Across the sector, there are a range of approaches to structuring student experience and student life within senior leadership portfolios.
On paper, the distinction seems clear: student experience is often associated with teaching, learning and assessment, while student life encompasses wellbeing, finance, disability support and the wider context in which students study.
At an institutional level, this separation can provide clarity and help manage complexity. Defined portfolios allow for focus and accountability across large and diverse organisations. The challenge is that students don’t experience their education this way.
Academic and personal factors are closely connected and shape how learning is accessed and sustained. In this sense, student life doesn’t sit alongside student experience as a separate strand – it acts as a lens through which student experience is interpreted and lived. The question, therefore, isn’t whether these areas can be separated structurally, but whether they remain sufficiently connected in delivery.
This question is growing in significance as expectations of student outcomes continue to evolve. Work from organisations such as the Higher Education Policy Institute highlights how cost of living, mental health and belonging shape engagement with study, while OfS emphasises continuation, completion and progression through its B3 measures.
These outcomes are often framed in academic terms, but they’re shaped by a combination of curriculum design, personal context and access to support – something reflected in measures such as the National Student Survey (NSS) and Graduate Outcomes, where perceptions of teaching and overall experience are influenced by factors well beyond the curriculum alone.
Where lines blur
This tension becomes more visible at faculty and school level. The relationship between personal academic tutors and student support roles provides a useful example: the distinction between the roles appears straightforward, with one focused on academic progress and the other supporting wider barriers, but in practice the issues students bring forward don’t fit neatly into these categories.
A student who has fallen behind may be managing assessment challenges alongside financial pressure or declining mental health, and progression and engagement are shaped by these factors together. The effectiveness of either role depends on how well they work in partnership rather than how clearly they’re separated.
The same pattern appears elsewhere. Belonging is shaped through teaching, relationships and access to support. Awarding gaps reflect assessment design as well as confidence and context. Wellbeing is influenced not only by services, but also by workload, timetabling and expectations within the curriculum – and these things sit at the heart of student success without fitting comfortably within any single domain.
Student support and student life functions often identify patterns early. A small number of students may struggle with the same assessment format; similar reasonable adjustments may be requested across different courses; periods of disengagement may occur at consistent points in the academic cycle. Individually, these cases can appear isolated, but taken together they can indicate underlying issues in curriculum design or assessment structure.
There’s a tendency to wait for larger datasets before acting, by which point a number of students may already have been affected. Smaller patterns can provide early insight and shouldn’t be dismissed on the basis of scale alone. Where these insights aren’t connected to curriculum development, institutions risk responding repeatedly at the level of the individual without addressing the source of the problem.
What processes reveal
This becomes particularly clear in processes such as extenuating circumstances and misconduct. Extenuating circumstances are often used to manage disruption to individual students, but they can also highlight where the curriculum creates pressure – repeated claims linked to the same assessment or time period suggest there may be a broader issue to address.
Misconduct processes are typically framed in terms of behaviour, but they can also reflect issues around clarity of expectations, assessment design or support, and patterns within these cases can indicate areas where students are struggling to engage. These processes generate valuable insight into how students experience the institution, but that insight doesn’t always inform change.
Student success is often presented as a single outcome, but it’s delivered through a combination of academic design, support and context. In many institutions, responsibility for these elements sits across different portfolios – an arrangement that can work effectively, but only with coordination. Without it, different elements of student success risk being addressed in isolation rather than as part of a connected whole.
Seen through the lens of student life, patterns in support and engagement can provide early insight into where success may be at risk, and the value of that perspective depends on how effectively it informs academic decision-making.
Designing for connection
Separating student experience and student life isn’t inherently problematic – at scale, it can provide clarity. The challenge is ensuring these areas remain connected in practice. That requires shared ownership of outcomes such as continuation and equity, clear routes for feeding insight into curriculum and assessment design, and early involvement of relevant people when policies and processes are developed.
It also means recognising that qualitative insight – including patterns emerging from casework – can provide valuable evidence alongside formal metrics. Institutional structures will continue to vary, but what remains consistent is the way students experience their education as a whole. If institutions organise that experience in parts, they need to ensure their processes actively bring it back together, particularly in the space between student experience and student life where belonging is shaped and the conditions for success are created.
