In my first year, I lived in university accommodation as the only person of colour on my floor.
As far as I could tell, I was one of four across the entire building.
I spent the whole three years correcting people on how to pronounce my name. To this day I still am.
The microaggressions were low-level and relentless – the kind that don’t make it into formal complaints because individually they’re too small to name, but collectively they do something to you.
They tell you, quietly and repeatedly, that this place wasn’t built with you in mind.
Founding flaws
Higher education in the UK was built by and for a very specific kind of person – white, male, affluent, and “traditional”. The oldest SUs in the country were founded as debating societies – spaces for a particular class of person to practise rhetoric before going on to run things.
The architecture, the traditions, the language, the culture – all of it was designed around an assumed student who looks nothing like the majority of students sitting in our lecture halls today.
We’ve widened participation dramatically. Around a quarter of university students in the UK now come from minority ethnic backgrounds, a proportion that continues to grow. And yet the systems, cultures, and staff teams that are supposed to serve them haven’t kept pace.
The conversation about this tends to happen in one place – academic departments. The awarding gap has rightly received serious attention. The most recent Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) data, analysed by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) in April 2025, shows the gap between white and Black students in degree outcomes rose to 21.4 percentage points in 2022/23 – up from 19 points the year before. Progress, such as it was, has gone into reverse.
The staff picture is just as stark. According to Advance HE’s 2024 staff equality report, only 3.8 per cent of UK Black academics hold professorial roles. Research consistently links these outcomes to students not feeling like they belong – and belonging, it turns out, is shaped significantly by whether the people around you look like you.
A 2025 study drawing on 72 in-depth interviews with minority ethnic students found that their sense of belonging is best understood as conditional – constantly negotiated, shaped by the pressure to conform to dominant institutional cultures, and eroded by the accumulation of microaggressions that never quite go away.
Research from the British Psychological Society goes further, showing directly that students’ sense of belonging differs depending on the racial composition of the staff team around them. Separate qualitative research has found that the absence of minority ethnic staff leaves students without role models they can identify with and turn to for support.
We know all of this – and yet parts of the university set-up have been almost entirely absent from the conversation.
Missing persons
SUs have largely sat outside the discourse on race and belonging in higher education. The same goes for the university student services teams that sit alongside them – wellbeing advisers, counsellors, academic support staff, hardship administrators.
That’s a problem – because for many students, these student services are their first and most frequent points of contact with university life beyond the seminar room. They’re where students look for community, for support, for a sense that someone is in their corner.
I was reminded of this during a club night I was shadowing as part of a drug harm reduction campaign I’d been running. A student approached me – probably with the liquid courage of a couple of VKs, but entirely sincere.
They told me how much it meant that I looked like them and was the president of their union. They hadn’t seen anyone who looked like them on their course. But they felt the SU was for them, they said, because I was there.
“You don’t know how much it means to me.
But I did – all too well.
I’ve thought about that conversation a lot since. Not because it was flattering – though of course it was – but because of what it revealed about how low the bar had been set. One person, one visible face at the front, was enough to make a student feel, perhaps for the first time since arriving at university, that an institution had space for them.
The sector has spent years asking why students of colour don’t engage. We’ve run focus groups, redesigned events, rebranded, thrown in a daytime meet-and-mingle in the hopes it makes events “more inclusive”. We’ve asked the question without looking at ourselves to answer it.
Mack Marshall has written on Wonkhe about the need to understand who the “we” is before we can fix engagement. And one answer is plain enough – for a lot of our students, the “we” of their SU feels like it was assembled without them.
The staff team of an SU or a university wellbeing service never functions as a neutral backdrop. It signals to students, before a single word is spoken, whether this is a space where people like them have power, do the work, make decisions.
When that signal is wrong – when the team is overwhelmingly white in a student body that isn’t – students notice. They may not articulate it, they may not complain about it, but they quietly decide that it is not for them and disengage in exactly the ways we keep puzzling over.
Inside job
For SUs, the issue isn’t only about elected officers – the student leaders whose faces go on the posters. It runs through the professional staff team – the advisers, the representation coordinators, the managers, the people who stay when the officer team turns over every year.
And on the university side, the same goes for student services – the wellbeing teams, the counsellors, the personal tutors, the academic skills staff. These are the people who shape culture, who write the job descriptions, who decide what “a good candidate” looks like, who carry institutional memory from one cycle to the next.
If those teams have never reflected the membership they serve, the problem compounds itself. Hiring processes default to familiarity, culture reproduces itself, and the result is a staff room that looks, well, “quite white in here”.
This describes how institutions work when nobody is paying deliberate attention, more than it accuses anyone in particular. The same mechanisms that produce a Eurocentric curriculum, or an awarding gap that persists despite years of intervention, also produce a students’ union professional team – and a student services workforce – that doesn’t reflect its members.
Compound interest
Getting this wrong has real costs. Students who don’t see themselves in their SU – or in the support service they’re supposed to turn to – are less likely to seek advice when they need it, less likely to stand for election, less likely to engage with the democratic processes that are supposed to make their university accountable to them.
The SU and the wider university start to feel, for these students, like more institutions that were clearly built for someone else.
The cost compounds, because the students who disengage today are the officers, SU staff, wellbeing advisers, and higher education “wonks” of tomorrow.
What would eventually change these organisations – and, in time, what the sector looks like – is a route to diverse leadership across both the SU and student services. That route depends on students feeling, right now, that these are places where they belong.
The mirror test
The uncomfortable question every SU in the country – and every university student services team – should be asking is simple enough. Does your staff team reflect your membership? Look past the officer team to the people who are there every day, who set the culture, who shape what the union, or the service, is and who it feels like it’s for.
If the answer is no – and for most SUs and most student services teams, honestly, it is – the follow-up question shifts. It stops being “why don’t students of colour engage with us?” and becomes “why would they?”.
The same logic applies well beyond race. Is the SU events programme 90 per cent club nights – because that’s the only way you know how to generate income – and 10 per cent anything else that works?
Are the volunteering opportunities or part-time officer roles truly accessible, or only to students with time and money to spare for unpaid work? Are the daytime events scheduled during lecture hours and early evenings, expecting asking commuter students to choose between their education and making friends or getting home safely before it gets dark?
Higher education wasn’t built for everyone, and neither were the SUs and student services that grew up alongside it. We can’t undo that history. But we can decide, right now, whether we keep running organisations that still feel like they weren’t built for everyone – or whether we finally build something every student can walk into and see themselves.
AyoOluwa from Middlesex Students’ Union and I are planning a session on troubleshooting this at Membership Services Conference – if you’d like to join us in working through some of these issues, please do.
