Stigma is as powerful a barrier as scarcity itself

When students can’t afford to eat, the instinct in higher education is to find them food.

When they can’t afford art materials, the instinct is to source supplies.

In many instances, these are right instincts, but in plenty of cases, they’re not enough. At Arts Students’ Union at the University of the Arts London, we’ve been building a basic needs project that starts from a different premise.

Basic needs insecurity has been viewed as a mere financial issue. Barriers preventing students from accessing support extend beyond monetary constraints and encompass social and cultural factors, too.

Even the most well-resourced intervention can struggle to reach the students it’s designed for. Simply put – if students don’t feel comfortable seeking out basic needs support, they simply won’t.

And the reasons they don’t feel comfortable have everything to do with how inequality gets reproduced in higher educational settings. That is, often invisibly, and often by the very institutions trying to help.

Bourdieu in the SU

Pierre Bourdieu’s Social Reproduction Theory offers a useful perspective on what’s going on here.

His core argument is that social inequality is passed down generationally through the accumulation and transmission of different forms of capital. Bourdieu classifies these forms of capital as economic, cultural, social, and symbolic.

What matters for our purposes is that this transmission does not just happen through familial monetary resources. It also happens through the dispositions people develop as a result of their social and cultural background. That is, ways of thinking, speaking, moving, and perceiving that Bourdieu called our habitus.

In higher education, habitus shapes how confident a student can feel in academic spaces, how easily they adapt to institutional norms, and, critically, whether they feel entitled to belong in higher education at all.

Universities and higher education institutions function as what Bourdieu called a field. Bourdieu describes fields as a structured space in which social reproduction plays out. Students equipped with higher social and cultural capital tend to benefit from that, while institutional systems often assume a level of confidence, entitlement, and familiarity that not all students possess.

Who asks for help?

This is where basic needs insecurity gets complicated. Students with higher cultural and social capital are more likely to know that support exists in the first place, and more confident in requesting it when they do.

Students experiencing basic needs insecurity, by contrast, are often positioned outside these dominant forms of capital, which means they’re less likely to seek out the support that’s been set up for them.

Views on accessing basic needs support are strongly shaped by a student’s habitus. How is “need” perceived and performed? Who feels entitled to support? Who avoids it because of stigma? And how do higher education institutions interpret what “need” actually looks like?

These dynamics matter enormously because they determine whether provision reaches the students who need it most.

Destigmatisation is just as important as having the provision itself. We want to normalise accessing support. Low engagement with basic needs provision does not necessarily mean low need. Rather, it may imply that students feel discomfort with visibly showing need, or that they have internalised a sense that asking for help marks them out as not belonging.

Without destigmatisation embedded in basic needs frameworks, basic needs provision risks reinforcing the exact hierarchies it tries to address. If support is framed in ways that require students to perform their need, whether that be to prove it, to articulate it in the right register, or to walk through the right door, then it ends up serving those who already possess the cultural capital to do so, while excluding those who do not.

What we’re building

The Student Basic Needs Project at Arts SU grew out of this recognition and was developed with destigmatisation as its foundation. It is a framework designed not just to provide resources, but to do so in ways that actively reduce the sociocultural barriers, in addition to the financial barriers, to accessing that support. That means thinking carefully about framing, language, and delivery at every stage.

• Our Nourish Box and free food markets, for instance, are intentionally framed to reduce the symbolic stigma attached to accessing food support.
• Our Leftover Art Material Giveaways address immediate gaps in basic needs while normalising shared support systems. At an arts institution, materials are a basic need, and running out of them should never feel like a personal failing.
• We run student-led pop-up stalls and Cycle Safety Events that integrate support into everyday campus life.
• Our online Student Basic Needs Hub centralises information so that students do not have to rely on social networks. This eliminates the need of having to know the right person or be in the right group chat to find out what is available to them.

We have also invested in professional and academic staff training in order to equip staff to recognise need, reduce stigma in their own interactions, and support students more effectively. These training sessions are set to roll out in the Summer Term 2026.

And our partnerships with student-led organisations use peer engagement to normalise accessing support because hearing from another student that it’s okay to ask for help can carry more weight than any institutional communication.

Beyond individual fixes

One of the most important shifts in our approach has been moving away from treating basic needs support as an individual intervention.

When provision is framed as something for individuals in crisis, it reinforces the idea that needing support is exceptional. This kind of framing makes it seem that a basic needs insecurity stems from a problem with the student rather than the system. By contrast, when it is framed as community infrastructure, it opens up space to foster a culture of care.

This matters for loneliness and belonging, too. Basic needs insecurity is closely linked to social isolation and a reduced sense of belonging. Stigma can discourage participation in campus activities, affect students’ sense of connection to their institution, and reinforce disconnection from communities within higher education more broadly.

Accessible and destigmatised support can work in the other direction, normalising asking for help, strengthening the student community, and building the kinds of social bonds that make university feel like somewhere all students belong.

What this means for the sector

There are a few things we’d like the sector to take from this work.

• Firstly, destigmatisation needs to be embedded in how basic needs provision is framed, communicated, and delivered across an institution.
• Secondly, basic needs insecurity is not an idea that exists in a social vacuum. Bourdieu’s work helps explain how universities can reproduce class inequalities, and how access to support can be strongly shaped by factors well beyond monetary wealth.
• Thirdly, institutions need to interrogate their own assumptions about what “need” looks like. Current systems often cater to students who can confidently articulate and demonstrate their need, which means they may privilege students who already possess certain forms of capital while excluding others.
• And finally, student-led and community-oriented models can disrupt traditional hierarchies of support and reduce the stigma attached to accessing them.

Basic needs support is not simply about providing resources. Stigma can be just as powerful a barrier as scarcity itself. If we want to remove the barriers that prevent students from accessing support, we need to understand that those barriers are social and cultural as well as financial, and that they are reproduced by the same systems that produce inequality more broadly.

Bourdieu’s Social Reproduction Theory explains how class inequality gets maintained through higher education institutions, like universities. That, we know. But it also equips us with the knowledge to disrupt that reproduction.

Basic needs support, done well, is not just sticking a plaster on an ongoing issue. It is the foundational infrastructure for student success.