Category: Belonging

  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • What we can do about belonging for postgraduates

    What we can do about belonging for postgraduates

    As the new academic year approaches, universities across the UK are gearing up to welcome thousands of new students.

    The first week on campus is all about helping students feel welcome, and evidence shows that this transition period is crucial for fostering a sense of belonging.

    But why should we care about fostering belonging in our students? Well, belonging is a basic human need and central to our wellbeing. Belonging is predominantly about social relationships, but also the environment, cultural groups, and physical places we reside in. That is, belonging is about all areas of life.

    For university students, a sense of belonging at their institutions is one of the key factors to help them get the most out of their degree. Students who report a strong sense of belonging to their university course often experience better mental health and general wellbeing.

    Overlooking postgraduate taught (PGT) students

    Worryingly, however, there is a lack of focus on postgraduate taught (PGT) students within the belonging literature. It is perhaps easy to assume that because PGTs have made the transition to university already, they will find the transition to the next level of study easy. But from the (limited) research out there, the transition from undergraduate to PGT is just as challenging, and surveys exploring wellbeing consistently reveal PGT students have poor, and sometimes the worst, wellbeing levels of any student cohort.

    PGT students are also overlooked more broadly across the higher education landscape. There is heavy weighing on the importance of the National Student Survey (NSS) which explores undergraduate student experience. The NSS is highly influential, publicly published and discussed in the media and league tables. In contrast, the (optional) Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey (PTES) is much less visible and has much lower response rates. The response in 2024 was proudly published as the highest ever response rate at 13 per cent of the UK PGT student population. The 2024 NSS achieved a 72.3 per cent response rate. This may be in part due to the visibility of the PTES, and shorter course length, but could also reflect a weaker sense of belonging in these cohorts.

    What can we do to improve PGT student belonging?

    Taken together, it seems as though PGT students often feel a weak sense of belonging on their courses and are overlooked by the sector. As a staff member working closely with PGT students, and a PGT student who has suffered a lack of belonging, we recognised the issue and noted the lack of clear guidance for educators to start thinking about these issues in their own settings.

    We therefore produced a free guide for educators to consider PGT belonging in their own contexts. The guide is available to download for free from the Open Science Framework (OSF).

    In the guide, we have outlined what belonging is, why it is so crucial for all students, but we have a particular focus on PGT students. We have also provided prompts for educators to reflect on their current practice, with the aim of inspiring staff to identify opportunities for increasing belonging.

    We have provided 5 simple evidence-based recommendations that educators can make now to work towards increased belonging in PGT students, which we will highlight in turn here. The first recommendation is around language and communication. PGT students report feeling that a lot of the generic information received from university was tailored to their undergraduate peers. Simple rewording for each cohort receiving the emails would really help students feel seen and valued.

    And staff need to develop an awareness of the cohort diversity. Some students will be entering straight after undergraduate, but many return to study after time away which can be challenging. PGT students have higher tuition fees and typically no separate maintenance loan, thus it is common for these students to have work commitments alongside their studies. PGT students are expected to learn independently at a higher level, often within just a year. Many universities run conversion courses, allowing students to change discipline. This can mean grappling with a different epistemology, which is a unique challenge.

    Ideally, staff should provide appropriate levels of support to the unique needs of the cohort. One way in which this tailored support could be provided is through informal upskilling workshops to ensure students understand the expectations of the programme. These could be run by the school, department, or centrally.

    The final two recommendations centre around the ability to form social connections. PGT students feel that due to such full timetables, they have limited opportunities to develop connections with their peers. Scheduling opportunities for PGT students to socialise, particularly when they are already on campus, can help develop those much-needed social connections. For instance, holding a regular coffee morning or study session can mean students have a space to work and socialise in between teaching sessions.

    Students also need to develop meaningful relationships with teaching staff. When staff actively schedule and attend student events, they help cultivate authentic relationships that enhance student engagement. These informal social opportunities can nurture a community feeling.

    Final thoughts

    With all this in mind, how will you ensure your next cohort of PGT students feels a sense of belonging? Download the guide, reflect on your practice, and start making small, meaningful changes – because every student deserves to feel that they belong.

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  • Have we taken our eyes off the postgraduate student experience?

    Have we taken our eyes off the postgraduate student experience?

    We know a lot about undergraduate student experience and how these students experience life at university, especially when it comes to considering a sense of belonging.

    However, our understanding of the postgraduate student experience is arguably lacking compared to what we know about the experiences of their undergraduate counterparts.

    Despite growing numbers and increasing strategic importance, postgraduate students remain largely invisible in both published research and institutional strategy.

    As Katharine Hubbard recently pointed out on Wonkhe, despite the large and diverse postgraduate population within UK higher education institutions the equity of outcomes conversation rarely extends to consider postgraduates. Amid financial pressures, universities are increasingly market-driven, often prioritising initiatives that enhance the undergraduate experience. Yet, in 2023-24, UK institutions awarded more postgraduate qualifications than undergraduate ones, generating what was (in 2022-23) an estimated £1.7 billion in income. So why aren’t we paying more attention to how they experience university?

    Working out the scenario

    There is growing recognition that the postgraduate taught (PGT) student experience is qualitatively distinct from that of undergraduates. Postgraduate taught courses, often one-year-long Master’s degrees, attract students with varying motivations and expectations, who may also be facing challenges in pursuing their studies. For example, PGT students often face compressed timelines, intense academic demands and limited opportunities for social and academic integration due to the short duration of their courses. They often return to study after time in the workforce and may be juggling additional responsibilities such as paid work, caregiving or visa constraints alongside their studies.

    A one-size-fits-all student support model applied to all taught students assumes some equivalence across the needs of undergraduate and postgraduate student cohorts, but we know that students are not homogenous. We need to approach the design and delivery of postgraduate courses without the assumptions that postgraduate students are inherently more autonomous or resilient as this can lead to a lack of tailored academic support, limited personal tutoring and underdeveloped community-building initiatives.

    This neglect is particularly concerning given the strategic importance of PGT students to institutional and national agendas: the development of skilled employment sectors, and investment in the research pipeline (not to mention the role PGT fees play in supporting) institutional finances. Yet, as has been shown in recent Advance HE-led Postgraduate Taught Experience Surveys, without adequate support, many PGT students report feeling isolated, academically underprepared or unsupported in navigating career pathways post-graduation.

    Reacting to wider trends

    The past decade has seen a boom in research into the undergraduate student experience, but efforts to understand the experience of PGT students is evidently lagging behind. For every single peer-reviewed article published on how postgraduate students experience belonging, thirteen are published on undergraduates. As a sector, what should we do about this?

    To address this imbalance, institutions need to recognise that postgraduate students are not undergraduate students; they have different expectations and therefore need to be responded to differently. Institutions need to stop trying to apply an undergraduate student experience lens to postgraduate student cohorts – let’s all look outside the lens.

    And we need to stop making assumptions about our postgraduate students and ask better questions. Who are our postgraduate students? How many are alumni? How many commute? How is information like this being used to shape the welcome and induction offering that is given to these students? This is all central to fully understanding the challenge.

    The hidden curriculum

    There is also a need to think about how information about specific postgraduate cohorts is being disseminated to the staff involved in teaching and supporting these cohorts? Our own surveys of PGT students have identified multiple examples of international students who have spent weeks navigating unfamiliar academic cultures and trying to decipher the “hidden curriculum” of academia.

    An example from one institution highlighted multiple international students believing that the institutional virtual learning environment “Blackboard” that they often heard being referred to, was an actual chalk-based blackboard that everyone else knew where it was located, except for them. That is not a failure of the students but of communication with them.

    Higher education institutions need to ensure that students experiencing the compressed timescales that many PGT students face, being enrolled on a year-long course, are still able to access equitable opportunities for student support, personal and professional development and career services. Lengthy wait times, drawn-out applications or referral processes are unlikely to meet the needs of students enrolled on the intensive and relatively short courses which reflect many PGT programmes. Postgraduate students still need the wrap around support that undergraduate students need!

    Postgraduate students are so much more than an extension of the undergraduate community. They are purposeful, motivated and diverse and form a vital component of the academic community. We need to ensure that we, as an academic community, are not taking our eyes off this crucial population of students who are essential both for the success of individual institutions and the wider sector as a whole.

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  • Working with our places will help us to spread the benefits of higher education more widely

    Working with our places will help us to spread the benefits of higher education more widely

    In the North East of England, fewer than one in three 18 year olds enter higher education, compared to a national average of 37 per cent.

    For higher education institutions, including my own, this is more than a regrettable statistic. It must be a call to action. The Sutton Trust’s Opportunity Index highlights that the North East ranks lowest of all English regions for social mobility prospects, with the poorest students in the region facing some of the most limited chances for progression into higher education and good employment.

    As a country we have undoubtedly made progress in widening participation, but as someone who spends their days thinking about such things, I worry: are we measuring that progress in the right ways? It’s not just about the gateway to university, it’s about the university journey and beyond. Or, to put it in more human terms: are people who previously wouldn’t have gone to university not only getting in, but thriving once they’re in?

    If we carry on measuring widening participation purely by entry stats and graduate salaries, we’ll miss the bigger picture, and what many of us went into higher education to try to achieve: deeper, transformative impact. A university education does more than prepare someone for a job. There is good evidence that links it to longer life expectancy, better health, and greater stability.

    The benefits of university go beyond the individual. Children of university graduates are much more likely to attend university and perform better once there. When a young person from a disadvantaged background earns a degree, it can spark a ripple effect that changes their family’s trajectory for good.

    There’s also a clear economic case for seeing success more broadly. Graduates typically pay more in tax, rely less on welfare services, and are more likely to engage in civic life. In regions like ours, where economic renewal and social mobility are deeply connected, that impact is amplified. A university education doesn’t just boost an individual’s prospects – it helps build stronger, more resilient communities.

    Whole-journey approach

    If we are truly serious about transforming lives and levelling up opportunity, especially in so-called “cold spots” like County Durham, then we need to dig deeper, beyond continuation rates and into attainment and the feeling of belonging. Financial strains, cultural barriers, wellbeing concerns, and more must be recognised and overcome. These are challenges not just for admissions, but across the entire student journey.

    Attainment gaps have a substantial impact, and disadvantaged students can be up to 22.7 months behind advantaged peers by the time they take their GCSEs. GCSE performance is strongly correlated with later life outcomes, including university attendance and employment quality. Early outreach is therefore pivotal in closing these long-standing gaps.

    It’s a challenge we take seriously. We’re not just widening the door – we’re reshaping the whole experience: investing nearly £1.5m in programmes for Key Stage 4 and 5 students, strengthening our foundation programme, and working with Sunderland AFC’s Foundation of Light to create a new health hub in one of our most deprived communities.

    One of the clearest messages of our new access and participation plan is how deeply place and perception are intertwined. Many young people in North East England don’t just lack opportunities – they’re not even sure those opportunities are meant for them. And, sadly, some still perceive Durham to be a place where they wouldn’t belong. Multiple studies show a strong link between a sense of belonging and academic success, particularly for underrepresented groups. So we’re investing in transition support and the Brilliant Club’s Join the Dots programme, which connects incoming students with peer coaches from results day onward.

    What we’re trying to achieve with our strategy cannot and should not be measured solely in continuation rates and degree classifications. Our evaluation strategy includes:

    • Sense of belonging as a core outcome: Building on Durham-led research, we are embedding a validated survey tool into our access and participation work. This tool captures students’ sense of belonging across multiple domains — from college life to academic confidence. These survey findings will help us identify and support groups at higher risk of exclusion.
    • Quasi-experimental design: Where sample sizes allow, we will use matched control groups and multiple regression analysis to compare outcomes between intervention participants and non-participants, tracking progress from outreach through to graduation. Intermediate metrics include not only continuation and attainment but also self-efficacy and engagement.
    • Pre/post measures: Our use of TASO’s validated access and success questionnaire enables pre- and post-intervention analysis of psychosocial outcomes such as academic self-efficacy and expectations of higher education.
    • Theory of change models: These have been developed for each intervention strand and will be regularly updated to ensure our work is aligned with evidence and outcomes over time.

    While our approach is rigorous, we anticipate several challenges. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds face cost-related pressures that may impact belonging and continuation. And persistent concerns about whether students from working-class or Northern backgrounds “belong” at Durham risk undermining recruitment and retention. We aim to confront this through co-designed interventions, but change in perception takes time.

    Co-development is key

    We believe that we can only succeed for the North East by working with others: through Universities for North East England – which includes Durham, Newcastle, Northumbria, Sunderland, and Teesside; and the new Durham Learning Alliance partnership with four local colleges – we must expand educational opportunities and drive economic growth.

    When people see that their goals and dreams are genuinely realisable, they’re far more likely to engage. After all, who are we to define what success should look like for someone else?

    The government’s opportunity mission gives higher education a rare, and much-needed, moment to pause and reset. Let’s not waste it. We’ve got a chance to rethink what success means – not just for universities, but for the people and places we serve. Let’s broaden the conversation beyond who gets through the door. Let’s put co-development at the heart of everything we do. And above all, let’s keep listening – not just to what students need, but to what they hope for. In the end, the real test of progress isn’t just who gets in. It’s who gets on – and how far they go, with us walking alongside them.

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  • For some students, home doesn’t feel like home

    For some students, home doesn’t feel like home

    In Britain, we can be oddly squeamish when talking about class, whether known or implied through a person’s accent, appearance, or behaviour.

    But not having an honest conversation with ourselves and our institutions about it is actively harming our students, especially the ones who are from the area where our institutions sit.

    I was one of a team of authors that published a report at the back end of 2024 exploring the role of social class and UK home region at Durham University. Our research, which was supported by the university, found that students from North East England had a lower sense of belonging than their peers.

    This is in comparison to students from other northern regions, the rest of the UK, and international students. And it is true even if they are from more advantaged backgrounds.

    I’ll say that again – students from North East England feel excluded from Durham University, which is in… North East England. This highlights that a problem at Durham University is not only class, but preconceived stereotypes based on how a person speaks, acts, or their family background.

    This article explains how we built our evidence base, and how the university responded, including by integrating our recommendations into the new Access and Participation Plan, and resourcing new staff roles and student-led activity.

    From anecdote to evidence

    The student-led report came out of the First Generation Scholars group in the Anthropology department in 2022.

    Having heard repeatedly the issues that first generation students were facing, and feeling it ourselves, we decided to move beyond anecdotal stories which were known in the university, and produce something concrete and legible which couldn’t be denied.

    We devised a survey and sent it to every student, with a 10 per cent response rate. Follow up focus groups were conducted to add additional context to the quantitative findings and ensure the voices of those who had been let down were heard.

    The findings were grouped into seven areas – overall sense of belonging at Durham, peer relationships, experiences in teaching and learning, college events and activities, college staff relationships, experiences in clubs and societies, and financial considerations.

    Across all these areas, social class had the strongest and most consistent effect. Students from less privileged backgrounds were more likely to feel ashamed of the way they speak, dress, and express themselves.

    They students felt targeted based on their background or personal characteristics – and said they were:

    …being told countless times by a flatmate that I seem the ‘most chavvy’ and continuously refer to Northerners as degenerates.

    …at a formal dinner, students laughed at my North-east accent, they asked if I lived in a pit village.

    The irony is that due to rising housing costs, many students really are being forced to live in pit villages.

    These instances weren’t only present in peer interactions – but also took place in the teaching and learning spaces. One student said that during a lecture, the lecturer mentioned that they couldn’t understand what the IT staff member was saying due to his North East accent – which was the same as the students’.

    Another noted that their peers were “sniggering when I made a comment in a tutorial.” Comments like these have led to students self-silencing during classes and, in some cases, changing their accents entirely to avoid stigma.

    Anecdotally, I’ve heard students say that their families laugh when they hear their new accent. If we are implicitly telling students that they have to change who they are in their own region, their own city, amongst their own family in order to fit in, we are telling them that they are not safe to be authentically themselves. That message lingers beyond university.

    The report notes that other groups of students also experienced exclusion. These included women, LGBTQ+ students, and students with a disability – although only disability came close to the magnitude of effects explained by social class and region.

    It should be noted that these are protected characteristics, while class and region are not. But there was also an interaction between these characteristics, class, and region. Women from less advantaged backgrounds from North East England had a worse time than their southern peers – which they reported as being due to their perceived intelligence and sexual availability. One North East female student stated,

    I was a bet for someone to sleep with at a college party because ‘Northern girls are easy.’

    Tackling the sense of exclusion

    The report also highlights instances of real connections for students. It was often in the simplest gestures, such as having a cup of tea with their college principal, porters saying hello in the corridor, or a lecturer confirming that they deserved to be at Durham, despite the student’s working-class background.

    We were worried that the university might be quick to dismiss, bury, or simply ignore the report. However, they’ve stepped up. The report has been used in the new Access and Participation Plan (APP), underpinning an intervention strategy to increase students’ sense of belonging through student-led, funded activities.

    That builds on the creation of new, instrumental staffing positions. In discussions following the launch event for the report, there was a real buzz and momentum from colleagues who spotlighted the work they were doing in this area – but with an awareness that more needs to be done.

    A key issue is connecting this discrete but interconnected work. Many activities or initiatives are happening in silos within departments, colleges, faculties, or within the central university, with few outside those realms knowing about it.

    In a time when every university is tightening their belts, coordinating activities to share resources and successes seems like an easy win.

    It would be easy to dismiss the problem as unique to Durham – the university and its students have often been under fire for being elitist, tone deaf, or exclusionary. But it’s likely that students at other institutions are facing similar barriers, comments, and slights.

    I’ve spoken to enough colleagues in SUs to know that it isn’t just a Durham problem, not even just a Russell Group problem. There will be those who are afraid of what they might find if they turn over that particular stone, actually having a good look at how social class impacts students belonging.

    But I’d argue it’s a positive thing to do. Bringing it into the light and confronting and acknowledging the problem means that we can move forward to make our students’ lives better.

    Read the full report here, including recommendations, and the university’s comments.

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  • It’s the little moments that power social mobility

    It’s the little moments that power social mobility

    Anyone who has gone into higher education from a “non-traditional” background knows that widening participation is a double-edged sword. It is there to promote social mobility – but for individual students this journey, once taken, tends to be irreversible.

    In return for out-earning your family of origin, you are likely to endure a long period of feeling like an outsider. Whether it’s your accent, the words you use, the house you lived in, what you eat, the school you went to, or where (and indeed, if) you go on holiday, there are thousands of ways that you can feel different – and lesser. For some students, this feeling of being an imposter is further compounded by differences in culture, religion and ethnicity. As time goes on you can either continue standing out like a sore thumb or you can start to assimilate and, in doing so, lose little pieces of yourself forever.

    This is the story I heard many times over while carrying out research for a report published today. A Different World explores socioeconomic disadvantage in the transition to university and first year experience. In a partnership between Unite Students, University of Leeds and Manchester Metropolitan University, students took part in interviews, focus groups and co-creation, with most of them contributing directly to the report’s 33 recommendations.

    If this many recommendations seems excessive (even though they are helpfully grouped into six themes) it’s because most of them are about small but meaningful actions. I’ve spent the best part of 25 years advocating for a more inclusive higher education sector, but it’s only since working in student accommodation that I’ve come to see the value of these day-to-day moments as a force for change.

    University visits for schools are good, tutoring projects even better, and the return of grants would be lovely – but wherever the student experience is built on middle-class norms we will continue to see lower enrolment, continuation, completion, attainment and graduate outcomes among students from a different background.

    The change that is needed – and attainable – involves small, local actions in addition to system-level change.

    In their own words

    A Different World enables students to tell their own stories in their own words, which brings a richness of nuance to the topic and reveals opportunities for change.

    For example, there are many ways to cope with alienation, but opportunities to meet others from similar backgrounds really helps. As well as other students, this could also include staff members, and not just academic staff. Student accommodation maintenance teams made a difference for one student, and outside of this research I’ve heard many stories of students whose experience has been transformed by housekeepers or the reception team. Do we recognise and encourage this enough? Students were also reassured by services specifically aimed at them. We British don’t like to talk about social class, but maybe it would be helpful if we did.

    Students also shared the challenges of working and balancing a budget, and financial matters certainly did limit opportunities for socialising and extra-curriculars. However, they talked at least as much about their budgeting skills and ability to find the best bargains, skills usually learned from family. They were so impressive in this respect that they would have been helpful peer coaches for students in financial difficulty.

    A less obvious impact of socioeconomic background is gaps in fundamental knowledge about higher education. If you are the first person in your family to go to university, and especially if your school or college isn’t geared up to preparing you for it, there will be a lot you don’t know, including “unknown unknowns”, which put you at a disadvantage. For some students, unspoken assumptions tripped them up several times in the first year leading to missed opportunities and academic disadvantage.

    A different world

    The good news is that there’s a lot that can be done that would benefit students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and much of it would benefit a wider range of students too. You are probably doing some of these already, or in pockets within the organisation.

    All academics, and especially personal tutors, could explain expectations, terms and how to interact with them. For example, what are “office hours”, how do students get a meeting with you, and what are they allowed to talk about in those meetings? Module leaders could include ice-breakers at the start of every module, which also helps to promote belonging. Campus services staff could be encouraged and trained to develop more meaningful relationships with students, within appropriate boundaries. You could employ more students, especially those on a low income, and encourage your partners and suppliers to do the same. You could work with student-led societies to develop more inclusive practices and clearer communication. Maybe offer targeted bursaries for extra-curricular activities, via a clear and efficient process. For further inspiration I’d recommend reading the case studies from Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Leeds that are included in the report.

    Widening access has been a success story over the last three decades – but if we’re serious about delivering social mobility as a sector, and as a society, individual students will benefit from better awareness and support while they are undertaking that difficult journey.

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  • Getting students drawing can help belonging and mental health

    Getting students drawing can help belonging and mental health

    Empowering students to develop a creative skillset in response to curriculum-based tasks facilitates experimentation and exploration.

    Increasing creativity supports problem-solving and innovation in a range of academic disciplines. Developing these skills, students acknowledge improvements in their mental health and wellbeing. At De Montfort University, our drawing centre gives students opportunities to develop drawing skills, not only to improve visual communication, but to enhance creativity more broadly.

    Our students say that this ability to design and create improves their confidence to become more imaginative in their studies, developing a confidence that transcends beyond the ability to be creative, enabling more holistic engagement in studies and the wider university experience.

    A centre for creativity

    The drawing centre – part of the central Library and Student Services directorate – offers an inclusive studio environment in which students are supported in a non-assessed way to develop individualised approaches to the creative process.

    Many students first enter the drawing centre thanks to timetabled sessions aligned to curriculum content, others bravely wander in to see what’s happening, and some come along as a supportive friend but soon find themselves engaged and wanting more. Located at the very heart of our Leicester campus, the centre is visible from outside – its interior attracts many to come in and embrace creative development, in an environment designed to support wellbeing.

    The centre is led by experienced arts teacher Chris Wright, who recognised the decline in student confidence and associated mental health and sought to address it. Knowing the importance of a students’ ability to engage creatively, to explore creativity in a nurturing, non-judgemental environment, Chris championed the establishment of a space to develop creative design thinking, doing this to facilitate preparedness for study from a place of perceived mental safety.

    A starting point for the centre was research indicating that mainstream education appears to marginalise art and design subjects in favour of STEM disciplines – a point which echoed Chris’s 20 years of experience teaching arts disciplines, where he witnessed a diminishing focus on craft, experimentation, and creativity, leading to a decline in critical thinking and the negative impacts of this on the student experience.

    Realising the need to develop student confidence in drawing and mark-making, the drawing centre was established in 2018 to provide bespoke support to a small selection of courses at our university. It has grown to become a core part of university activity with provision for multi-modalities of learning for all four faculties, engaging over 2,600 student visits each academic year.

    Confidence

    Many providers seek to understand and support incoming students during that key period of transition into higher education.

    As part of our approach, we invite new students to engage in a self-evaluation exercise. Findings have indicated that high proportions of students start their higher education journey with little or no confidence in visual expression (the ability to express oneself through visual media), visual literacy (the ability to work with visual media), and visualisation (the ability to think in a visual way). The drawing centre aims to address this, based on the principles that with support and in the right environment all students have creativity that should be developed. We offer the chance to develop drawing, visual and creative skills to students who clearly recognise alignment between creativity and their academic studies, as well as to those who don’t.

    Through non-assessed creative activity, exploration and play, students are challenged to explore stimuli and tasks in different ways. They are taught about physical and visual representation, examining how changes in design approaches can impact processes and outputs. Doing this in a “fun” environment, students also share their experiences, often exploring and expressing deeper concepts than purely the physical medium in which they are working or in response to the task set.

    Echoing the mental health benefits of playful approaches to learning, students develop confidence in their creative abilities and recognise the impact of this on their studies. Chris’s student self-evaluation research identifies where visual acuity confidence is lacking and allows for a bespoke curriculum to be designed with course teams to meet student needs. Extracurricular sessions encourage students’ confidence, alongside coaching for staff to embed creative play within assessed activity.

    Power of community

    Some 96 per cent of drawing centre users recognise this as an important learning community, acknowledging creative skill development, and beyond that, resilience. Students feel more confident in approaching academic studies, using the skills developed through creative exploration, adapting these approaches for use in their disciplines. The non-assessed approach is considered non-judgmental, the learning environment is recognised as one in which students develop a toolbox of skills for use in any task and preparing them for lifelong learning.

    Community building within student cohorts supports the development of a sense of belonging, and is considered an increasingly important factor in a student’s sense of wellbeing within the learning environment. Belonging impacts the student experience and attainment, therefore providing students with a physical space in which they feel safe and supported to creatively explore delivers positive benefits beyond the development of creative skills.

    An ongoing process

    We hope to shine a light on the power of developing creativity during study, particularly to improve mental health and support engagement with study. The drawing centre is an experiential learning environment, one that invites the exploration and empowers a community. Students are encouraged to use creative enquiry, informing criticality within their studies.

    We encourage others to consider student support from a creative perspective. Practical guides outline approaches to student belonging, recognising the ways in which this can be approached and benefits it brings. From our experience, creative exercises and opportunities to explore in a non-assessed environment at the heart of campus enable students to develop confidence and lifelong learning skills.

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  • What does it mean if students think that AI is more intelligent than they are?

    What does it mean if students think that AI is more intelligent than they are?

    The past couple of years in higher education have been dominated by discussions of generative AI – how to detect it, how to prevent cheating, how to adapt assessment. But we are missing something more fundamental.

    AI isn’t just changing how students approach their work – it’s changing how they see themselves. If universities fail to address this, they risk producing graduates who lack both the knowledge and the confidence to succeed in employment and society. Consequently, the value of a higher education degree will diminish.

    In November, a first-year student asked me if ChatGPT could write their assignment. When I said no, they replied: “But AI is more intelligent than me.” That comment has stayed with me ever since.

    If students no longer trust their own ability to contribute to discussions or produce work of value, the implications stretch far beyond academic misconduct. Confidence is affecting motivation, resilience and self-belief, which, consequently, effects sense of community, assessment grades, and graduate skills.

    I have noticed that few discussions focus on the deeper psychological shift – students’ changing perceptions of their own intelligence and capability. This change is a key antecedent for the erosion of a sense of community, AI use in learning and assessment, and the underdevelopment of graduate skills.

    The erosion of a sense of community

    In 2015 when I began teaching, I would walk into a seminar room and find students talking to one another about how worried they were for the deadline, how boring the lecture was, or how many drinks they had Wednesday night. Yes, they would sit at the back, not always do the pre-reading, and go quiet for the first few weeks when I asked a question – but they were always happy to talk to one another.

    Fast forward to 2025, campus feels empty, and students come into class and sit alone. Even final years who have been together for three years, may sit with a “friend” but not really say anything as they stare at phones. I have a final year student who is achieving first class grades, but admitted he has not been in the library once this academic year and he barely knows anyone to talk to. This may not seem like a big thing, but it illustrates the lack of community and relationships that are formed at university. It is well known that peer-to-peer relationships are one of the biggest influencers on attendance and engagement. So when students fail to form networks, it is unsurprising that motivation declines.

    While professional services, student union, and support staff are continuously offering ways to improve the community, at a time where students are working longer hours and through a cost of living, we cannot expect students to attend extracurricular academic or non-academic activities. Therefore, timetabled lectures and seminars need to be at the heart of building relationships.

    AI in learning and assessment

    While marking first-year marketing assignments – a subject I’ve taught across multiple universities for a decade – I noticed a clear shift. Typically, I expect a broad range of marks, but this year, students clustered at two extremes: either very high or alarmingly low. The feedback was strikingly similar: “too vague,” “too descriptive,” “missing taught content.”

    I knew some of these students were engaged and capable in class, yet their assignments told a different story. I kept returning to that student’s remark and realised: the students who normally land in the middle – your solid 2:2 and 2:1 cohort – had turned to AI. Not necessarily to cheat, but because they lacked confidence in their own ability. They believed AI could articulate their ideas better than they could.

    The rapid integration of AI into education isn’t just changing what students do – it’s changing what they believe they can do. If students don’t think they can write as well as a machine, how can we expect them to take intellectual risks, engage critically, or develop the resilience needed for the workplace?

    Right now, universities are at a crossroads. We can either design assessments as if nothing has changed, pivot back to closed-book exams to preserve “authentic” academic work, or restructure assessment to empower students, build confidence, and provide something of real value to both learners and employers. Only the third option moves higher education forward.

    Deakin University’s Phillip Dawson has recently argued that we must ensure assessment measures what we actually intend to assess. His point resonated with me.

    AI is here to stay, and it can enhance learning and productivity. Instead of treating it primarily as a threat or retreating to closed-book exams, we need to ask: what do we really need to assess? For years, we have moved away from exams because they don’t reflect real-world skills or accurately measure understanding. That reasoning still holds, but the assessment landscape is shifting again. Instead of focusing on how students write about knowledge, we should be assessing how they apply it.

    Underdevelopment of graduate skills

    If we don’t rethink pedagogy and assessment, we risk producing graduates who are highly skilled at facilitating AI rather than using it as a tool for deeper analysis, problem-solving, and creativity. Employers are already telling us they need graduates who can analyse and interpret data, think critically to solve problems, communicate effectively, show resilience and adaptability, demonstrate emotional intelligence, and work collaboratively.

    But students can’t develop these skills if they don’t believe in their own ability.

    Right now, students are using AI tools for most activities, including online searching, proof reading, answering questions, generating examples, and even writing reflective pieces. I am confident that if I asked first years to write a two-minute speech about why they came to university, the majority would use AI in some way. There is no space – or incentive – for them to illustrate their skill development.

    This semester, I trialled a small intervention after getting fed up with looking at heads down in laptops. I asked my final year students to put laptops and phones on the floor for the first two hours of a four-hour workshop.

    At first, they were visibly uncomfortable – some looked panicked, others bored. But after ten minutes, something changed. They wrote more, spoke more confidently, and showed greater creativity. As soon as they returned to technology, their expressions became blank again. This isn’t about banning AI, but about ensuring students have fun learning and have space to be thinkers, rather than facilitators.

    Confidence-building

    If students’ lack of confidence is driving them to rely on AI to “play it safe”, we need to acknowledge the systemic problem. Confidence is an academic issue. Confidence underpins everything in the student’s experience: classroom engagement, sense of belonging, motivation, resilience, critical thinking, and, of course, assessment quality. Universities know this, investing in mentorship schemes, support services, and initiatives to foster belonging. But confidence-building cannot be left to professional services alone – it must be embedded into curriculum design and assessment.

    Don’t get me wrong, I am fully aware of the pressures of academic staff, and telling them to improve sense of community, assessment, and graduate skills feels like another time-consuming task. Universities need to recognise that without improving workload planning models to allow academics freedom to focus on and explore pedagogic approaches, we fall into the trap of devaluing the degree.

    In addition, universities want to stay relevant, they need agile structures that allow academics to test new approaches and respond quickly, just like the “real world”. Academics should not be creating or modifying assessments today that won’t be implemented for another 18 months. Policies designed to ensure quality must also ensure adaptability. Otherwise, higher education will always be playing catch-up – first with AI, then with whatever comes next.

    Will universities continue producing AI-dependent graduates, or will they equip students with the confidence to lead in an AI-driven world?

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  • Working-class students feel alienated from their creative arts degrees – here’s how to help

    Working-class students feel alienated from their creative arts degrees – here’s how to help

    Social class inclusivity is a problem in UK higher education.

    Research demonstrates that working-class students report being less likely to apply to university than their middle-class peers – and when working class people do enter higher education they may face discrimination and social exclusion. This is exacerbated in creative arts subjects.

    We interviewed students currently studying creative arts subjects at a Russell Group university to hear more about their experiences of social class inclusivity. Speaking to ten undergraduate and eight postgraduate students studying a range of creative fields including music, drama and film, we found that working-class students find it difficult to attend class, are disadvantaged in terms of accessing the cultural resources needed to succeed on their course, and feel excluded from social life on campus.

    Economic disadvantage presents a considerable barrier to students completing arts subjects at university. To be inclusive, university staff may have to adjust teaching and learning. We would like to make the case for those working in higher education to consider what classed assumptions are made about students in our institutions and accordingly reassess our expectations of those studying the creative arts.

    Many of the disadvantages or challenges that working-class students face are connected to wider structural inequalities that are deeply entrenched in our society. At the same time, there are still meaningful interventions that staff can make to support working-class students. We suggest four ways in which university staff can make their practice more inclusive to working-class students.

    Discuss working-class stories as present and live

    Universities are middle-class spaces. In creative arts subjects, students often make work referring to their class identity. This can be at odds in institutions where middle-class experience is the “norm”.

    Class diversity must be present within teaching. More working-class mentorship and role models would help students to feel like they belonged at university – including visiting working-class creatives. Our participants also advocated for contemporary working-class experience in the curriculum, in academic texts, and in the artworks discussed.

    Staff must maintain a supportive and safe space when discussing issues pertaining to social class. Staff should also recognise that not everyone wants to talk about their background or experience. Additionally, staff must be aware of social class-based stereotyping that might exist in other students’ creative work, and be prepared to intervene when necessary if (often unintended) prejudices around work, class, accent, or lifestyle emerge.

    Adapt teaching to the multiple demands on working-class students’ time

    More and more students are undertaking part-time work alongside their studies. It is difficult to devise our curricula for only those students who can commit all their time to studying, when significant numbers are balancing their studies with multiple part-time, temporary and precarious jobs, or with care responsibilities.

    Working-class and carer students may be commuting considerable distances to engage with their studies. This is creating a two-tier system of engagement, and many of the students we interviewed felt that teaching and learning on their courses was not flexible enough to support their participation. The same issues are present when students try to engage in extracurricular and cultural activities.

    Working-class students asked for more online resources and access to course materials immediately at the start of modules, alongside concerns over early starts and late finishes and travel costs. They wanted permission to speak to staff about part-time work without feeling like they were “doing something wrong” or not taking their studies seriously. The normalisation of working alongside studying is something that staff may have to accept and work with, rather than try to push against.

    Early intervention is important

    The early stages of the student’s degree are a key time when social class difference and disadvantage is felt, with high levels of anxiety around finance and budgeting in comparison to more affluent peers.

    Working-class students asked for the university to provide information to support their transition into economic independence. Examples include advice on budgeting, lists of free resources, inexpensive alternatives and free access to cultural resources.

    Peer support plays a huge role in the transition to higher education. Working-class peer support groups and mentorship are as significant interventions to help.

    Adjust assumptions and reassess expectations

    University staff can make a difference to the experience of working-class students through simple adjustments of the assumptions we make.

    Interviewees believed staff made assumptions about what creative arts students should know, or the kind of experiences they should have had prior to university. These assumptions corresponded with a more middle-class experience, for example knowledge of university life, or access to (and the ability to afford) cultural resources or engagement with extra-curricular activities. Participants were particularly frustrated by assumptions from staff that students could afford to pay for learning resources not available in the library.

    Extra work is also needed to ensure that working-class or other marginalised students feel comfortable and entitled to ask for help from staff.

    Because many students now must work alongside studying, students may have less time to complete their work outside of class. Stronger steers on the amount of time to complete activities and prioritisation of reading, and the removal of blame for those struggling to balance time constraints of working whilst studying can all be effective.

    Working-class creatives

    Class inclusivity means students feel like they belong on their course, alongside having the financial security to take the time and space to study.

    This is particularly important in the creative arts because the more time and space students have to engage with their course or with extracurricular activities like arts societies, the more working-class stories will be represented in the creative work they make. Creative arts subjects must better support working-class students to engage fully with their studies – and not to be disadvantaged by financial pressure, lack of resource, or through feeling like they don’t belong on their course.

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