Asking students about the challenges they face

Increasing numbers of undergraduate students are either neurodivergent or living with a mental health condition, and in some cases both – but their voices aren’t being heard.

Departments know that these students face particular challenges in their academic studies, but struggle with how to best support them, especially given pressures to do more with fewer resources. University lecturers are also growing more familiar with these conditions, either because of their own personal experience, or because of greater cultural awareness and openness around neurodivergence and mental illness. All of us in the MINOTAUR team have lived experience ourselves or loved ones living with neurodivergence and mental illness, which has informed our approach to this work.

One way universities have tried to adapt to this change in their student populations has been by issuing support agreements through their disability services team, but these are often very general and don’t always address the actual challenges individual students are facing. We know that this lack of support is having a negative impact on student experiences and academic outcomes.

Student voice

The MINOTAUR project (Mental Illness and NeurOdiversiTy Academic sUppoRt), run out of the classics department at Royal Holloway, University of London, grew out of an EDI survey which identified a significant population of students in the department who were neurodivergent and/or living with mental illness. We then ran a series of student focus groups in summer 2023 to identify issues facing these students and solutions the department could implement in order to improve their experience as learners.

As far as we know, it is the first time that focus groups have been used to ask this diverse community of students about their experiences during their degrees – within Royal Holloway, within our discipline, and quite possibly within HE. Certainly there are no easily visible parallel initiatives in the sector. The recommendations we made following these discussions have been simple and easy to implement, and we know they’ve made a great deal of difference to our student cohort.

So, in an age where the student voice has become a critical part of university life, why do these students often go unheard?

A literature review carried out this summer with the support of the RHUL School of Humanities Scholarship and Innovation Fund confirmed our suspicion that interventions for students with neurodivergence and mental illness are typically being done to students rather than shaped by them. This review sampled a wide range of work and resources aimed at supporting university and school students with ADHD, autism, other forms of neurodivergence and mental illness. These studies largely took the form of designing an intervention, implementing it, and considering its effectiveness. There seemed to be few attempts at co-creation, co-design, or co-production.

However, our experience with the first stage of MINOTAUR suggests that not asking students to identify the challenges they are facing and how these might be addressed means we are missing some simple, low-effort, high-effect interventions that can offer immediate support. In the longer term, it also means that those who design interventions address the problems that they can see, not the problems that students are experiencing.

Simplicity is a virtue

Studies indicate that increasing self-knowledge and self-advocacy skills among neurodivergent students can contribute to positive academic outcomes. Through applying principles of co-design, we can empower students to take ownership of their learning while ensuring that any interventions address their real needs. This may be particularly impactful for students without a formal diagnosis, who may not be eligible for support within existing university systems. Co-design can also increase community buy-in to projects and interventions, which is essential as part of supporting a cohort of students who are more likely to become disengaged and isolated when facing challenges.

One great example of this for MINOTAUR has been an intervention so simple that we wouldn’t have thought of it without talking to our students. As a department, we have a reputation for being supportive and understanding for students living with neurodivergence and mental illness, but as staff we had taken it as a given that our new students would automatically realise this. Last year, we introduced a simple slide titled “Neurodiversity in Classics”, to be shown at the start of each new module.

It emphasises that we want students to be able to learn, and uses three bullet points designed to lower the barriers to our students’ learning. “Better late than absent” reduces the anxiety of being five or ten minutes late to a class session, which can throw off attendance for a whole term. “Tell us about the room” gives students permission to tell us about sensory disruptors; having to concentrate on processing an overwhelming physical stimulus, like a flickering light, that can distract focus from teaching. “We understand about stimming,” referring to repetitive physical actions often made by people with autism, makes it explicit that students can fidget and move in ways which help them concentrate rather than struggling to repress those habits for an hour.

We simply hadn’t realised how much work our students were putting in to trying to meet expectations we didn’t have of them. Without consultation, we wouldn’t have known how effective this simple intervention could be – and it has made a huge difference to our students, especially first years joining the department.

It’s all about participation

Low-impact adjustments designed for neurodivergent students and students living with mental health issues can often be valuable in supporting the learning of neurotypical students too. Following the focus groups’ recommendations, many of us more systematically introduced a break in lectures to avoid students’ cognitive overload, and to allow them to refresh their minds around halfway through the lecture. Even if the evidence is only anecdotal at this stage, this small change seems to have positive effects on the entire cohort, fostering a more collaborative and open teaching environment, and reinforcing the class as a space of collective learning and teaching.

Recognising that neurodivergent students, disabled students, and those with mental health conditions are experts because of their experience is critical to work against assumptions which, however unintentionally, disempower these groups. In line with trends around developing ethical practice as part of community-based participatory research, recent movements within disability studies seek to redress the imbalance within scholarship which has cast disabled people as subjects of research, rather than active participants with agency to engage in discussion and innovation: no research about us without us.

Through proactively working with students, MINOTAUR recognises that higher education cannot meet the needs of this cohort without working with them collaboratively to produce interventions that are grounded in their student experience.