Student belonging – the four foundations
Over the last year, together with our partners at Wonkhe, and with the help of 15 students’ unions, we’ve explored the concept of student belonging. We surveyed 5,233 students and 430 staff, and analysed over 240 monthly diary entries from anonymous student participants, multiple student focus groups, and 52 projects by sector colleagues from across UK universities.
Belonging is not an easy concept to tie down - after all, it means something slightly different to all of us. However, the depth and breadth of insight from students and staff throughout the research, has enabled us to analyse the conditions and interactions that contribute to feelings of belonging. The recently published report explores 4 areas which we consider to be the foundations of belonging: connection, inclusion, support, and autonomy. For each of these areas we offer practical recommendations (based on the experiences and ideas of students and staff) for how universities can better support student belonging, and share best practice examples from educators who are leading the way in their respective fields of expertise.
Here are a few of the stand out recommendations within those four foundational areas:
Connection
Recommendation: All staff involved with delivering or designing courses should integrate initiatives for connecting students, this could form part of the course review process and the validation process for new courses.
In our research, both staff and students agreed that peer to peer connections are critical. Getting to know their peers profoundly affects students’ sense of belonging because it enables them to build a support network and develop confidence.
“[Belonging is] having people around me who I connect with, who I can support and who I know will support me. It is about connecting with others. When these connections are made you get a sense of security and acceptance.”
- Student
Staff and students also agreed that the course is an important platform for developing these connections. And yet students did not report a strong sense of connection, either at the course or university level. Throughout the research students gave countless examples of course initiatives that made a difference to their sense of community, connection, and ultimately their sense of belonging. These initiatives included online social spaces, informal social interactions, group work and communal spaces.
In the quantitative research, staff tended to overlook peer connections as a basis for confidence, whereas students reported that exposure to other students through academic societies, group work, or in seminars, studios, and labs increased their confidence levels. The benefit of students being able to support each other should not be overlooked.
"Having those bonds and those people around you to support you when you’re having those moments of doubt [is the key to overcoming imposter syndrome]”
- Student
Inclusion
Recommendation: Present course content in its global, historical, and colonial context. Where there are gaps in course content, encourage staff to be open about these and invite students to help close them.
You might assume that students would judge whether content is inclusive by looking to ‘see themselves’ in the content. And although there were comments to that effect in the qualitative research, the bigger question on students’ minds was about academic rigour. They associated diverse inclusive content with course credibility – in their minds this gives them a more rounded perspective of the discipline and better prepares them for the world of work:
“Case studies and handout in my course have been very international in nature, reflecting the increasingly globalised world and can be applied by students in their global careers.”
- Student
A lack of diversity led students to question the credibility of their course and the expertise of their educators. It also led them to question how well their course was preparing them for the graduate workplace.
“I know for certain that I [a medical student] will meet and look after people from all walks of life, varying in skin colour, gender orientation, social circumstance, and so I am not fully comfortable that my learning resources fully address this.”
- Student
Recommendation: Train staff on inclusive design thinking so that all content and communications across the institution are designed to create equity by accommodating accessibility needs.
57 per cent of students with a disability reported accessibility issues to teaching and learning resources due to a physical or mental health condition. There was clearly an expectation among students in our research that learning resources should be accessible by default. Students condemned incidences where students with accessibility needs had to specifically request resources be made accessible for them.
This section of the report also includes recommendations around neurodiversity, access to resources and representation of staff.
Support
Recommendation: Academic skills and their development should be integrated throughout teaching and learning, delivered as standard to all students rather than requiring students to identify as ‘deficient’, thereby avoiding a deficit model approach to support provision.
Above all other findings, eliminating a deficit model approach to support by integrating support throughout the course and across the university had the greatest potential to remove deeply engrained feelings of unbelonging, “otherness” or “imposter syndrome”. Feeling like you ‘don’t deserve to be a university’ was prevalent among students regardless of their achievements or background.
Recommendation: Signpost support, streamline access and build support networks across the institution. Ensuring regular staff training, support and inter-departmental connection is essential.
University staff survey respondents felt strongly that supporting students should be a shared responsibility across the institution, enabling students to access appropriate support at the point of need.
We found that when students had to request support specifically, they often had to overcome bureaucratic administrative burdens, which was both frustrating and alienating.
"I’ve had no extra support even though I’ve been through three mental health advisors and loads of different lecturers…It’s just going round in circles, trying to find who I’m meant to actually go to."
- Student
Training and support for staff is critical to ensuring students can benefit from the provision in place, as and when they need it. The student body is becoming more diverse (a testimony to the widening participation focus in higher education), and with that, student needs are also diversifying. This complexity can mean that tutors are unsure or unconfident about the ‘right’ support to offer and where it is within the institution.
Autonomy
Recommendation: Encourage academics to take a ‘feed-forward’ model to student feedback, encouraging a growth mindset throughout individual and groupwork activities to promote student confidence.
Through the qualitative research, we saw that mindset played a part in the feedback students received – students displaying growth or fixed mindsets among our diarists appeared to respond differently when receiving poor grades. Positive, productive feedback on assessments gave students a straw to clutch at when anxious about upcoming assessments. It ensured students felt able to progress as not knowing where they went wrong was a key reason for feeling disappointed but also anxious about improving for future assessment.
Recommendation: Increase opportunities for student co-creation so it becomes standard practice.
Despite an increasing number of projects around co-creation in the sector, the practice is not widespread. One of the key recommendations in this section, particularly with reference to developing more inclusive content, is for co-creation to become standard practice.
“Having your suggestion accepted and to be implemented feels special and I am more confident about this course than before.”
-
“I think part of the problem with it is that some lecturers refuse to be educated by us even though we have… although they have more knowledge, obviously, on what they’re teaching, sometimes we can bring them new ideas on modern problems and problems that are arising in the past few years.”
- Students
Barriers to belonging
Alongside the foundations, there were three areas that stood out from the research, that reflect the challenges of building a sense of belonging in students and implementing the recommendations:
Lack of integration between the course and curriculum and the wider experience
Our findings indicate that a “course plus everything else” approach to student belonging is unlikely to work, so we are advocating for a whole institution approach. If universities are serious about implementing measures to build and maintain, student belonging, they will need to avoid creating “bolt-on” programmes that run adjacent to the student learning or wider student experience.
Poor mental health creates a major barrier to belonging and inclusion
There was a clear interaction between to what extent students felt that they belonged at an institution and how well they rated their mental health. This correlation was consistent across the student experience, whether we were asking students to rate their peer connections, confidence, how inclusive they found course content or whether they felt they could speak freely at university. Students with lower mental health scores were lower on virtually every question they were
asked. It is clear that mental health must be central to any strategy that seeks to develop student belonging and that the interrelationship between belonging and mental health should be reflected in student wellbeing and experience strategies.
Structural and cultural issues prevent good practice
We found very little indication that there is a lack of will among staff to implement practices that could enhance student belonging. What we did find was evidence of staff feeling overworked, overwhelmed, and confused as to where their responsibility and remit as part of this work lies. Staff will need a clear steer on what good practice looks like, why it is important, and genuine support – in terms of training, time, remit, and remuneration – to carry it out. Alongside these factors, staff stressed that a casualised labour force and issues around inclusive culture are barriers to implementing good practices surrounding student belonging and inclusion.
“Casualised and financially insecure staff do not have the mental and practical capacity to develop pedagogy”
- Staff survey respondent
To conclude
There are many more recommendations in the report itself, in addition to the quantitative and qualitative data that informed them. We hope that the practical way students and staff describe the journey of belonging – all the ways it can be improved or damaged – means that you can see the stage of the journey which your own institution, department, students and staff are on. We have shared examples of some of the fantastic initiatives happening across the sector, which are making tangible and, in some cases, life-changing differences to student experiences. We hope these examples spark conversations, helping you evaluate current practices and ideate future initiatives.