The Secret Life of Students 2025

UK higher education continues to strive to live up to its globally respected reputation for rigorous academic standards, innovative research, historic institutions and high rankings, even as financial pressures bear down on the scale of what can be offered to students, and the sector’s scope to respond to a changing educational landscape. Reimagining curriculum and academic support and streamlining delivery can take the sector so far, but at some point the cracks begin to show.

While some may claim that the future of higher education lies in a great unbundling and fragmentation, we’d argue that reports of the death of the full-time three-year degree have been greatly exaggerated. With a new government commitment to access and student success, within the framework of a regional regeneration agenda, there’s an opportunity to build a different vision for a full-time student experience, one that acknowledges all the dimensions of students’ lives – their learning, their work, and their health – and seeks to imagine a student experience that can meet every student’s distinct needs and future potential.

As Wonkhe’s unique student experience event returns for its seventh year, we’ll try to climb out of the doldrums over the student experience debate, asking the question – what would it take for the UK to offer the world’s best student experience? Bringing together policy makers and experts with sector leaders and managers, as well as student leaders and students’ union managers, we’ll get beyond trying to discern “the student interest” and work towards an ambitious, positive vision for students’ participation in higher education.

We’ll also spend some time interrogating some of the wicked problems associated with particular groups of students in higher education: disabled students, postgraduate researchers; students who live locally (or less locally) to their campus; and those coming to the UK to study as international students to explore how thinking about distinctive student experiences can uncover new perspectives on all students’ lives.

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. And at every stage we’ll be asking for your ideas, to create a shared optimistic vision for the future, and to think through how to make it real in practice. The Secret Life of Students is the essential event for anyone working on policy and delivery for students.

Event information

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, a delegate list and guide to the event before the day.

Agenda

9.30 A new vision for the student experience

Jim Dickinson introduces the day with a tour of what we know about the student condition, and the kind of vision for student futures the evidence is pointing to.

10.10 Student story – Liam White

10.15 Learning, work and life – creating the conditions for a better future

Mark Peace, Chris Millward, Amira Campbell and Rille Raaper digest and discuss what needs to change to build a fresh, positive vision for students that recognises all dimensions of their lives and ambitions.

11.00 Break for refreshments and networking

11.30 Student story – Mihita Parekh

11.35 Deep-dive: international students 

In a fireside chat with Sanam Arora we discuss how UK HE can sustain its appeal to international students and ensure it lives up to its promise to offer a truly international experience.

12.00 The future that students want to see
Students’ union representatives Jimena Alamo, Alvina Imran, and Jorgen Clemmensen-Floholm share their insight about what students want from their experience and the kind of changes they are seeking to make their vision a reality. Higher education expert and academic Liz Thomas responds.

12.50 Lunch and live recording of The Wonkhe Show podcast

1.50 Student story – Paige Rivers

1.55 Deep-dive: disabled students

With increasing numbers of students arriving with or experiencing disability during their studies, Abigail Hamer and Anna Freed think through what it takes to make the student experience inclusive by design.

2.20 What is a world-class learning experience?

Active, authentic, inclusive, research-led, interdisciplinary, flexible…incorporating sustainability, intercultural awareness, digital fluency, global citizenship…and maybe even fun? There’s lots of aspirational chatter about the future of learning, but what happens when aspiration meets reality? Higher education leaders Sam Grogan and Helen King explore how to build learning environments fit for the future.

3.00 How to make a student city work

Students’ experience is geographical: it happens in accommodation, on public transport, in their GP’s surgery, in work, and in the voting booth. Students and graduates bring economic and cultural benefits to their regions yet they are rarely considered as objects of policy. Susan Kenyon and Joel Dowson draw on research and practice to ask how universities can influence regional policymakers to attract and retain students and graduates.

3.30 Break for refreshments and networking

4.00 Student story – Molly Pemberton

4.05 Deep dive: postgraduate researchers

Matthew Beach and Ewan Nicholas identify the key pain points for PGRs, and we think through what their experience can teach us about the kind of self-directed research-led student experiences that many aspire to weave throughout the higher education learning experience.

4.30 From vision to reality – how higher education can prepare for the future

Realising a new vision means letting go of how things used to be and finding new ways of thinking, doing and delivering. Drawing on research conducted with Advance HE on how higher education institutions are navigating complex and uncertain futures, Shaid Mahmood, Charles Knight and Darcie Jones assess what change could look like in practice – and what higher education needs to do right now to start bringing the future into being.

5.10 Students will change the world 

Jacob Blasius, executive director of the Global Students Forum, offers a global vision and perspective to round off the day.

5.30 Close of event: join us for a drinks reception at the Shaw Theatre.