Category: Students

  • One-third of U.S. public schools screen students for mental health

    One-third of U.S. public schools screen students for mental health

    This press release originally appeared on the RAND site.

    Key points:

    Nearly one-third of the nation’s K-12 U.S. public schools mandate mental health screening for students, with most offering in-person treatment or referral to a community mental health professional if a student is identified as having depression or anxiety, according to a new study.

    About 40 percent of principals surveyed said it was very hard or somewhat hard to ensure that students receive appropriate care, while 38 percent said it was easy or very easy to find adequate care for students. The findings are published in the journal JAMA Network Open.

    “Our results suggest that there are multiple barriers to mental health screening in schools, including a lack of resources and knowledge of screening mechanics, as well as concerns about increased workload of identifying students,” said Jonathan Cantor, the study’s lead author and a policy researcher at RAND, a nonprofit research organization.

    In 2021, the U.S. Surgeon General declared a youth mental health emergency. Researchers say that public schools are strategic resources for screening, treatment, and referral for mental health services for young people who face barriers in other settings.

    Researchers wanted to understand screening for mental health at U.S. public schools, given increased concerns about youth mental health following the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

    In October 2024, the RAND study surveyed 1,019 principals who participate in the RAND American School Leader panel, a nationally representative sample of K–12 public school principals.

    They were asked whether their school mandated screening for mental health issues, what steps are taken if a student is identified as having depression or anxiety, and how easy or difficult it is to ensure that such students received adequate services.

    Researchers found that 30.5 percent of responding principals said their school required screening of students with mental health problems, with nearly 80 percent reporting that parents typically are notified if students screen positive for depression or anxiety.

    More than 70 percent of principals reported that their school offers in-person treatment for students who screen positive, while 53 percent of principals said they may refer a student to a community mental health care professional.

    The study found higher rates of mental health screenings in schools with 450 or more students and in districts with mostly racial and ethnic minority groups as the student populations.

    “Policies that promote federal and state funding for school mental health, reimbursement for school-based mental health screening, and adequate school mental health staff ratios may increase screening rates and increase the likelihood of successfully connecting the student to treatment,” Cantor said.

    Support for the study was provided by the National Institute of Mental Health.

    Other authors of the study are Ryan K. McBain, Aaron Kofner, Joshua Breslau, and Bradley D. Stein, all of RAND; Jacquelin Rankine of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine; Fang Zhang, Hao Yu, and Alyssa Burnett, all of the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute; and Ateev Mehrotra of the Brown University School of Public Health.

    RAND Health Care promotes healthier societies by improving health care systems in the United States and other countries.

    eSchool News Staff
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  • Sarah Bendall on good governance – Campus Review

    Sarah Bendall on good governance – Campus Review

    NSO First Assistant Ombudsman Sarah Bendall spoke to Campus Review editor Erin Morley about how student complaints reflect current sector issues, like governance, and how it will work with the Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC).

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  • For student leaders, it’s been a Cruel Summer

    For student leaders, it’s been a Cruel Summer

    From where we sit – or, more accurately when on a Cross Country train over the summer, from where we stand – there are some things coming for students that it’s possible to metaphorically see from metaphorical space.

    Food price inflation will distort the “average” basket of goods for those on low incomes so significantly that a fresh cost of living crisis is obviously coming.

    The failure to consult meaningfully on the hundreds of micro-decisions to be made on toilets, changing rooms and anything else currently gendered in a university has the capacity to cause chaos the very second that the EHRC publishes what we can already guess it will say on the Supreme Court ruling.

    In England, the Renter’s Rights Bill will see absolute chaos once everyone realises that landlords will be evicting students on or near June 1st next year. Assessment reform in an age of AI is really moving in some parts of some universities – in others, it’s as if the OHP is still being PAT tested.

    And the signals from the labour market and the surveys published over the summer hold out a real prospect that student part-time work will all but dry up in several cities in the year ahead – once that way of plugging the growing hole in the student finance system is no longer available, what exactly is the plan?

    Make me feel fine

    Every summer, while you’re on a beach protecting yourself with factor 50, we’re out on the rail network for three months or so meeting, briefing and training the new batch of students’ union officers who won in last Spring’s SU elections.

    In part, that involves thinking through the policy headwinds and identifying the ways in which SUs and their universities have factored in their own protections for the dangers that are coming. This year the dangers feel particularly real; the scenarios particularly prescient; the forward plans systematically absent.

    As part of almost every visit, we’ll explore the journeys that have led student leaders from welcome week to the un-air-conditioned seminar room of flipchart paper and post-it notes that prefaces their year in office.

    And this year, not only do the dangers feel most alarming, and the mitigations most miniscule, but the experiences that have led students into leadership almost too awful to explain.

    Along with everything else, this has felt like a year of extremes. Outright lies from recruitment agents. Shocking stories of disabled students having their rights crudely brushed aside. Teaching that is poor and perfunctory, supervision that is awful or absent, part-time jobs that are as exploitative as they are normalised. Tales of safety and quality in the private rented sector that are just too awful to imagine.

    On one visit, we learned of rats living in a wall. On another we were told of a lecturer that “everyone knew” was a “lothario” but nobody knew how to report. International students whose visas were late, admitted weeks after the start of their course only to miss the induction, then be accused of assessment offences they didn’t know were offences, only to have their visa run out before their final work could be marked. No graduate route for them.

    We’ve heard of students working below the minimum wage for weeks on end, while being bullied and harassed in the process. We’ve heard of students taking to gambling and gig work to pay fees and rent.

    We’ve heard of students struggling with late and inflexible timetables, personal tutor systems that exist only on paper, late and inadequate feedback, and courses that were so stripped down and reorganised by the time they hit their third year that they were unrecognisable from that which was promised.

    Fever dream high in the quiet of the night

    Some of what we’ve heard will be of no surprise to regular readers. Students’ lives are now dominated by juggling – work, study, housing, travel, and survival in a way that makes “full-time” higher education feel like a misnomer. Their new leaders describe the contortions that students must go through to piece together rent payments, jobs, study hours and social life – and how universities often fail to see the whole picture.

    Complaints about patchy personal tutoring, email response times, and lack of flexible timetabling all stem from the same place – a sense that systems are designed for an imagined student who doesn’t exist anymore. The result is exhaustion, anxiety, and an education experience that feels compromised rather than enriched. But they also feel like systems that neither can change nor will change as a result of their advocacy.

    Cost dominates – not just for tuition, but every part of life that sits around it. Student leaders tell stories of universities insisting the cost of living crisis has passed because hardship fund applications have dipped, while on the ground students are launching swap schemes, food banks, budgeting workshops, and recipe exchanges just to survive.

    International postgraduates in particular speak of being “milked” – with extortionate accommodation, opaque fees, and casual gaslighting when asking for support or flexibility. These are not isolated grumbles but systemic failures, and officers are weary of institutions that seem keener to manage perception than engage with the reality of what it takes to participate in HE.

    Another set of concerns centres on space, belonging, and wellbeing. Campuses are crowded yet inaccessible – coffee queues too long, study spaces too few, and neurodivergent students locked out of the quiet they need. Student leaders are angry at the dissonance between glossy atriums and the absence of somewhere to heat up food. They’re also clear that wellbeing is not “extra” – but the way staff understand their role in relation to student mental health varies wildly, from proud detachment to amateur counselling.

    Add in the “engagement collapse” – anxiety, imposter syndrome, and an erosion of confidence – and it’s no wonder that participation in both classrooms and communities feels fragile.

    Student leaders want something deeper – a recognition that employability, citizenship, and belonging are not bolt-ons, but core to the experience. They want placements, volunteering and democratic activity to be credit-bearing, not just because they deserve recognition, but because participation costs time and money they don’t have. But they don’t really think they can have it.

    They want universities to stop pretending belonging can be conjured through branding, and to grapple instead with consistency, delivery and equity. And they want honesty – not just reassurances that budgets are fine, but genuine partnership in facing the future. Without that, the visions of sector leaders – blueprints, reviews, strategies – risk being hollow. University survival will be pointless if students don’t.

    Devils roll the dice, angels roll their eyes

    There’s always – especially for Jim – a touch of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Perhaps some of what’s experienced as a problem or barrier is just a rite of HE passage, a part of growing up, a component of joining a large and diverse community that involves setbacks and coping and developing resilience in the face of adversity.

    But as the flipchart sheets describing the journeys are pinned to the wall mid-each morning, we have wondered whether there’s something else going on.

    The year before Jim began spending his summers like this, a couple of early career social psychologists from Yale had published a paper that ended up having quite the impact on some of his psychology student colleagues in the mid 1990s.

    Josta and Banajia’s “The role of stereotyping in system-justification and the production of false consciousness” doesn’t sound like the most fun a Media and Cultural Studies student can be having over a photocopier, but his accidentally interdisciplinary first-year had meant Jim was able to get into all sorts of things that were never originally on the curriculum.

    The paper illustrates the idea that people, including the disadvantaged, often internalise stereotypes or explanations that legitimise their own oppression. It shows experimentally how individuals and groups can end up rationalising harmful arrangements – believing the powerful are more competent, attributing failure to themselves, or normalising unequal roles.

    It has helped to shape exercise design and training approaches for new student leaders ever since. Change isn’t just about better evidence arguments or slicker campaigns – it’s about creating the conditions for awareness and solidarity, surfacing the arbitrariness of rules and hierarchies, and showing that misery is not inevitable but manufactured.

    When students see that struggles with housing, finance, or assessment aren’t personal failings but systemic outcomes, the pressure to internalise blame weakens – and the potential for collective action grows.

    That matters because normalisation is the enemy of change. If students “learn to love their limitations,” policymakers have little incentive to do better. The lesson has always been that sometimes the most powerful intervention isn’t a tidy solution or a polished set of recommendations, but the act of refusing to let the intolerable become invisible.

    Consciousness-raising, storytelling, and solidarity are not soft tactics – they’re the preconditions for breaking the cycle of silence that otherwise guarantees next summer’s flipchart sheets look the same as this year’s.

    No rules in breakable heaven

    Yet this year more than most, we have at times felt like we’re swimming against a tide that is too strong to mount a defence against. Because the truth is, even though the stories are well beyond the mild irritations and petty bureaucracy of the past, they almost all sound like secrets. They are, to put it another way, below the iceberg’s surface.

    Part of the problem is that the UK has an increasingly old electorate. Older voters are less likely to have direct contact with universities, less likely to hear unvarnished student stories, and more likely to see the sector through the prism of cost rather than value.

    If the most shocking aspects of student life remain whispered rather than shouted, they never cut through to those who wield electoral influence – meaning the ballot box skews policy towards pensioner bus passes rather than student housing reform. The silence isn’t just cultural, it is political.

    There’s the country’s economic climate – higher education is operating in a state that is literally running out of money. Public finances are squeezed, universities are struggling with deficits, and the instinct everywhere is to protect what you have rather than admit to new liabilities.

    When uncomfortable truths about student experience are not voiced, it becomes easier for managers, ministers and mandarins to avert their gaze, telling themselves that problems can be absorbed rather than addressed. Silence functions as an accidental subsidy – by not surfacing the costs borne by students, the state and the sector get away with shifting more burden onto them.

    Universities themselves are complicit, albeit we suspect unintentionally. A manager at any level who admits that their students are hungry, homeless, or harassed risks reputational damage, league-table drops, and hostile headlines. Better to stress resilience, opportunity, and the odd bursary scheme than to admit systemic failure.

    But the reputation-management reflex actively undermines the case for investment. If every institution projects that all is broadly fine, why should Treasury officials prioritise a bailout? Silence, again, becomes a strategy – but one that entrenches scarcity rather than securing resources.

    The cumulative effect is a system where student misery remains invisible to those with power, not because the evidence is lacking, but because the incentives to reveal it are weak. Students stay silent for fear of stigma, SUs temper their tone to keep the block grant flowing, universities bury problems beneath polished prospectuses, and policymakers hear only satisfaction scores.

    The loop feeds itself – and in a democracy where older voters decide priorities, absence of noise is all too easily interpreted as absence of need.

    Hang your head low in the glow of the vending machine

    For student leaders, the pressures are especially acute. Their role is ostensibly to represent the unvarnished experiences of their peers, but they operate in an environment shaped by the logic of LinkedIn – an arena where polished professionalism is prized, and the temptation to smooth away awkward truths is ever-present.

    To admit publicly that your students are hungry, unsafe, or disillusioned can feel incompatible with the personal brand of competence and leadership that young people are told they must cultivate if they want graduate opportunities. The very platforms officers use to communicate are biased towards optimism, progress, and positivity – which makes surfacing struggle feel like self-sabotage.

    Even when they’ve tried, they’ve been hit by the devious frames – denialism (it is not a problem), normalisation (it is normal and expected) and victim blaming (it is a problem because of the individual mistakes), all of which become “how we operate around here” and thus hard to even start to tackle.

    And that takes us right back to Jost and Banaji’s arguments about system justification and false consciousness. If social media teaches student leaders to internalise the idea that problems are personal weaknesses rather than systemic failures, their capacity to challenge those failures is blunted.

    When representation becomes curation, the cycle of silence is reinforced – not because officers lack courage, but because the psychological and cultural currents around them steer towards self-preservation over truth-telling. Breaking the cycle means supporting officers to resist the currents, to value solidarity over self-presentation, and to recognise that authentic voice is more powerful than polished image.

    It’s why the conspiracy of silence that surrounds the contemporary student experience is so dangerous. It erodes the sector’s long-term sustainability by masking the very crises that could galvanise public support. In an ageing nation with empty coffers, the only way to win investment is to make the case that students’ struggles are real, systemic, and intolerable – and to do so loudly.

    If higher education keeps choosing discretion over disclosure, it will discover that in the competition for scarce resources, quiet constituencies get ignored first. Maybe it’s discovered it already. But it’s never too late to tell the truth.

     

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  • Partnership? Students in Scotland need protection

    Partnership? Students in Scotland need protection

    It’s easy to trace differences in culture back much further – arguably right back to Bologna in 1088, and the Rectors of the Ancients in the 15th Century.

    But at the very least since 2003, students’ unions in England have looked North of the border jealously at a country so committed to student partnership that it created a statutory agency to drive it.

    Partnership at all levels thrives when there’s will, time, and frankly, money. It’s tougher to reflect the principles of students having power when times are tight – when the excel sheets no longer add up, when restructures have to be planned, and when cuts have to be crafted to the facilities and services that students have been inputting on for years.

    Beyond the potentially apocryphal stories of truly student-led institutions in ancient times, students in any system are bound to be treated as, and regard themselves as, at best junior partners – with, both at individual and collective levels, a significant power asymmetry.

    In such scenarios, when leaders spend their days choosing between any number of awful options, it’s often going to be the least institutionally risky path that’s taken. And the danger is that students – who previously might have relied on partnership to secure their interests – now really need protection instead.

    I spend quite a bit of time here lamenting the implementation of protection measures for students in England. But in conversations with students and their leaders in Scotland, I’m now finding myself repeatedly reflecting on the fact that at least, in England, there are some.

    3 months to open your email

    Take complaints. The Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) doesn’t always generate the answer that student complainants would like – it often feels too distant, and at least temporally, hard to access.

    It also has a tendency to seek resolution when it’s sometimes justice that should prevail – and increasingly feels like providers are paying students off (often with NDAs for non-harassment complaints) before they get there.

    But in Scotland, students have to use the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman (SPSO). As I type, “due to an increase in the volume of cases” it is currently receiving, there is a delay of 12 weeks in allocating complaints to a reviewer.

    Some comfort that will be to the international PGT who has cause to complain in month 10 of their studies, only to have to encounter a complaint, an appeal, and then a further 12 weeks just to get the SPSO to open their letter. UKVI will have ensured they’re long gone.

    It’s clear that few get as far as the SPSO. When it investigates a complaint, it usually reports its findings and conclusions in what it calls a decision letter – and these findings are published as decision reports. Since May 2021, just ten have been published.

    Either students in Scotland have much less to complain about than their counterparts in England and Wales, or universities in Scotland are much better at resolving complaints, or this is a system that obviously isn’t working.

    Never OK

    Then there’s harassment and sexual misconduct. Just under a year ago Universities Scotland’s update on anti-harassment work suggested a system of protection that’s patchy at best.

    37 per cent of institutions weren’t working with survivors to inform their approach, 21 per cent didn’t have policies allowing for preventative suspension where necessary, and only 71 per cent of institutions had “updated their policies” following guidance from UUK on staff-student relationships – which could still mean all 19 universities are permitting staff to pursue students.

    Universities Scotland acknowledges that most identify funding as a barrier, but England’s regulator makes clear that providers “must” deploy necessary resources, with higher-risk institutions expected to invest more. If you can’t fund student safety properly, perhaps you shouldn’t be operating is the message in England.

    And there’s no sign that Scotland will be taking part in the prevalence research that’s been piloted in England.

    Cabinet Secretary Jenny Gilruth’s praise for Scotland’s “partnership approach” suggested either complacency or a failure to grasp that Scotland is sliding toward being significantly less robust than England in protecting students. When partnership fails to deliver safety, protection becomes essential – and on harassment, it feels like Scotland is failing to provide either adequately.

    Best practice should not be voluntary

    Or take mental health. While Wales has responded to parliamentary concerns about consistency by accepting recommendations for a “common framework for mental health support” backed by registration and funding conditions, Scotland continues to rely on voluntary approaches that deliver patchy outcomes.

    The Welsh government’s response to its Children, Young People and Education Committee shows what serious commitment looks like. New MEDR registration conditions will require clear expectations for student wellbeing, supported by data collection requirements, evaluation frameworks, and crucially, funding considerations built into budget allocations.

    There’s partnership rhetoric – but it’s partnership backed by regulatory teeth. Wales has grasped what Scotland appears to miss – that “best practice should not be voluntary” when student lives are at stake, as one bereaved parent told Westminster’s Petitions Committee.

    The Welsh approach is set to recognise that students need “parity of approach” and “consistency between departments, institutions, and academic teams” – something that purely voluntary frameworks cannot deliver.

    Scotland’s reliance on institutional goodwill for mental health provision increasingly looks naive. Maintaining flexibility for institutions to design services suited to their contexts, is one thing – but Wales will ensure baseline standards that students can depend on regardless of which university they attend.

    The contrast is stark – Wales will treat student mental health as a regulatory priority requiring systematic oversight, while Scotland appears content to hope that partnership alone in a context of dwindling funding will somehow deliver consistency. When partnership fails to protect the most vulnerable students, Wales will have built backup systems – Scotland has built excuses about funding pressures that Welsh universities face too.

    Promises promises

    Then there’s consumer protection – or, as I like to rebrand it, delivering on the promises made to students. It’s easy to assume that students in Scotland aren’t covered – but plenty do pay fees, and those that don’t are supposed to be protected too.

    But over two and a half years since the Competition and Markets Authority revised its guidance to universities on compliance, there seems to be a nationwide problem. Of the 16 universities I’ve looked at in Scotland, 15 still include contractual terms limiting liability in the event of a strike involving their own staff – something CMA has advised is unlawful, and which OfS is effectively enforcing in cases like Newcastle.

    In a year when strikes are more likely, why should students in Scotland not be afforded the same rights to the education they’ve signed up for than their English counterparts?

    The CMA also bans clauses that limit compensation for breach of contract to the total paid in fees – something that would be very attractive in Scotland for obvious reasons. Yet 14 of the country’s universities continue to publish contractual terms that apparently allow them to with impunity. Several have highly problematic clauses on in-contract fee increases too.

    And CMA’s guidance on “variation clauses” – that should not result in too wide an ability to vary the course or services that were offered when students signed up – looks like it’s been flouted too.

    I’m no lawyer, but most universities in Scotland seem to be affording themselves the right to pretty much change anything and everything – and when finances are as tight as they are, that means students and their complaints about cuts can be bottom of the risk register, if they feature at all.

    You’re the voice

    Or take student voice itself. The mandatory Learner Engagement Code required by the Tertiary Education and Research (Wales) Act 2022 could be transformative – moving from “should” to “must” with genuine comply-or-explain mechanisms, protected status for student representatives, and mandatory training on rights and responsibilities for all students. Or it could emerge as something weak and vague, disappointing everyone who fought to get student engagement into primary legislation.

    But at least there is one. At minimum, Wales recognises that student partnership requires legal backing, not just goodwill that evaporates when finances get tight. Scotland’s partnership model, for all its historical reputation, increasingly looks like an expensive way of avoiding the hard work of building systems that actually protect students when partnership fails.

    However flawed, students in England now have new rights over freedom of speech – including a right to not be stopped from speaking on the basis of “reputational impact” on the provider. Several Scottish universities seem to have extraordinarily wide exemptions for “disrepute” and “reputation” that are almost certainly in breach of the Human Rights Act.

    You could even, at a stretch, look at cuts and closures. For all the poor implementation and enforcement of a system designed to protect students when their campus, course, university or pathway is closed in England, at least the principle is in place. Student Protection Plans are required in Scotland by SAAS for private providers – but not of universities. Why?

    We voted against Brexit

    I could go on. Scotland regularly positions itself as more European than England, particularly in higher education where the “partnership approach” is often presented as evidence of continental-style governance. Scottish politicians invoke European models when defending their policies, suggesting Scotland’s collaborative approach mirrors sophisticated systems across the continent.

    Yet European student rights frameworks put Scotland to shame. In Serbia, students have the legal right to nutrition, rest and cultural activities. In Sweden, students enjoy the same workplace protections as employees under the Work Environment Act. In Lithuania, there’s a minimum amount of campus space allocated per student by law, and student representatives hold veto power over university senate decisions – if they use it, a special committee reviews the issue and a two-thirds majority is required to override.

    In Latvia, students’ unions receive at least 0.05% of the annual university budget by law, with legal rights to request information from any department on matters affecting students. In Poland, students have guaranteed rights to study programmes where at least 30 per cent of credits are elective, and universities must consult student governments when appointing managers with student affairs responsibilities. Student protests and strikes are specifically protected, with mediation rights.

    In the Netherlands, universities must inform the national confidential inspector whenever staff may have engaged in harassment involving students – and any staff hearing about allegations must report them to management. Spain mandates every university has an independent ombudsperson with statutory reporting duties. In Croatia, universities are legally obliged to provide students’ unions workspace, co-finance their activities, and offer administrative support. And Austrian students make up significant proportions of curriculum committees by statute, ensuring programmes remain flexible and career-relevant.

    Can I get the Bill

    It’s not as if there isn’t a legal vehicle that could improve things. The Tertiary Education and Training (Funding and Governance) (Scotland) Bill is weaving its way through the Scottish Parliament as we speak – but it couldn’t be weaker in protections for students if it tried.

    • Section 8 allows the new Council, when conducting efficiency studies, to consider “the extent to which the needs and interests of students are being met” and then issue recommendations to universities and colleges. But recommendations are not binding.
    • Section 11 amends the 2005 Act to require the Council, in exercising its functions, to “have regard to the desirability of protecting and promoting the interests of current and prospective learners.” Again, this is a duty on the Council, not directly on universities, and is about regard rather than enforceable standards.
    • Section 18 allows Scottish Ministers to designate private providers so that their students can access public student support. That’s a consumer-style protection, but it’s about access to funding rather than quality or rights.
    • Section 19–20 updates the rules around how student support is administered and delegated — but again, that’s more about machinery than protections.

    There’s no new regulatory framework for how universities behave towards students (on contracts, teaching quality, complaints handling, etc.). There are no rights conferred directly on students — no duty of fair treatment, no consumer protection-style obligations, no statutory complaints rights.

    Universities themselves are not made subject to enforceable duties in the Bill, beyond existing general oversight via the Funding Council. And while the Council can give guidance (section 10) and issue recommendations (section 8), institutions are only required to “have regard” rather than comply.

    Cakeism in Scotland

    Models of student partnership have served Scotland well over the decades – and should continue to. After all, learning outcomes take two to tango – and that’s true from the classroom right up the boardroom.

    But right now here in 2025, partnership often feels like a luxury for when rivers of money start flowing back in – and even the most well meaning and moral SMT or Court has a duty to protect the institution before it protects its students.

    Ultimately, partnership and protection should not feel like mutual exclusives, or something a country should choose. It’s perfectly possible, and in the current funding climate, deeply desirable, for students to have both.

    Scottish ministers – through a new section of the Funding and Governance Bill – should legislate to make it so.

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  • 3 steps to build belonging in the classroom

    3 steps to build belonging in the classroom

    Key points:

    The first few weeks of school are more than a fresh start–they’re a powerful opportunity to lay the foundation for the relationships, habits, and learning that will define the rest of the year. During this time, students begin to decide whether they feel safe, valued, and connected in your classroom.

    The stakes are high. According to the 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, only 55 percent of students reported feeling connected to their school. That gap matters: Research consistently shows that a lack of belonging can harm grades, attendance, and classroom behavior. Conversely, a strong sense of belonging not only boosts academic self-efficacy but also supports physical and mental well-being.

    In my work helping hundreds of districts and schools implement character development and future-ready skills programs, I’ve seen how intentionally fostering belonging from day one sets students–and educators–up for success. Patterns from schools that do this well have emerged, and these practices are worth replicating.

    Here are three proven steps to build belonging right from the start.

    1. Break the ice with purpose

    Icebreakers might sound like old news, but the reality is that they work. Research shows these activities can significantly increase engagement and participation while fostering a greater sense of community. Students often describe improved classroom atmosphere, more willingness to speak up, and deeper peer connections after just a few sessions.

    Some educators may worry that playful activities detract from a serious academic tone. In practice, they do the opposite. By helping students break down communication barriers, icebreakers pave the way for risk-taking, collaboration, and honest reflection–skills essential for deep learning.

    Consider starting with activities that combine movement, play, and social awareness:

    • Quick-think challenges: Build energy and self-awareness by rewarding quick and accurate responses.
    • Collaborative missions: Engage students working toward a shared goal that demands communication and teamwork.
    • Listen + act games: Help students develop adaptability through lighthearted games that involve following changing instructions in real time.

    These activities are more than “fun warm-ups.” They set a tone that learning here will be active, cooperative, and inclusive.

    2. Strengthen executive functioning for individual and collective success

    When we talk about belonging, executive functioning skills–like planning, prioritizing, and self-monitoring–may not be the first thing we think of. Yet they’re deeply connected. Students who can organize their work, set goals, and regulate their emotions are better prepared to contribute positively to the class community.

    Research backs this up. In a study of sixth graders, explicit instruction in executive functioning improved academics, social competence, and self-regulation. For educators, building these skills benefits both the individual and the group.

    Here are a few ways to embed executive functioning into the early weeks:

    • Task prioritization exercise: Help students identify and rank their tasks, building awareness of time and focus.
    • Strengths + goals mapping: Guide students to recognize their strengths and set values-aligned goals, fostering agency.
    • Mindful check-ins: Support holistic well-being by teaching students to name their emotions and practice stress-relief strategies.

    One especially powerful approach is co-creating class norms. When students help define what a supportive, productive classroom looks like, they feel ownership over the space. They’re more invested in maintaining it, more likely to hold each other accountable, and better able to self-regulate toward the group’s shared vision.

    3. Go beyond the first week to build deeper connections

    Icebreakers are a great start, but true belonging comes from sustained, meaningful connection. It’s tempting to think that once names are learned and routines are set, the work is done–but the deeper benefits come from keeping this focus alive alongside academics.

    The payoff is significant. School connectedness has been shown to reduce violence, protect against risky behaviors, and support long-term health and success. In other words, connection is not a “nice to have”–it’s a protective factor with lasting impact.

    Here are some deeper connection strategies:

    • Shared values agreement: Similar to creating class norms, identify the behaviors that promote safety, kindness, and understanding.
    • Story swap: Have students share an experience or interest with a partner, then introduce each other to the class.
    • Promote empathy in action: Teach students to articulate needs, seek clarification, and advocate for themselves and others.

    These activities help students see one another as whole people, capable of compassion and understanding across differences. That human connection creates an environment where everyone can learn more effectively.

    Take it campus-wide

    These strategies aren’t limited to students. Adults on campus benefit from them, too. Professional development can start with icebreakers adapted for adults. Department or PLC meetings can incorporate goal-setting and reflective check-ins. Activities that build empathy and connection among staff help create a healthy, supportive adult culture that models the belonging we want students to experience.

    When teachers feel connected and supported, they are more able to foster the same in their classrooms. That ripple effect–staff to students, students to peers–creates a stronger, more resilient school community.

    Belonging isn’t a single event; it’s a practice. Start the year with purpose, keep connection alive alongside academic goals, and watch how it transforms your classroom and your campus culture. In doing so, you’ll give students more than a positive school year. You’ll give them tools and relationships they can carry for life.

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  • In training educators to use AI, we must not outsource the foundational work of teaching

    In training educators to use AI, we must not outsource the foundational work of teaching

    This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.

    I was conferencing with a group of students when I heard the excitement building across my third grade classroom. A boy at the back table had been working on his catapult project for over an hour through our science lesson, into recess, and now during personalized learning time. I watched him adjust the wooden arm for what felt like the 20th time, measure another launch distance, and scribble numbers on his increasingly messy data sheet.

    “The longer arm launches farther!” he announced to no one in particular, his voice carrying the matter-of-fact tone of someone who had just uncovered a truth about the universe. I felt that familiar teacher thrill, not because I had successfully delivered a physics lesson, but because I hadn’t taught him anything at all.

    Last year, all of my students chose a topic they wanted to explore and pursued a personal learning project about it. This particular student had discovered the relationship between lever arm length and projectile distance entirely through his own experiments, which involved mathematics, physics, history, and data visualization.

    Other students drifted over to try his longer-armed design, and soon, a cluster of 8-year-olds were debating trajectory angles and comparing medieval siege engines to ancient Chinese catapults.

    They were doing exactly what I dream of as an educator: learning because they wanted to know, not because they had to perform.

    Then, just recently, I read about the American Federation of Teachers’ new $23 million partnership with Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic to train educators how to use AI “wisely, safely and ethically.” The training sessions would teach them how to generate lesson plans and “microwave” routine communications with artificial intelligence.

    My heart sank.

    As an elementary teacher who also conducts independent research on the intersection of AI and education, and writes the ‘Algorithmic Mind’ column about it for Psychology Today, I live in the uncomfortable space between what technology promises and what children actually need. Yes, I use AI, but only for administrative work like drafting parent newsletters, organizing student data, and filling out required curriculum planning documents. It saves me hours on repetitive tasks that have nothing to do with teaching.

    I’m all for showing educators how to use AI to cut down on rote work. But I fear the AFT’s $23 million initiative isn’t about administrative efficiency. According to their press release, they’re training teachers to use AI for “instructional planning” and as a “thought partner” for teaching decisions. One featured teacher describes using AI tools to help her communicate “in the right voice” when she’s burned out. Another says AI can assist with “late-night lesson planning.”

    That sounds more like outsourcing the foundational work of teaching.

    Watching my student discover physics principles through intrinsic curiosity reminded me why this matters so much. When we start relying on AI to plan our lessons and find our teaching voice, we’re replacing human judgment with algorithmic thinking at the very moment students need us most. We’re prioritizing the product of teaching over the process of learning.

    Most teachers I talk to share similar concerns about AI. They focus on cheating and plagiarism. They worry about students outsourcing their thinking and how to assess learning when they can’t tell if students actually understand anything. The uncomfortable truth is that students have always found ways to avoid genuine thinking when we value products over process. I used SparkNotes. Others used Google. Now, students use ChatGPT.

    The problem is not technology; it’s that we continue prioritizing finished products over messy learning processes. And as long as education rewards predetermined answers over curiosity, students will find shortcuts.

    That’s why teachers need professional development that moves in the opposite direction. They need PD that helps them facilitate genuine inquiry and human connection; foster classrooms where confusion is valued as a precursor to understanding; and develop in students an intrinsic motivation.

    When I think about that boy measuring launch distances with handmade tools, I realize he was demonstrating the distinctly human capacity to ask questions that only he wanted to address. He didn’t need me to structure his investigation or discovery. He needed the freedom to explore, materials to experiment with, and time to pursue his curiosity wherever it led.

    The learning happened not because I efficiently delivered content, but because I stepped back and trusted his natural drive to understand.

    Children don’t need teachers who can generate lesson plans faster or give AI-generated feedback, but educators who can inspire questions, model intellectual courage, and create communities where wonder thrives and real-world problems are solved.

    The future belongs to those who can combine computational tools with human wisdom, ethics, and creativity. But this requires us to maintain the cognitive independence to guide AI systems rather than becoming dependent on them.

    Every time I watch my students make unexpected connections, I’m reminded that the most important learning happens in the spaces between subjects, in the questions that emerge from genuine curiosity, in the collaborative thinking that builds knowledge through relationships. We can’t microwave that. And we shouldn’t try.

    Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

    For more news on AI in education, visit eSN’s Digital Learning hub.

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  • OfS pushes ahead with two tier fairness for students

    OfS pushes ahead with two tier fairness for students

    Good news for students in England. Providers will soon be subject to tough new rules that ensure they’re treated fairly. But only if they’re in a new provider. Elsewhere, it seems, the unfairness can reign on!

    Just a few days before applications to join its register reopen, the Office for Students (OfS) has published consultation outcomes and final decisions on reforms to its registration requirements.

    It sets out the regulator’s decisions following its February 2025 consultation on changes to the entry conditions that higher education providers have to meet to register with OfS, and therefore access student loan funding. It covers:

    • A new initial condition C5 (treating students fairly), replacing the old consumer protection and student protection plan conditions (C1 and C3).
    • New governance conditions E7, E8 and E9, replacing the old governance requirements (E1 and E2).
    • Tighter application requirements, including more detailed financial planning, declarations about investigations, and restrictions on resubmitting applications after refusal.

    Conusingly, the changes interact closely with two separate consultations on subcontracting.

    First, in January 2025 the Department for Education consulted on requiring delivery providers in franchised or subcontractual arrangements to register directly with OfS for their students to be eligible for student support.

    Then, in June 2025 OfS ran its own consultation on the regulation of subcontracted provision, focusing on how such providers would be assessed, overseen, and held accountable if brought into the system.

    These reforms don’t themselves impose registration on subcontracted delivery providers, but they prepare the ground – the new conditions clarify how subcontracted applicants could meet C5 and related requirements, and OfS signals that it is ready to align with whatever the government decides on the January DfE proposals.

    Chin plasters

    We’re several months on now from the initial jaw on the floor moment, but by way of reminder – the main proposals on treating students fairly are justified as follows:

    Providers are facing increasing financial challenges. They must have effective management and governance to navigate those challenges in a way that delivers good student outcomes. Where providers are making tough financial decisions, they must continue to meet the commitments they have made to students. Our engagement with students shows that being treated fairly is very important to them and suggests that too often this does not happen.

    Against that backdrop, and repeated never-met promises to act to address student protection issues, you’d have thought that there would be progress on what is happening inside the 429 providers already on the register. Alas not – its centrepiece proposals on treating students fairly are only to apply to new providers, with a vague commitment to consult on what might be applied to everyone else (closing the stable door) at some point down the line (one the horse has bolted).

    But worse than that, in its infinite wisdom OfS has somehow managed to concoct a situation where for this tiny group of new providers, it will:

    • Remix lots of existing consumer protection law so that instead of talking about consumer rights, it talks about treating students fairly
    • In some areas go further than consumer protection law, because OfS can and has decided to in the student interest
    • In some areas not go as far as consumer protection law, because…. reasons?

    On the topline, what’s now being introduced is a new initial registration condition – C5, “treating students fairly” – that will replace the old consumer protection entry tests for providers seeking to join the OfS register.

    Instead of simply requiring a university or college to show that it has “had due regard” to CMA guidance, applicants will have to demonstrate that they treat students fairly in practice.

    To do that, OfS will review the policies and contracts they intend to use with students, and judge them against a new “prohibited behaviours” list, a detriment test, and any track record of adverse findings under consumer or company law. In effect, OfS is shifting from a box-ticking exercise about compliance to an upfront regulatory judgement about fairness.

    Providers will have to publish a suite of student-facing documents – terms and conditions, course change policies, refund and compensation policies, and complaints processes – which together will constitute their student protection plan.

    And the scope of the new condition is deliberately broad – it covers current, prospective, and former students, higher education and ancillary services like accommodation, libraries, or disability support, and information issued to attract or recruit students, including advertising and online material. In short, C5 sets a new standard of fairness at the point of entry to the system, at least for those providers trying to join it.

    Students aren’t consumers, but they are, or are they

    The problem is the relationship with consumer law. OfS is at pains to stress that new Condition C5 sits comfortably alongside consumer law, drawing on concepts that will be familiar to anyone who has worked with CMA guidance.

    It makes use of the same building blocks – unfair terms, misleading practices, clarity of information – and even names the same statutes.

    But we’re also reminded that C5 is not consumer law – it’s a regulatory condition of registration, judged and enforced by OfS as a matter of regulatory discretion. That means satisfying C5 doesn’t guarantee compliance with the Consumer Rights Act 2015 or the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, and conversely, complying with the Act doesn’t automatically secure a pass on C5. The frameworks overlap, but they don’t align.

    In some respects C5 goes further. By creating its own “prohibited behaviours list”, OfS has declared that certain contractual terms – which the Consumer Rights Act 2015 would only treat as “grey list” risks – will always be unfair in the student context. Examples include terms that allow a provider to unilaterally withdraw an offer once it has been accepted, clauses that limit liability for disruptions within the university’s own control (like industrial action), or refund policies that impose unreasonable hurdles or delays.

    The list also bans misleading representations such as claiming “degree” or “university” status without proper authority, omitting key information about additional compulsory costs, or publishing fake or cherry-picked student reviews. It even extends to the legibility and clarity of terms and policies, requiring that documents be accessible and understandable to students.

    C5 also sweeps in documents that may not ordinarily have contractual force, like course change policies or compensation arrangements, and makes them part of the fairness test. In that sense, the regulator is demanding a higher standard than the law itself, rooted in its view of the student interest.

    But in other senses, C5 lags behind. Where DMCC now treats omissions of “material information” as unlawful if they’re likely to influence a student’s decision, C5 only bites when omissions cause demonstrable detriment, judged against whether the detriment was “reasonable.”

    DMCC introduces explicit protections for situational vulnerability, and a statutory duty of professional diligence in overseeing agents and subcontractors – neither concept is reflected in C5. DMCC makes universities liable for what their agents say on TikTok about visas or jobs – C5 says providers are accountable too, but stops short of importing the full professional diligence duty that the law now demands. DMCC makes clear that the full price of a degree needs to be set out in advance – including anything you have to buy on an optional module. C5 not so much.

    We will protect you

    The problem with all of that from a student point of view is that the Competition and Markets Authority is going to take one look at all of this and think “that means we don’t have to busy ourselves with universities” – despite the rights being different, and despite no such regulation kicking in in the rest of the UK.

    And worse, it makes the chances of students understanding their rights even thinner than they are now. On that, some respondents asked for wider duties to ensure students actively understand their rights – but OfS’ response is that its focus is on whether documents are fair, clear, and not misleading, and that if issues arise in practice (like if notifications flag that students aren’t being given fair or accurate information), OfS can require further information from the provider and take action.

    How on earth students would know that their rights had been breached, and that they can email an obscure OfS inbox is never explained. Even if students find the webpage, students are told that OfS “will not be able to update you on the progress or outcome of the issue that you have raised”.

    They’d likely make a complaint instead – but even if they got as far as the OIA, unless I’ve missed it I’ve never seen a single instance of OfS taking action (either at strategic/collective level or individual) off the back of the information I’m sure it gets regularly from its friends in Reading.

    I suspect this all means that OfS will now not publish two lots of information for students on their rights, depending on whether they’re new or existing members of the register – because like pretty much every other OfS strategy on the student interest, students are framed as people to be protected by a stretched mothership rather than by giving them some actual power themselves.

    I can make an argument, by the way, that sending complaints to lawyers to be assessed for legal risk to the provider, routinely ignoring the OIA Good Practice Framework, refusing to implement an OIA recommendation, not compensating a group when an individual’s complaint obviously applies to others who didn’t complain, using NDAs on complaints that don’t concern harassment and sexual misconduct, deploying “academic judgment” excuses on any appeal where the student is let down, or the practice of dragging out resolutions and making “deal or no deal” “goodwill” offers to coax exhausted students into settling are all pretty important fairness issues – but the relationship with the OIA in a whole document on fairness is barely mentioned.

    As usual, almost nothing has changed between proposals and outcome – but there’s a few nuggets in there. “Information for students” has been replaced with “information about the provider” – to make clear the duty extends beyond enrolled students and covers all marketing/info materials. The problem is that under DMCC stuff like, for example, misleading information on the cost of living in a given city is material, but under OfS “treating students fairly” doesn’t appear to be “about” the provider.

    OfS has clarified that its concerns about “ancillary services” only applies where there is a contract between student and provider (not with third parties), but has added that providers are responsible for information they publish about third-party services and expects universities to exercise “due diligence” on them and their contracts.

    Some language has been more closely aligned with the DMCCA on things like omissions and fake reviews), and in its “detriment” test providers now must do “everything reasonable” rather than “everything possible” to limit it.

    Banned practices

    In some ways, it would have been helpful to translate consumer law and then go further if necessary. But looking at the overlap between the CMA’s unfair commercial practices regime and OfS’s prohibited behaviours list reveals some odd gaps.

    OfS has borrowed much of the language around misleading marketing, fake reviews, false urgency, and misused endorsements, but it has not imported the full consumer protection arsenal. The result is that students don’t seem to be guaranteed the same protections they would enjoy if they were buying a car, a washing machine, or even a mobile phone contract.

    General CMA guidance prevents companies from mimicking the look of competitors to confuse buyers – but the practice is not explicitly barred by OfS. The CMA bans direct appeals to children – no mention of the vulnerable consumer / due diligence duties in OfS’ stuff. Under DMCC, a practice that requires a consumer to take onerous or disproportionate action in order to exercise rights that they have in relation to a product or service is banned – but there’s little on that from OfS.

    Fee increases

    One note on fees and increases – in the response, OfS points to a “statement” that anyone with an Access and Participation Plan has to submit on whether it will increase fees. It supposedly has to specify the “objective verifiable index” that would be used (for example, the Retail Price Index or the Consumer Price Index), in all cases the amount must not exceed the maximum amount prescribed by the Secretary of State for Education, and under consumer protection law, all students must have a right to cancel a contract in the event of a price increase, even where that price increase is provided for in the contact.

    Here’s the first five I found in approved Access and Participation Plans on Google:

    • “Our intention is to charge the maximum fee, subject to the fee limits set out in Regulations” (the doesn’t seem compliant to me)
    • “We will not raise fees annually for 2024-25 new entrants” (that one from a provider that has announced that it will after all)
    • “We will not raise fees annually for 2024-25 new entrants” (that from a provider who now says that for those who started before 1 August 2025, the continuing fee will be £9,535)
    • “We will not raise fees annually for new entrants” (that from a provider that now says “the fee information and inflation statement provided on page 69 of our 2025/26 to 2028/29 Access and Participation Plan are no longer current)
    • “Subject to the maximum fee limits set out in Regulations we will increase fees each year using RPI-X” (what it’s actually doing is increasing its fees by RPI-X as projected by the OBR, which is a very different figure, and no way would pass muster as an “objective verifiable index”

    I’d add here to this utterly laughable situation that the CMA is very clear that the right to cancel in the event of a material change or price increase has to be exercisable in practice:

    In the HE sector, switching course or, in some cases, withdrawing and switching HE provider, is likely to be difficult or impractical in practice, bearing in mind that in many cases the student will not be able simply to transfer their credits to another HE provider, and so saying the student can switch may not improve matters for them, or alleviate the potential unfairness of a variation.

    I’m not sure there’s a provider in the country that’s compliant with that.

    Wider changes

    On its reforms to registration requirements, the exciting news is that rather than introduce one new Condition of Registration, there’s going to be three – E7 (governing documents and business plan), E8 (fraud and inappropriate use of public funds) and E9 (on fit and proper persons, knowledge and expertise).

    In the future, providers will have to submit a defined set of governing documents at registration – replacing the previous reliance on self-assessment against public interest governance principles. Providers will also have to submit a clear and comprehensive five-year business plan showing objectives, risks, compliance with ongoing conditions, and consideration of students’ interests.

    Specific senior roles (chair of governing body, accountable officer, finance lead, and an independent governor) will have to demonstrate sufficient knowledge and expertise, usually tested through interviews. And a new fit and proper persons test will mean that those in senior governance and management roles will be subject to checks on past conduct (e.g. fraud, misconduct, behaviour undermining public trust).

    Providers will also have to have comprehensive and effective arrangements to prevent, detect, and stop fraud and the inappropriate use of public funds. A “track record” test also applies, the upshot of which is that relevant convictions or regulatory sanctions within the past 60 months could bar registration unless exceptional circumstances apply.

    You’ll not be surprised to learn that in the consultation, some worried that the changes would increase bureaucracy, slow down registration, and impose disproportionate burdens on smaller providers. Others objected to the removal of self-assessment against the Public Interest Governance Principles (PIGPs) at the point of registration, fearing this would dilute student protection or cause confusion given that PIGPs still apply on an ongoing basis.

    Concerns were also raised about creating a two-tier system where new entrants face tougher entry requirements than established providers, and about the practicality of requiring a five-year business plan when forecasting beyond two or three years is often unrealistic. Many also questioned a new interview requirement for key individuals, seeing it as costly, stressful, open to coaching, and potentially inconsistent. Just like student assessment!

    OfS was right all along, of course – arguing that the new conditions give stronger protection for students and taxpayers, that the five-year planning horizon is essential to test medium-term sustainability, and maintains that fit and proper person interviews are the most effective way to test leadership capacity.

    If you were one of the handful of respondents, it wasn’t all in vain – the phrase “policies and procedures” is now “policies and processes”, OfS has clarified the level of knowledge required (the chair and independent governor only need “sufficient awareness” of student cohorts rather than detailed operational knowledge) and a minimum requirement for fraud prevention arrangements is now in the actual condition (rather than just in guidance).

    Registering with OfS

    Much of that is now reflected in a tightening of the registration process itself. Applicants will now be required to submit a defined set of final, governing-body-approved documents at the point of application – including governing documents, financial forecasts, business plans, and information on ownership and corporate structure.

    The idea is to eliminate the previous piecemeal approach, under which providers often submitted partial or draft materials, and to ensure that applications arrive complete, coherent, and capable of demonstrating that a provider has the resources and arrangements necessary to comply with the ongoing conditions of registration.

    Some argued that the shift makes the process more rigid and burdensome, particularly for smaller or specialist providers, and warned that requiring fully approved documents could create practical difficulties or delay applications. Others were worried about duplication with other regulators and barriers to entry for innovative providers.

    Again, OfS is pressing on regardless, arguing that a standardised approach will improve efficiency and consistency, while promising proportionate application of the rules, detailed guidance on the required documents, and limited flexibility where a final document cannot yet exist.

    To the extent to which some might argue that a heavy and complex burden is a tough ask for small new providers – and runs counter to the original Jo Johnson “Byron Burgers” vision, the message seems to be that it turns out that scale and complexity is required to protect public money and the student interest. It would arguably be a lot easier (on both OfS and Independent HE’s members) if DfE was to just say so.

    Defeat from the jaws of victory

    Sometimes, OfS gets close to getting it – finally, an education regulator properly thinking through the ways in which students are treated unfairly – only to go and spoil it and say something stupid like “this will only apply to new providers”.

    As I noted when the consultation came out, what we now have is one set of rights for students in a new(ly registering) provider that they’ll never be proactively told about, and another set of much weaker ones for everyone else that they’re not told about either, all in the name of “fairness”, at exactly the point that the regulator itself admits is one where providers are under pressure to not deliver on some of the promises they made to students.

    The lack of justification or explanation for that remains alarming – and while cock up is often a better explanation than conspiracy, it’s hard to conclude anything other than OfS has proactively decided to turn a blind eye (while blindfolding students) to existing unfairness while everyone gets their cuts done. What a time to be a student.

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  • Care experienced students are assets, not risks

    Care experienced students are assets, not risks

    We have spent decades asking what support care leavers need to “catch up” in education. But what if we focused instead on what they already bring?

    Thirty years since I left the care system, I reflect on low expectations, persistent awarding gaps, and why higher education needs to reframe the care experience.

    Low expectations

    “One GCSE is enough, you’re in care”. That’s what I was told as a teenager growing up in the care system. That message stayed with me, if one GCSE was enough for someone like me, then I was not expected to succeed, I was expected to survive.

    By the time I was studying for my A levels I was living independently and worked full time. University at 18 was not an option, it was unthinkable. Years later, I found myself on a BTEC in health and social care as part of a role as a children’s rights worker, and that was where I discovered psychology.

    Suddenly, everything in my life made sense, my upbringing, my responses, the systems around me. I applied for university in 2002 and completed my first term while pregnant. At 36 I became a lecturer in education and psychology in higher education, teaching education through a psychological lens to education students, many of whom want to become teachers themselves.

    A full circle moment

    Recently, I hosted an A level psychology student for a placement. On the final day, she revealed that one of her teachers had been one of my undergraduate students. The moment was moving, not because she was care experienced (she wasn’t), or because the teacher was (they weren’t), but because it showed how my journey, rooted in care, had rippled out into the education system in ways I never imagined.

    That moment hit me like a wave. It was not just a neat coincidence, it was a full circle moment that challenged everything I had been told about my place in education.

    It reminded me that care experienced students are not simply passing through higher education as “at risk” individuals in need of support. Instead, we are contributing to it, we are building it and sometimes we are shaping the success of others in ways that last longer than we realise.

    Ditching deficit thinking

    What if we stopped asking what care experienced students lack? Too often, care leavers are described as “at risk” of exclusion, poor attainment, and drop-out. We talk about their trauma, instability, or disadvantage.

    Those challenges are real and need addressing – but rarely do we ask what strengths they bring with them. We bring resilience, not just as a feel good buzzword, but as a lived practice. We know how to manage under pressure, navigate uncertainty, and stay focused when stability is not guaranteed.

    We bring empathy, because we have seen how systems can fail people and we have learned how to listen, observe, and understand beneath the surface. We bring adaptability because when your life has taught you that plans change, support disappears, and people move on, you learn how to adjust quickly, quietly, and effectively and we bring purpose. Many of us enter education not out of expectation, but out of intent because we want to create the kind of impact we once needed. It is that intent that makes us powerful educators, mentors, and role models even for students who do not share our background.

    Within the classroom, I sometimes hear mature students described as “assets” because they bring work experience, life experience, and often support other students. Care experienced students who are appropriately nurtured and empowered bring their own strengths to their peers. They also bring different and valuable perspectives – particularly relevant to social sciences disciplines – about social inequity, systemic injustice, and resilience that can open up important conversations about theory and its relevance to the “real world” and prepare the students they learn alongside for work in a world in which they will encounter diverse and disadvantaged others.

    My time in care taught me skills that have defined my academic and professional life – I learned independence young and I developed empathy and adaptability not just emotionally, but practically, not as nice extras but as core strengths. They have helped me understand students better and helped shape the kind of lecturer I am.

    Care experienced students do not just overcome adversity, they carry rich insight, emotional intelligence, and a deep understanding of social systems and sometimes, like in my case, they help educate the people who go on to teach the next generation.

    Having said that, it’s 30 years since I left the care system – is it still the same?

    Not enough has changed

    In many ways, the system looks different today. Every looked-after child has a Personal Education Plan (PEP), schools appoint designated teachers, virtual school heads oversee progress, and there’s a £2,345 per-child annual Pupil Premium Plus. In principle, care-experienced learners are a priority. Some universities make contextual offers to care leavers in recognition of the challenges they faced on their way through the education system.

    Yet the numbers tell a different story:

    • only 37 per cent of looked-after children reach expected levels at Key Stage 2 (vs 65 per cent of peers)
    • only 7.2 per cent achieve grade 5+ in English and maths at GCSE (vs 40 per cent)
    • at age 19, just 13 per cent of care leavers enter higher education (vs 45 per cent of others).

    These gaps are not just statistical, they reflect structural inequalities, where expectations remain low and pathways to university feel closed off before they have even begun. For a care experienced student to find their way into higher education is a testament to their determination, resilience, and motivation before they even start.

    A fight not a right

    My mantra was “education was a fight not a right”. We may no longer say, “one GCSE is enough” out loud – but it is still heard in the subtext of our systems.

    We talk about “widening participation” and “belonging,” but too often, care experienced learners are left out of those conversations, or placed into categories of concern rather than capability. Recently, my ten-year-old said something that stopped me in my tracks: “children shouldn’t be judged on academic intelligence but on creative intelligence. School is more about following the rules than finding yourself.”

    They are right – the education system has moved from creativity to conformity and in doing so, we do not just risk excluding care experienced learners, we risk losing the individuality, emotional intelligence, and imaginative power that all students bring. The ones who have had to survive the most often bring innovation and creativity. When we centre care experienced voices in policy, in pedagogy, and in professional learning, we begin to close the awarding gap, the one that limits how we (and sometimes they) see their potential.

    Higher education did not just change my life. It gave me the chance to change other people’s too – and that is an opportunity we should provide to all our children.

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  • Beware the sharing issue in the depths of the higher education iceberg

    Beware the sharing issue in the depths of the higher education iceberg

    If you’re a proper Eurovision Song Contest loser like me, you look forward each year to the crowdsourced fansourced compilation of the season’s Iceberg.

    On the surface is the stuff you figure that “normal” casual Saturday night viewers will notice – like the considerable coverage afforded to Malta’s entry this year, which involved its artist Miriana Conte attempting to argue that her song “Serving Kant” really meant “serving song”.

    Then several layers below sea level there’s things like the news that Sasha Bognibov – who has entered the Moldovan selection several times with a series of increasingly creepy entries – had died of a heart attack, only to come back alive a few days later.

    “Icebergs of ignorance”, as they’re officially known, were originally invented by a Japanese management consultant in the 80s. Sidney Yoshida’s keynote at the 1989 International Quality Symposium in Mexico had described his research on a car manufacturer named Calsonic – where he’d found that senior managers at the firm only saw about 4 percent of the issues, with the bulk hidden at lower levels.

    And like an iceberg, most of the danger lies beneath the surface – with supervisors and frontline staff far more aware of the everyday challenges. In theory it all highlights the need for stuff like open communication, feedback loops and genuine staff voice – so decision-makers aren’t steering blind.

    Under the surface

    I’ve long been fascinated by the way the concept might apply in a university. Plenty of senior leaders might take the view that the cultural (and now regulatory/legal) protection afforded to academic staff saying critical things on social media on everything from workload to the travel booking system means very little is below the surface – but my guess is that that can breed complacency about the things that people don’t say out loud.

    From a higher education sector and public perception point of view, we might interpret new research from the Policy Institute at King’s and HEPI in a similar way – an iceberg of misunderstanding where the surface-level chatter obscures the submerged reality.

    The public apparently overestimate graduate regret, assumes that nearly half of graduates feel crushed by debt when only 16 per cent say so, and underestimate higher education’s economic heft. And like Yoshida’s managers, the danger isn’t so much ignorance of the big headlines as it is the quiet accumulation of false assumptions beneath the surface – gaps in knowledge that, if unchallenged, steer the national conversation off course.

    But it’s the big financial crisis in the sector where I keep thinking most about the Iceberg. Above the surface, to the extent to which the issue is “cutting through”, it’s the prospect of a provider going under that the press seem really keen to report on. Every other day one of us at Team Wonkhe will get a message from journo or other asking us who might be on the brink, presumably because stories like this in the i Paper (“At least six unis at risk of going bust before 2025 freshers finish their degrees”) get clicks.

    Just below the surface (for me at least) is what’s happening to student demand (or, more accurately, supply) – a process that seems to be converting “high”, “medium” and “low” tariff group categories into “medium”, “low” and “has a pulse” as each day of Clearing 2025 goes on.

    The next level down for me is redundancy rounds and telegraphed cuts. They definitely sound bad – especially if a course closes. But if they result in 24 hour library becoming a 15 hour one, or the optional electives on an undergraduate degree being slashed, they seem be harder to pin down and understand – and often aren’t being picked up and protected by consumer law, complaints or Student “Protection” Plans.

    The worst of all of that, at least so far, has been down the bottom end of the league tables – although journos hoping for an actual collapse may find that the realities of processes like endless cost-cutting remain buried at the bottom of the iceberg because of the amount of debt that everyone’s in.

    A small provider like Spurgeon’s can fall over because the banks aren’t expecting millions to be repaid on shiny buildings – big universities extended in that way are likely to be able to renegotiate because banks like being paid back, albeit in a way that effectively surrenders the already shaky illusion that the Board of Governors is in control to a shadow board of bankers insisting on deeper and deeper cuts to students with the least social capital and confidence to complain about them.

    We need a shrink

    What then manifests is the scourge of shrinkflation. You know the idea – when the Quality Street tubs appear in the supermarket in September, you’re only minutes away from a national newspaper pointing out that there’s two fewer toffee pennies in this year’s tub of 525g than last year. I mean have you seen how small a Freddo is these days?

    The problem for students is that this stuff is hard to spot and even harder to enforce rights over. It is simply not possible to lose the number of academic staff that the sector has lost over the past two years and for providers to not be in breach of contract – promises have either been broken, or the contract itself gives a university too wide a discretion to vary, or it doesn’t and the risks of not making the cuts are greater than the risks of a handful of students having the energy to complain.

    And when the big red flags from the Office for “Students” are about financial sustainability with the odd askance murmur about finding efficiencies in a way that protects the student experience, it’s not as if the regulatory environment is doing anything other than egging on the shrinkflation. You’re only going to get inspected on the provision by OfS if your outcomes are terrible, and it seems to have all but given up doing inspections anyway.

    Will a student enrolling onto a three year degree get the course they were promised in two years time? I’ve no idea, and all OfS can offer in protection terms is “let’s hope you paid your fees on a credit card because you might be able to get the credit card company to do a chargeback”.

    Every year I get taken in by a fresh promise that OfS will actually enforce the stuff about broken promises. Almost a year ago to the day Director for Fair Access and Participation John Blake turned up at an SU staff conference to declare that he’d heard students worried about being promised one thing and getting another loud and clear. What he didn’t say was that a full year on, its new definitions of “fairness” will only apply to students in newly registered providers – with no sense of when “fairness” might be a thing for everyone else.

    Deep down

    But the temptation would be to assume that the harms of where we are are exclusively in those layers already mentioned. For me, right down at the bottom of the Iceberg – for the public, regulators and students themselves – is the sharing problem.

    I often lament that being in a university library in certain weeks of the year is like being on a short-formed Cross Country train with no air con on a Bank Holiday Monday when the service before it has been cancelled. There’s nowhere to sit, everyone is very tense, and there’s a real sense that an actual fight might break out between two otherwise polite members of the public over a seat reservations issue.

    There’s always an idiot with their bag on a seat, the catering trolley can’t get through, and the wheelchair user finds themselves yelling at those with suitcases because they’ve been plonked in the space for chairs at the end of the carriage. It’s carnage.

    Over the years, I’ve often skim-read commentary from financial and management consultant types that “one less international PGT means needing to recruit two home students”, as if the only thing that matters is the overall financial target rather than having enough of everything for the students being recruited.

    What I (almost certainly naively) never expected is that it pretty much is panning out like that at the top end of the tables – and while there’s debates to be had about acquisition costs, suitability for a course and/or culture, market instability and the loss of “local” options and choice, the thing that worries me most of all is the sharing thing.

    Let’s imagine – hopelessly simplistically, I know – that some universities are indeed setting a financial target regardless of the number of students that would involve recruiting. As part of that, let’s imagine that these are universities more likely to recruit students living away from home. If 1 x PGT becomes 2 x UG, are there enough bed spaces in the city?

    Enough is enough

    Enough books in the library? Enough marking capacity to hit the 2 week turnaround pledge? Enough sockets for laptops when everyone’s in at once? Enough spaces in seminar rooms to avoid students sitting on the floor? Enough counselling staff to cope when that extra intake tips more students into crisis? Enough careers support to avoid queues that make the whole thing feel tokenistic rather than transformative?

    Enough quiet corners for those who can’t concentrate in noisy shared flats or packed libraries? Enough placements to go around when professional courses all need them at the same time of year? Enough personal tutor appointments to avoid the system becoming decidedly impersonal? Enough contact with actual academics rather than a carousel of casualised staff? Enough eduroam bandwidth when every lecture, seminar, and social is streaming at once? Enough student housing that isn’t mouldy, miles away, or eye-wateringly expensive?

    “Enough” is already pretty subjective – and itself subject to wild differences between subject areas on campus in a way that makes it hard to not always spot someone (probably an international PGT in the Business School) who’s worse off. Even if they knew they could and even if they were minded to, it’s pretty hard for a student to argue that something that is still there and was always shared is being stretched a little too thinly now.

    And this sort of thing almost always manifests in conflict between students rather than pinning the blame tail on the university donkey – see our dismal debates about things like NHS access and immigration for a classic example.

    It’s not even as if the regulator doesn’t understand. John Blake again, a year ago:

    When the 2012 number controls were abolished, there are institutions that literally doubled in size overnight… I don’t know that the answer is us saying, no, you can’t have your students, or you have to do this. But I think there’s definitely scope for us thinking about what the obligation of institutions is to have discussions with their local community about where their students are going to go, because it’s clearly not sustainable for every institution to double itself overnight in small places.

    See also everything else about a university experience that, by definition, involves sharing things.

    Swear words

    It remains the case that it’s almost as bad to sing the uncensored version of Miriana Conte’s Eurovision entry in a church as it is to even gently propose some student number controls. And even though one of the least publicly resisted immigration rules is not a cap but a “if you want more CAS, you have to think about whether you have the capacity” (maybe because it’s never been meaningfully or publicly enforced by UKVI), people even seem to be nervous about suggesting something like that for home students.

    I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – higher education is an endeavour that is profoundly unsuited to very rapid expansion and very rapid contraction at programme, subject and institutional level. But the biggest mistake of all would be to focus on the end of the league tables where the impacts of contraction are closest to the Iceberg’s surface.

    Cramming tens of thousands more students into the cities of the (not so) high tariffs may well be just as damaging, all while the tone of their recruitment relationship – “you’re lucky to be here” – reduces the chances of students doing anything other than the HE equivalent of putting your head down, crouching next to the toilet and staring at your phone for three gruelling hours. Or, in HE’s case, years.

    It’s really not hard this one. You want to expand your student numbers by more than 5 per cent in a subject area? Publicly consult on how you’ll do it – including the results of conversations with staff, students, the local community and local providers, and you’re on. Imagine suggesting out loud that doing some planning to ensure more students doesn’t mean a worse experience would represent a regulatory “burden”.

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  • Students sitting on floor in ANU tutorials – Campus Review

    Students sitting on floor in ANU tutorials – Campus Review

    The Education and Employment Committee has heard Australian National University (ANU) students are forced to sit on the floor in overpacked tutorials as a result of budget cuts in its $250m restructure.

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