In an era where higher education emphasises retention, progression, and student success, there remains a striking omission in policy and practice: how best to support students who are struggling to meet their course requirements.
We talk confidently about inclusion, engagement and student voice but for students required to resit exams, the reality is often isolation, confusion, and a lack of meaningful academic contact. This is not just a pastoral concern, it’s strategic failure.
The hidden cost of resits
Every summer, thousands of students across the UK undertake resit assessments. Failing to pass second time around can delay progression or, in some cases, threaten continuation. To provide a sense of scale, it has been estimated that somewhere between five and 25 per cent of students need to resit at least one assessment during their degree – this could be around 90,000 or more.
In many institutions, including my own at the University of Manchester, the resit period overlaps with a time when many academic staff are away or busy with other things. It is at a time (for us, in late August) when there are no structured teaching activities, and likely minimal tailored guidance. These students are often left navigating complex academic demands while juggling paid work, accommodation issues, and other commitments with little support beyond generic study tips. It’s a recipe for disengagement.
Resits are rarely discussed in pedagogic terms, and almost never in policy conversations. This topic remains under-explored, under-theorised, and under-supported. Yet, resits are pivotal moments in students’ lives, with a clear link to continuation and completion. So why do we treat them as an afterthought?
What students told us
To better understand the support gaps, we ran a student-partnered inquiry at the University of Manchester, focusing on students’ experiences of resits. We set out to work with students to understand how they experience resits and what support might help them succeed the second time around.
Using thematic analysis, we drew out three main themes from our discussions. Our findings weren’t surprising, but they were striking. Students reported a lack of academic contact during the summer period with, students feeling “out of touch and isolated” during the summer. Students struggled with concerns about how to improve their knowledge and they felt unclear on what doing better looked like. And critically, they lacked confidence in their own ability to succeed.
Importantly, students weren’t necessarily asking for more support, but they were asking for the right support. Generic toolkits and peer mentoring were rated as the least useful support strategies. Instead, what they valued was targeted feedback, clarity about expectations, and a sense of continued connection to their course and teaching team.
What needs to change
If institutions are serious about retention and inclusive education, they need to take resits seriously and students undertaking resits need specific pedagogic support. This means embedding revision and review into regular teaching, providing personalised feedback that explicitly supports second attempts, and recognising the resit period as a time where academic confidence is likely to be low and meaningful academic contact can make or break motivation and self-efficacy.
Our findings suggest that students facing resits are not a homogenous group. They are individuals each navigating their own set of academic, emotional, and logistical challenges. Critically, the strategies they value most are those that give them insight into their own performance and actionable ways to improve.
More broadly, we need to challenge the idea that resits are just a student problem. Whether a resit is seen as a hurdle, a second chance, or a psychological burden has implications for how we structure and support our students. Resits are an organisational issue where institutional priorities, academic calendars, and staffing models collide to create patchy and inconsistent support.
Resits should not be a footnote in our academic policies. They are a critical part of the learning journey for many students, and we need to consider examining both University led and individual led strategies of support. We need to also talk to students who don’t pass their resits. What support was missing? Were the barriers academic, personal, or structural? And crucially what interventions might have made a difference.
We need sector-wide conversations about what effective resit support looks like, how it is resourced, and who is responsible. Research on this is scarce, but growing (you can read more about our student-partnered inquiry in our recently published Advance HE case study).
Taking resits seriously is not about lowering standards. It’s about recognising that failure when properly supported may even serve as a pedagogical “leg up” for learning. However, when left unsupported, it risks becoming the moment students fall through the cracks.
Finally!! This is something that has been of a concern for me for years – there’s also the expectation for students, who have likely returned home and not in student accommodation, to return onto campus and sit exams when they have nowhere to stay and may not be in a financial position to do so. The fall back for some of these students who fail resits may be to repeat their studies if their institution allows so as part of their policies and procedures. But that also comes with challenges and a threat to continuation and success, particularly if the… Read more »
Why are students resitting assessments? With the numbers reported here, the university should be classifying resits to test for patterns. The response to resits seems to be coaching. Reasons for resits could include:- 1. Conditions outside of the control of the student determining eventual assessment performance, for example, recruitment criteria. 2. Student did not learn because of teaching practices, for example, assignments weakly constructed. 3. Student did not understand the assessment requirements. 4. Student did not work sufficiently to prepare for assessment. 5. Lifestyle choices affecting performance. 6. Traumatic events. 7. Insufficient preparatory support in the form of study skills.… Read more »
you make an excellent point here. students fail for a variety of reasons, and it is really important to investigate why. It is far too easy to just say the student wasn’t up to it. but there are a huge range of reasons including those you mention above. extenuating circumstances, poor teaching, inappropriate method of assessment. technical problems. (I have heard of a lot of instances where students have failed modules as a result of problems uploading digital assignments.- I feel really strongly about this one because students are often being penalised for faulty it systems. It is not enough… Read more »
8. The trade-off between money and time.
9. The trade-off between money and energy.
10. Social relationships.
This is such an important and overdue conversation. As the article rightly emphasises, resits are pivotal moments in students’ lives – with clear links to continuation, completion, and long-term wellbeing. So why do we continue to treat them as an afterthought? For many students, failure isn’t just an academic setback. It brings dashed hopes for the future, the need to rethink career plans, and immediate financial strain. Students who fail late in the year often lose access to student finance, yet remain contractually bound to pay for accommodation they may no longer need. This combination of emotional, academic, and financial… Read more »
But it doesn’t need staff being made to feel guilty either. Staff are entitled to an amount of annual leave per year and need that to be able to rest and recharge. If the university year runs 365, that is threatened. So either resit students miss out on support or academic staff are not able to take the time they need and deserve.
Very true- this is definitely an area where my instinct to support students clashes with my instinct to support working rights. Teaching staff are just as entitled to their annual leave as anyone and already have a restricted calendar in which to take it; but I’ve encountered so many students going through appeals who tell me at crunch points, they tried to get guidance but only got an automatic email response. When only one academic teaches on a module, as is the case in some of our smaller courses/optional modules, I’m not sure where an easy answer lies- as the… Read more »
Professional services staff too. When I worked in programme administration, we were only allowed to take annual leave outside of term time, which meant that most of it had to be taken after the end of the undergraduate summer term in mid-July. We had to be back in time to process postgraduate assessments and summer resit submissions at the end of August. That’s about 6 weeks for everyone in the team to take their annual leave, and you need at least one person around at all times.
In addition to asking students what kind of support they need, or that they lacked, I would love to see people asking _staff_ (both academic and non-academic) what kind of support _they_ might need to be able to provide that student support. For many of us, summer is the time promised to us to do our research, since there is increasingly no time left over from teaching and admin during term time (and even this “oh, just do your research over summer!” idea is in conflict with the increasing number of taught master’s programmes, whose students are often writing up… Read more »