

    UK universities run scattered peer mentoring – something for international students, maybe medical school family groups – but lack scale and universality. European universities assume all students need this and design accordingly. These schemes are student-led and union-coordinated, with training and modest payment or academic credit for mentors. Improved retention alone pays for the programme many times over.

    Whose job?

    Some will get this far and ask why universities should be responsible for students making friends. Surely that’s not what academics signed up for – shouldn’t institutions focus on teaching and research rather than playing social coordinator?

    The problem is that Maslow’s hierarchy doesn’t work the way we’d like it to. Students who are lonely, anxious, and socially isolated aren’t engaging with the academic self-actualisation at the top of Maslow’s pyramid – they’re stuck further down, and no amount of excellent lecture content will shift them up.

    The student who posted about being too anxious to get food after eight hours on campus isn’t thinking about their essay – they’re hungry and scared. The one spending entire days in bed in the dark isn’t going to benefit from better seminar slides.

    Universities can either acknowledge that belonging and connection are prerequisites for academic success, or they can keep measuring poor outcomes and wondering why interventions aimed at the top of Maslow’s pyramid aren’t working.

    And given that students are now paying the full cost of their education through a lifetime of additional tax framed as debt, universities can’t simply say “that’s not our problem” when the system they’ve designed produces loneliness at scale.

    Students seem remarkably willing to accept this as a collective responsibility – they generally don’t complain about resources spent on mental health support or on helping others succeed, even when they don’t use those services themselves.

    What breaks that tolerance is visible unfairness and institutional indifference. If universities want to retain that goodwill and actually deliver on the outcomes they’re being measured against, designing for friendship isn’t mission creep – it’s the foundation that makes everything else possible.

    Source link