The Secret Life of Students 2024

So much of students’ lives takes place under the radar – yet its students’ encounters around campus, their confidence in independent learning, and the pressures of juggling their work and personal commitments that shape how they engage with learning and teaching. To really enable students to thrive requires knowing about the full extent of their lives, not just the bits that universities can most readily see and touch.

Yet time and money are in short supply for universities and students – and with no let up on funding in sight, carefully choosing interventions that will help students to both survive and thrive has become both more important and even tougher. Deepening our collective understanding of what is in universities’ gift to influence and how to do the things that make a difference, is vital.

As Wonkhe’s unique student experience event returns for its sixth year, we’ll be interrogating the contemporary higher education policy questions through the student lens – bringing together sector leaders and managers, as well as student leaders and students’ union managers, to figure out how to respond in the student interest.

What role should universities and SUs play in stoking, or calming, conflict on campus? What are the expectations that we should place on students themselves to create a good learning experience? How are they learning – and how can we both measure it and support it – outside of the classroom?

On the day we’ll round up key findings into the student experience from the past year, and launch exciting new findings on the student experience beyond the classroom. It’s the essential event for anyone working on policy and delivery for students.

Venue

The Secret Life of Students takes place at the Shaw Theatre, a short walk from Euston, Kings Cross and St Pancras train stations. All delegates will receive full joining instructions, including further venue and access details.

Agenda 

9.30 Welcome and introduction from Team Wonkhe

PART 1: Campus cultures – are students thriving?

9.40 What do we know about the conditions that help students thrive? 

The latest and most powerful insights on the student condition from Wonkhe and Cibyl’s Belong student survey platform and from across the HE sector.

Jim Dickinson

10.10 Student story – loneliness among international students

10.15 An agenda for student health 

What if poor mental health was a symptom rather than a cause of students’ struggles? The more we uncover about students’ lives the more we find links between students’ living conditions, sleeping and eating, their learning environments, and their mental state. In this session, we’ll explore what a holistic agenda for student health might look like – both for higher education providers and for the policymakers who increasingly seem to assume that all of this is primarily universities’ problem.

Dominique Thompson, John de Pury

11.00 Break & refreshments 

11.30 Student story – social confidence and navigating other students

11.35 Balancing the free speech-inclusion see-saw 

The Office for Students is simultaneously introducing regulation  around harassment and misconduct which expects higher education providers to protect students from harms on the basis of protected characteristics, and implementing legislation designed to ensure anyone can say whatever they like, within the law. In the abstract, it should be possible to champion both free speech and inclusion, but as the culture wars show no signs of abating, media scrutiny continues to ramp up, and hot-button issues provoke strong feelings in all sorts of quarters, how can universities achieve this complex balancing act of values and duties?

Kirsty Sedgman, Smita Jamdar, Andy Winter

12.30  Lunch & open recording of The Wonkhe Show podcast

PART 2: Learning in the real world

1.30 What do we know about what’s shaping how students spend their time? 

The latest and most powerful insights on the student condition from Wonkhe and Cibyl’s Belong student survey platform and from across the HE sector.

Livia Scott

1.45 Student story – part-time work and struggling to make ends meet

1.50 What are the consequences of student time poverty and what can be done about it?

Students are undertaking more paid work alongside study, and have more complex lives – in practice, straining to cram a full-time study load into part-time hours. A realistic student finance package could ease the burden, but given nobody’s expecting one of those any time soon, it’s essential to get real about the natural consequences of the issue – including students stretching the accepted use of generative AI tools to produce assessed work to their very limits. Is there a version of the future that can design a learning environment that engages with reality?

Mark Peace, Eve Alcock

2.35 Student story – how students are completing assignments now

2.40 Academic support, meaningful learning, and student agency

Rebuilding student learning communities post-pandemic, during a cost of living crisis, as generative AI puts pressure on traditional forms of study and assessment, requires radical thinking. We’ll hear from some of the people who are formulating new ways of supporting student academic development, rethinking what counts as meaningful learning, and creating the conditions for students to play a more active role in building and driving their own thriving learning communities.

Jean Mutton, Cathy Minett-Smith, Adam Zeidan

3.30 Break & refreshments

4.00 Student story – attendance regulations and dodgy part-time work 

4.05 Reimagining Student Futures two years on

In 2022 the UPP Foundation Student Futures Commission set out recommendations to help UK higher education rebuild student belonging and engagement following the Covid-19 pandemic. Two years on, we take stock of how the pandemic has changed higher education, and think through what remains to be done.

Richard Brabner, Mary Curnock Cook, Tim Jones, Simeon Anyalemechi

5.00 Close of event & drinks reception – all welcome 

For any questions, email events@wonkhe.com.