Students are being othered again – and everyone loses out

Keir Starmer’s speech was pretty strong on communitarianism:

You may not see them on social media, people like this, they are the real face of Britain, painting a fence, running the raffle, cutting the half time orange, or even that gentle knock on the door that checks that your neighbor is all right, that’s real Britain.

Conference, millions of people miles away from Westminster, giving up their time, taking responsibility, making their community better and so. Conference, we will renew Britain with them, because I’ve always said that people with skin in the game make the best decisions for their community.

And so the money we invest in renewal, whether it’s for youth clubs, peers, parks or chippies, we will give control not to politicians, but to people, to those champions of national renewal. Because while I know nobody wants to hear this from a politician. The truth is, we do all have a responsibility to change our country. There are limits to what the state can do on its own.

As I often say, school plays sell out.

One of the big announcements late last week backing all of that up that’s been on the list of things that MPs on panels have been keen to point out has been the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government’s Pride in Place Strategy.

Its targeted investment strand is a pretty substantial commitment to Britain’s most disadvantaged communities, with citizen participation embedded as a core governing principle rather than mere consultation.

Doubly disadvantaged

One major strand of the programme allocates £5 billion over a decade to up to 250 areas identified as “doubly disadvantaged,” and places decision-making power directly in the hands of resident-led Neighborhood Boards that include local businesses, community organizations, and independent chairs.

The boards determine spending priorities – whether for town square regeneration, homelessness programs, or community facilities – marking a deliberate shift from centrally-imposed solutions to locally-driven choices.

The Community Wealth Fund extends the participatory approach further, giving communities direct control over £1-2.5 million over ten years, backed by capacity-building support to develop local confidence and decision-making skills. That represents a marked departure from previous approaches that spread funding thinly across many areas, instead betting heavily on intensive, long-term intervention where communities themselves call the shots.

But one of the problems is the way that those “doubly disadvantaged” places have been chosen.

To pick the places, it’s used a composite of the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) and the Community Needs Index (CNI) to produce an apparently neutral, data-driven shortlist – but it masks as much as it reveals.

Othered and invisible

One of the biggest distortions comes from the way the IMD income domain is constructed. Because it only counts people claiming income-related benefits, most students – despite having very low disposable incomes – are invisible in the measure. That means classic student districts that are likely among the poorest in reality don’t show up as “income deprived” at all.

In Leeds, for example, Hyde Park and the city-centre core both have over 40 per cent of residents recorded as full-time students in Census 2021 – but they fail to appear anywhere near the top of the IMD tables, and so were not selected for Pride in Place.

The result is that PiP’s Leeds picks – Middleton Park Avenue, Seacroft North, Farnley East and Armley – all carry student populations below 30 per cent, while neighbourhoods like Hyde Park or Headingley, with student densities approaching 50 per cent, fall through the cracks.

In Manchester the same pattern repeats – Oxford Road and Fallowfield MSOAs have over a third of their residents in full-time study, but the four areas selected for PiP (Benchill, Harpurhey, Clayton Vale and Gorton South) are outlying estates. In both cities, the places where thousands of young people experience what is effectively hidden poverty are simply missing from the official deprivation map.

The effect is that Pride in Place will channel resources into “left behind” neighbourhoods that exclude those where deprivation is concentrated among transient student populations. That might be politically defensible – investing in “permanent” communities – but it risks ignoring the structural hardship facing large numbers of young people.

If students were counted as low-income, my back-of-the-fag-packet analysis suggests that at least half of the PiP slots in Leeds and Manchester would have flipped into student districts. Instead, those neighbourhoods remain unrecognised – their poverty discounted because it takes the form of home domiciled debt or temporary migration rather than benefits.

In practice, some of the most obviously deprived student areas miss out on community investment. Pride in Place money could have been used to reclaim empty retail for social learning and cultural space, to build dedicated student centres that reduce loneliness, or to support student-led regeneration of high streets hollowed out by retail collapse.

In several European towns and cities we’ve seen on our SU study tours, we’ve seen municipalities backing exactly those kinds of projects – co-working hubs, city-wide student centres, or shared cultural venues that anchor students to the wider community. By contrast, English cities like Plymouth see their student quarters overlooked in favour of outer estates, leaving thousands of young people in shoebox flats with no serious civic offer.

And the problem isn’t just that student areas get excluded. Where a neighbourhood genuinely is deprived for permanent residents but also has a large student population, the metrics become badly distorted. If half of your MSOA is students invisible to IMD’s income domain, the deprivation of the other half gets understated in the rankings.

Painting a fence, running the raffle

Meanwhile, the broader policy framework that surrounds Pride in Place applies universal changes designed to benefit all communities, again with citizen participation woven throughout as both principle and practice. The strategy mandates that all local authorities establish “effective neighbourhood governance,” ensuring community engagement becomes standard operating procedure rather than optional add-on.

New community asset protections, including an expanded Community Right to Buy, give residents concrete powers to purchase treasured local spaces like pubs and community centers. Anti-Social Behaviour Action Plans must be developed with community input, while local planning processes are being reformed to give residents stronger voices in shaping development.

The framework also creates new participatory structures, from expanded Youth Councils to a Civil Society Covenant that resets the relationship between government and community organizations. The measures might not carry the concentrated funding of the targeted programs, but they potentially affect millions more people by fundamentally changing how decisions are made – embedding the principle that those most affected by local choices should have the strongest voice in making them.

The problem is that here, again, universities and students are entirely absent.

Scooby dooby do

What is mentioned are parish and town councils, residents’ associations, faith groups and neighbourhood forums, local charities, housing associations, social enterprises, mutual aid groups, youth clubs, tenants’ federations, sports clubs, cultural and heritage societies, neighbourhood watch schemes and parent–teacher associations, Business Improvement Districts, local Chambers of Commerce, traders’ associations, civic trusts, environmental groups, allotment societies, conservation charities, community safety partnerships and policing neighbourhood boards.

Almost every type of charity, association and community body that ministers point to as rooted and permanent is referenced – but universities, students and their representative structures are nowhere to be seen.

It’s not clear whether the blind spot is because of central government silos or more to do with the civic efforts (or otherwise) of universities. But either way, it also ignores the role that students could be playing in those initiatives.

It also touches agendas that ought to matter hugely for students – loneliness, digital inclusion and youth participation – but again they’re absent. It pledges action on tackling loneliness, boosting digital connectivity, and expanding Youth Councils, but nowhere does it acknowledge the specific needs of student populations, despite overwhelming evidence of student loneliness, patchy digital access in private housing, and the lack of civic structures for 18–25s.

The result is that students miss out not just in the targeted funding strand, but across the universal reforms designed to strengthen community life.

Get a grip

As I argued in Doing better, getting better: Getting a grip on the full-time student experience, students could and should be recognised not just as learners, but as citizens with rights to connect and contribute – from secure, affordable housing to structured opportunities for civic participation and community service.

In practice that means seeing students not only as consumers of courses or tenants in expensive private blocks, but as people entitled to the same civic infrastructure as anyone else – places to meet, affordable transport, access to community amenities, and a genuine role in shaping the future of their neighbourhoods.

Whether we’re thinking about the thousands of young people who live in halls in the centre of a city, or the commuters who bus in from the suburbs, the question shouldn’t just be how to keep them quiet or monetise their spending, but how to embed them in strategies for regeneration, cohesion and resilience.

A Pride in Place strategy that omitted pensioners, parents, or ethnic minorities would rightly be condemned as deficient. The same could and should be true for students. Three million people living in almost every city and town in the country represent an immense reservoir of civic energy and potential – and when their participation is properly structured, it is not just communities that benefit.

Credit-bearing civic engagement, whether through volunteering, co-curricular projects or service learning, has long been shown to enhance students’ education, build transferable skills and strengthen social cohesion across generational and cultural divides.

Embedding student-led activity into local planning and governance would not only improve their lives but could transform the fortunes of the communities in which they live. Without that recognition, the programme risks hardwiring town-gown division when the very opposite is there for the taking.

Better PR is one thing, but until students are recognised as citizens and universities “feel” part of a place, the polling will not shift. Public First’s finding that only 6 per cent of people back more funding for universities, and the UPP Foundation’s evidence that over a third of the public – rising to 53 per cent in working-class communities – have never even set foot on a campus, speak to the scale of the disconnect.

Without tackling that isolation through structures that give local student voices real power and responsibility, Pride in Place risks reinforcing the perception of universities as distant and irrelevant – rather than reshaping them as engines of shared civic renewal. That’s your “opportunity” mission right there.