Building Student Belonging: The Role of Engagement in Higher Education

Imagine stepping onto a campus for the first time, surrounded by strangers, unfamiliar buildings, and a whirlwind of activities. Your inbox floods with invitations to various events, and a sense of anxiety looms as you wonder how you'll manage it all. Amidst this chaos, a senior student invites you to an interactive workshop for first-years. You attend, make friends, and feel your anxiety ease. Soon, a professor remembers your name and interests, inviting you to a social event organised by the faculty. You join the student leaders’ network and feel like you are part of a community and can make a difference. These moments of connection are the seeds of belonging.

In today's higher education landscape, fostering a sense of belonging is more critical than ever. With post-pandemic recovery, increasing diversity, and the pursuit for inclusion, creating environments where every student feels they belong is both a challenge and an opportunity. Research, such as the findings by Pedler at al., highlights the profound impact of belonging on academic motivation and retention. Additionally, Skipper and Fay found that students who feel they belong are more likely to have higher levels of mental wellbeing and lower levels of stress.

So, how do we build belonging?

Allow me to explore this question and share insights from my role at KCL on how we can enhance the sense of belonging within our institutions. Spoiler alert: it starts with engagement.

Building the Foundation

Coming from a scientific background, I was taught to approach problems by finding the initial cause, not the effect, if I am to find a solution. I must ask, what is causing the symptoms? Is it localised? How do I stop others from getting sick?

When it comes to belonging, the same questions should be asked. What is stopping belonging, and how do we rectify it to provide a more desirable outcome? Let’s delve into how we can shift our focus from merely treating symptoms to addressing the root causes, thereby cultivating a campus environment where every student can thrive.

Defining Belonging

The Cambridge Dictionary defines belonging as ‘a feeling of being happy or comfortable as part of a particular group, having a good relationship with the other members because they welcome you and accept you’. Belonging, according to Psychology Today, is ‘the subjective feeling of deep connection with social groups, physical places, and individual and collective experiences’. Cultivating belonging has been shown to increase well-being.

We can conclude that belonging is a feeling and intrinsic outcome, a destination and the product of engagement with people or your environment. It is a subjective feeling. Belonging is not something you can acquire as a stand-alone product. You have to engage in one way or another to get the reward. Yes, we hope to achieve belonging, but can we build it?

One thing is true: it is cultivated through engagement.

You can imagine why it is hard for students who often feel left out of engagement opportunities on campus, especially those from diverse cultural and low socioeconomic backgrounds. According to Fernández and colleagues, students' sense of belonging is influenced by their social connections, observed similarity with fellow students, and identity-based experiences.

The Key to Facilitating Positive Engagement

The key to building belonging is to build engagement. Robust engagement structures enable students to interact with their interests and people, helping them to find commonality among their peers and/or environments.

Engagement is a topic we are constantly exploring, and rightly so, because students and times are constantly changing. The means to engage students post-COVID-19 have most definitely changed as the world changes around us.

Speaking with colleagues across the sector, what is notable is that there is less engagement from students despite putting on more. What has changed? Yes, the cost of living plays a role, but what we still hear from students is they want more events and connection opportunities, but statistics show that engagement is still low.

If engagement is the key to belonging, how do we facilitate effective engagement for all students? How do we position ourselves as a sector in a proactive way to ensure belonging is always possible?

For me, the question of engagement comes down to three things: Are students informed (awareness), are they willing (motivation), and are they able (access)? For any student, these are the three parameters. In my role, my goal is to ensure that most students answer "yes" to these three questions. Let’s briefly explore each of these parameters and what they mean.

Three Questions to Maximise Engagement

1. Awareness

Are students aware of opportunities for engagement?

Awareness is about communication and tends to be the first step, making it the most important key to engagement. If students don’t know about opportunities, they can't decide if they are willing or able to engage. This includes events, resources, support, activities, and more.

Simply put, do they know it’s there?

How often do we hear students say, "I didn’t know," or find in feedback surveys that they are interested in events that happened weeks ago with minimal attendance?

Meaningful communication helps students move from contemplation to engagement. It relates to the communication channel, the structure, the content, the frequency, and timing. I work with our student leaders’ network to ensure communication to students is personal, authentic, and impactful, resulting in a high email open rate and positive responses and remarks from students on communication campaigns. This includes reviewing the impact of communication on engagement metrics. Additionally, I run design competitions allowing students to directly shape communication strategies.

2. Access

Do students have the access they need to engage?

We are aware that no two students are the same. Each student may have different circumstances that hinder accessibility and the opportunity to engagement. This can be physical (location, timing), financial, intellectual, cultural, etc. The list goes on.

Communication plays a huge role here. Understanding and relationships with the student body help identify who is in the community and any barriers they face. Collaboration with colleagues in respective departments is also key to access. For instance, I often speak with programme teams who have a good understanding of their cohort, harmonising opportunities with timetables. I work with the Education Team and Programme Directors  to consider assessment periods in the Business School, aligning opportunities accordingly. Furthermore, I have diverse student representatives (PG, UG, commuter, international, etc.) among my student leaders' network who provide insight on how various activities affect them. This approach has contributed to the Business School achieving the highest outcome for Community in the 2024 Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey across the university, with one programme increasing overall satisfaction by 25%.

3. Willingness (Motivation)

Are students willing to engage? Simply put, do they want to?

Willingness communicates the motivation and desire of students to engage with opportunities and is impacted by multiple intrinsic and extrinsic factors.

Think back to your days in primary school or high school. Often during performances, the student body was full of all types of students: the enthusiastic one, the shy one, the one barely taking part, the one just staring and mumbling, and the one who keeps laughing at everything.

The point is, regardless of their motivations, they engaged—they showed up! In higher education, however, we don’t have the luxury of simply ushering everyone to the stage. Our problem is they won’t even show up if they don’t feel like it.

We must create a welcoming and inclusive student environment that encourages participation. It relates to engagement culture. At the Business School, I utilise peer mentoring in Year 1, workshops, induction videos, encouraging media, and showcasing student role models in induction to enhance willingness. Several students have shared the impact of these activities. Alumni, when invited to present at award ceremonies, have stated how they wish these structures were in place when they were studying.

Other times, it’s about understanding the reasons for demotivation or barriers to demotivation. Maybe we are not providing opportunities that interest them, or like I have found in some cases, due to how the opportunity is packaged or promoted, students do not understand its benefits.

Again, at the Business School I have built up our student leaders to have personal responsibility for the engagement of their peers. For example, I engage course representatives in planning activities and often co-create a recruitment plan for the cohort. Additionally, through our Engagement and Mentoring programme I spearhead, I invite the Student Engagement Associates to bring their peers in 1st year with them to events in the first term to help them cross any barriers they may experience (e.g., shy, nervous, don't want to go alone). These approaches have largely contributed to our high engagement in activities. The student faculty ball had a significant increase in attendance from 900 in 2023 to 1,300 in 2024.

Recommendations

To build belonging, we must address barriers to student awareness, willingness, and access to engagement. Engagement is not a one-time effort but a continuous process. It is essential to collect and act on feedback to continuously improve engagement efforts.

In my experience, addressing one of the three key questions—awareness, willingness, or access—often makes a significant difference. Conducting quick market research with students helps identify issues and improve future initiatives. For example, our Business School has seen a 350% increase in student nominations for awards and consistently high engagement in community activities. This is largely due to increasing visibility of the nomination period through various communication channels, designing a neater and simpler nomination form, coordinating with student leaders, and the added benefit of showcasing the prestigious awards, and the celebration of the awards ceremony which welcomes staff, students, alumni, and guest performances over a three-course meal.

As stakeholders in higher education, it is our collective responsibility to foster environments where every student feels a sense of belonging. Start by evaluating your current engagement strategies through the lens of the three key questions: Are students aware? Are they willing? Are they able?

From my experience, the best approach is co-creation. Collaborate with staff and set up an effective student leadership network to:

• Evaluate and Adapt: Assess your communication channels and ensure they are reaching all students effectively (Awareness).

• Foster a Welcoming Culture: Encourage an inclusive campus culture where every student feels motivated to participate through campaigns, workshops, and mentoring programmes (Willingness).

• Create Inclusive Opportunities: Design activities that are accessible to all students, considering diverse needs and circumstances (Access).

Remember, the key is not having students do everything but rather designing a system that allows each student to engage in something and find their place within our educational communities, unlocking their ideal pathway to success, positive outcomes, and a great student experience.