Emily McIntosh (UWS, Director of Student Success) and Sabina Lawrie (UWS Union Student Voice Manager) presented a session (slides) on belonging as a strategy for engagement at Celtic Connections.
They were offering something more fundamental than a framework or a policy – a roadmap for transforming how universities understand their core purpose in an era when student success has become existential rather than aspirational.
The University of the West of Scotland’s “No Student Left Behind” initiative is an admission that traditional approaches to student engagement have failed, and that belonging – not satisfaction, not outcomes, not even retention – might be the missing variable in higher education’s increasingly desperate equation.
McIntosh opened with a provocation that should unsettle every university leader – belonging is emerging as the strongest single predictor of progression and retention. Not academic preparedness. Not financial support. Not even teaching quality. Belonging.
The research underpinning UWS’s approach, led by David Gilani, reveals a virtuous cycle that challenges fundamental assumptions about student engagement. The more students feel they belong, the more likely they are to engage. The more they engage, the stronger their sense of belonging becomes. It sounds obvious – until you realise how systematically UK higher education has been getting this wrong.
McIntosh’s framework distinguishes between student “success” and student “experience” in ways that expose the poverty of current institutional thinking. Student success, she argued, is about individual learners with specific educational legacies, multiple identities, and different approaches to learning. It’s personal, contextual, and can’t be mass-produced through standardised interventions.
The six overlapping concepts – belonging, mattering, community, connection, expectations, engagement – create what McIntosh termed the foundation for everything else. But crucially, her analysis revealed how much of what affects belonging sits within institutional control rather than individual student responsibility.
This matters because it shifts the locus of intervention from deficit models that treat students as problems to be fixed, toward systemic approaches that recognise universities as communities to be built.
The anatomy of mattering
One of the practical contributions came through McIntosh’s exploration of “mattering” – the sense that individual students have significance within their institutional community. Drawing again on Gilani’s research, she outlined four dimensions that staff can directly influence: support and care, approachability, valuing students’ voices and identities, and recognition of systemic factors.
The specificity here is crucial. High expectations combined with helping students develop goals. Prompt responses and multiple contact pathways. Non-judgemental attitudes that encourage question-asking. Visible action on student feedback and recognition of all student contributions.
These aren’t revolutionary concepts. They’re basic principles of human relationship that higher education has somehow managed to systematise out of existence.
The systemic factors dimension acknowledges what too many institutional strategies ignore – that class sizes, staff capacity, natural breaks in academic years, and industrial action all affect students’ sense of mattering. You cannot create belonging through individual heroics when structural conditions work against it.
From consultation to co-creation
The session’s most sophisticated element emerged through a progression model – from student expression through consultation and partnership to co-creation and co-leadership. This isn’t the familiar ladder of participation that treats student involvement as a series of steps toward greater institutional control. Instead, it’s recognition that meaningful partnership requires cultural transformation across entire organisations.
The “4 C’s” model – community, collaboration, cohesion, and co-creation – provides scaffolding for this transformation. But McIntosh was clear about the relationship between these elements. Genuine co-creation can only emerge from strong community foundations and collaborative practices. It cannot be imposed through governance structures or strategic initiatives.
This connects to deeper questions about university purpose that too many institutions avoid confronting. Are students customers whose satisfaction we track, or citizens with rights and responsibilities within academic communities? The answer shapes everything from representative systems to feedback mechanisms to the basic interactions between staff and students.
UWS’s “Being, Becoming, Belonging” survey – achieving a remarkable 21 per cent response rate from students – reveals the systematic disconnections that characterise contemporary student experience. Staff consistently overestimate students’ sense of belonging, awareness of opportunities, and satisfaction with feedback systems. Students report limited engagement opportunities, poor communication, and uncertainty about whether their input creates change.
These aren’t communication failures. They’re evidence of fundamentally different realities within the same institution.
The campus differences are particularly revealing. Where staff generalise about “UWS as a whole,” students highlight specific location-based variations. The “grass is greener” thinking about other campuses suggests that belonging is intensely local and contextual rather than institutional and strategic.
Most importantly, students expressed uncertainty about whether feedback leads to positive change. After decades of quality assurance frameworks that embed student voice in institutional processes, students still cannot see connections between their input and institutional action. That should terrify university leaders more than declining recruitment numbers.
The enablers and barriers matrix
McIntosh and Lawrie’s analysis of what enables and prevents belonging provides perhaps the most actionable framework to emerge from Celtic Connections. The enablers span individual relationship-building (making friends, feeling valued), structural support (clear communication, consistent guidance), and community development (clubs, societies, peer education, collaborative working).
But the barriers reveal the scale of institutional challenge. Time constraints, financial pressures, work commitments, commuting, living arrangements, disability, mental health challenges, social and cultural barriers, inadequate communications.
These aren’t problems that student engagement strategies can solve through better programming. They’re symptoms of a higher education system that has lost touch with the lived realities of contemporary students.
The representation and partnership barriers are particularly damning: lack of awareness, students’ inability to identify how feedback creates change, inadequate systems and processes, insufficient reward and recognition. When institutions spend enormous energy on consultation exercises while students remain unclear about impact, something fundamental has broken down.
UWS’s framework for 2025-26 demonstrates ambition matched by specificity. Pre-arrival programmes focusing on “relentless orientation and academic skills preparedness.” Diagnostic approaches that identify where students are rather than where institutions think they should be. “Social engineering” through programmatic academic peer groups that supplement formal peer assisted study sessions.
The student representation infrastructure progression – from informal academic peer groups to formal student partnership forums – acknowledges that meaningful participation requires scaffolding and development rather than expecting students to immediately engage with complex governance structures.
Perhaps most innovatively, the focus on an advising model that integrates academic, pastoral, and professional support around student-centred pedagogical practice suggests movement away from fragmented service delivery toward holistic relationship-building.
The community principles framework – “as a student I will, as colleagues we will, as a university we will” – creates shared responsibility and mutual accountability rather than one-way institutional commitments to student satisfaction.
The measurement imperative
What distinguishes UWS’s approach from typical belonging initiatives is its commitment to systematic measurement and evaluation. The comprehensive framework tracking progression through belonging, community development, representation, and partnership creates accountability that most institutions avoid.
The “In Partnership” framework maps specific activities across engagement levels – from attendance and co-curricular involvement through peer support and academic societies to student voice mechanisms and formal partnership agreements. This granularity matters because it makes visible the pathways through which belonging develops rather than treating it as an outcome that institutions can deliver.
But the real test will be whether this measurement creates genuine transformation or simply more sophisticated forms of institutional self-deception. When belonging becomes a KPI, does it retain the human authenticity that makes it meaningful?
Beyond the sector crisis
McIntosh and Lawrie’s work emerges within a higher education landscape characterised by financial crisis, demographic decline, and fundamental questions about institutional purpose. In this context, belonging isn’t just about student experience – it’s about institutional survival.
Universities that can create genuine communities where students feel they matter, contribute, and develop will thrive regardless of external pressures. Those that continue treating students as consumers of educational products will struggle as alternative providers offer better value propositions.
The UWS model suggests that belonging cannot be purchased through facilities investment or marketed through brand positioning. It must be built through daily interactions, structural changes, and cultural transformation that positions students as active participants in academic communities rather than passive recipients of institutional services.
The session’s most important contribution might be its demonstration that this transformation is measurable, systematic, and achievable. When universities understand what enables belonging and what prevents it, they can make informed decisions about resource allocation, policy development, and cultural change.
The revolution starts with measurement. But it succeeds through human connection, institutional commitment, and the recognition that student success and institutional sustainability are not competing priorities but interdependent possibilities.
The question facing every leader is whether they’re prepared to measure what matters – and act on what they discover.
