“Belonging” has become one of the most comfortable ideas in higher education.
It sits easily in strategies, frameworks and student experience plans. It is rarely challenged.
Students who feel they belong are more likely to stay, engage and succeed. That much is well established.
What is less examined is what belonging looks like in practice, who defines it and what happens to students who do not recognise themselves in it. At the same time, a large group of students remain unseen: the silent middle.
The students who do not appear
Those who form the silent middle are not failing, but nor are they thriving. They attend enough. They submit work that passes. They do not raise concerns and they do not seek support.
They do not appear in crisis. They do not appear in celebration. They simply pass through.
In systems built on alerts and thresholds, they are easy to miss. Progression becomes a proxy for wellbeing. Silence becomes a proxy for satisfaction. Both are unsafe assumptions.
Why silence makes sense
Silence is often read as disengagement. It can be argued that it is more often a rational response.
For some students, silence reflects matters that are structural. Paid work, commuting and caring responsibilities limit how far they can engage beyond the minimum. For others, silence is cultural. The expectation to speak, perform and disclose is not universal. What we recognise as engagement is shaped by a narrow set of norms.
Then, in some instances, silence is strategic. If surface learning is enough to pass, then surface learning is what many will do. Students are not passive recipients of education. They read the system and respond to it. And, of course, silence can be protective. Choosing not to be visible can be a way of managing confidence, identity or uncertainty.
None of these silent responses are accidental. They are patterned behaviours within the conditions we create.
The problem with belonging
Belonging is rarely neutral. In practice, it is often translated into a familiar set of behaviours – including speaking in seminars, contributing to group work, engaging beyond the curriculum, disclosing difficulty, and being visible.
These are not unreasonable expectations. They are also not universal ones. They privilege a particular model of the student: available, confident and willing to perform engagement in recognisable ways. Those who do not fit that model are not necessarily disengaged. They are simply harder to see.
When inclusion excludes
Much of the sector’s work on belonging is well intentioned. It aims to draw students in. However, it can also create new forms of exclusion.
Students from distinct cultural backgrounds may not prioritise verbal participation. Neurodivergent students may find socially intensive environments difficult. Those with external responsibilities may not have time to engage beyond what is required.
In these cases, belonging becomes something that must be demonstrated. If you cannot perform it, you risk being read as absent. The silent middle sit precisely in this gap. Not absent but not fully recognised.
What follows from this?
If the silent middle exists in a way that many of us recognise, then some of our assumptions need to shift.
For example, progression is not enough. A student passing quietly through a course is not necessarily a student who is well supported or well connected. And participation needs to be broadened. If engagement is only recognised when it is visible, then many forms of learning remain invisible by design.
Support cannot rely on disclosure. Systems that depend on students asking for help will continue to miss those to whom have learned not. And surface learning is not a student deficit. It is often a rational response to assessment systems that allow it.
None of this requires abandoning belonging. It requires being more precise about what we mean by it.
Beyond one model of the student
Not all students want the same relationship with higher education. Some are with us to transform. Others are here to complete. Some will build identity and community. Others will move through quietly and successfully. The question is not whether these students belong. It is whether our definition of belonging is wide enough to include them.
Higher education increasingly operates as if all students can be seen through data, dashboards and metrics. The silent middle challenge that assumption.
They should remind us that what is not visible is not necessarily absent and what is not measured is not necessarily unimportant. If belonging is only recognised when it is visible, measurable and easy to evidence, then many students will never fully appear within it. That is not a failure of students. It is a limitation of how we have chosen to see them.
You omit other possibilities. The student simply does not care for nor wish to engage with any sense of “belonging” they are simply doing their own thing. “Belonging” is simply cultural baggage that the he sector chooses to lug along in the hope or belief that it is or might be useful. Students and many staff do not share this delusion.
I take your point and I agree that not all students are looking for a sense of belonging in the way the sector often presents it. Some are quite content to focus on their studies and move through in their own way.
My concern is slightly different. There is a risk that we overlook a group of students because they do not demonstrate belonging in ways that we readily recognise.
Much of our current thinking relies on visible forms of engagement. When students do not speak often, do not seek support, or do not participate beyond what is required, it becomes easy to assume disengagement or lack of interest. In reality, those students may be making rational, deliberate choices about how they engage.
The point is not that all students must belong in the same way. It is that our understanding of belonging needs to be broad enough to recognise different forms of participation, including those that are quieter, more contained, or more instrumental. Otherwise, we risk missing students not because they are absent, but because they do not fit the version of belonging we expect to see.
I understand and accept many of the premises in this piece, but it seems to miss an element that has had many of us wringing our hands: in order for students to successfully engage with HE, they might not need to “belong”, but they *do* need to be present.
Attendance is important (or should be), for the discussion of ideas, enrichment of learning. It also may help when students are struggling, so that they don’t find it as daunting to approach academic or professional services staff who might be able to offer support.
So, from a retention and achievement perspective, is “belonging” truly necessary, or merely a “nice to have” compared to “attend and engage”?