Why ‘compassion’ is student wellbeing’s newest buzzword

‘Compassion’ is the word of the moment in the HE sector. But why, and what does that look like in practice?

Join host Jenny Shaw and an expert panel for a deep dive into how compassion is shaping new approaches across UK Higher Education, in student support and beyond.

This lively discussion covers how compassionate communications can enhance the student experience, how to integrate compassion into your organisation’s policies and procedures, and examples of this in practice across accommodation and university functions.

Our expert panel includes:

• Dr Kathryn Waddington, Emeritus Fellow in Psychology at University of Westminster
• Julia Hunt, Mental Health Clinical Lead at University of Central Lancashire
• Katy Lemmon, Accommodation Manager at University of Liverpool
• Becca Hayhurst, Head of Resident Experience at Unite Students

You can listen to the episode, or read the transcript, below.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are the personal views of individual guest speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of Unite Students and/or Unite Group plc. 

Episode transcript: Compassion – Student wellbeing’s newest buzzword

Jenny Shaw: Hello and welcome to Accommodation Matters, where we explore issues that shape student accommodation and the wider student experience.

Last November, the Higher Education Mental Health Implementation Taskforce – or HEMHIT, as it’s also known – released its compassionate communication statement. Now for full disclosure, I was part of that project as part of my secondment to the taskforce. The statement set out clear principles for a more compassionate approach that guides how we communicate with students and crucially the policies and the procedures that affect their daily lives.

And it drew on good practice from across the sector, things that were really working and it was co-created with the Office of the Independent Adjudicator. So it’s a statement that carries real weight when it comes to student complaints, making it more than just guidance.

Compassion in higher education is not just a nice to have. It does have real measurable benefits. So for example, Mohawk College in Canada, they’re one of the pioneers of this approach, and they tested out more compassionate communications with students about their academic results. And what happened was an improvement in student wellbeing and academic outcomes too.

But what are the implications for student accommodation and for other campus services could compassion be the change that we all need right now? Here to make sense of this big topic, we have four fabulous guests.

Kathryn Waddington: Hello. Thank you, Jenny. I’m Kathryn Waddington. I’m an Emeritus Fellow in Psychology at the University of Westminster, and Jenny said I can do a plug for a book I’m currently writing called How to Be a Compassionate Academic. My University of Westminster email will be in the podcast notes, and I’d love to hear any stories of compassion from anybody who’s interested. So thank you for that. Jenny.

Julia Hunt: Hi. Thanks, Jenny. I’m Julia Hunt. I’m from the University of Central Lancashire based at the Preston campus, and I’m one of the clinical leads in the student support and wellbeing services.

Katy Lemmon: Hi Jenny. Thanks for the invite. My name’s Katy Lemmon, and I’m Accommodation Manager at the University of Liverpool.

Becca Hayhurst: Hi, I’m Becca Hayhurst. I’m Head of Resident Experience at Unite Students.

Jenny Shaw: Thank you, Becca. So Kathryn, I would like to start with you if that’s okay. Can you tell us just a little bit about what compassion is? What does it mean for higher education?

Kathryn Waddington: Okay. Really, I think there are four key components. One is noticing suffering, distress, discomfort. So you have to have your eyes and ears open to be able to notice it in the first place. It’s also about feeling empathy, but without understanding the causes and the context, it tends to be just kind words. So it’s about noticing, feeling empathy, understanding the causes and the context, and most importantly, taking action.

And I think what’s really important, I’ve got a definition here that was derived from some research that I did with a colleague, Brian Bonaparte, with undergraduate psychology students as co-researchers, when we wanted to find out what compassion in the classroom and compassionate pedagogy looked like.

And this is student-led, recognising and noticing the difference, discrimination and bias in how people are being treated, how students are learning and being taught, and the compassionate actions both strategic and small that we all need to take to promote and support student and staff wellbeing. So that’s my take on compassion.

Jenny Shaw: And why is it so talked about these days? It’s something that we maybe haven’t heard about really in any way until quite recently.

Kathryn Waddington: Yeah, there’s a definite – what I call a ‘compassion turn’, but it’s definitely as we’re coming to the, well, not even the tail-end of neoliberal ideology, but universities can be quite tough places to learn and to work. That’s one reason.

Jenny Shaw: So what makes it authentic? What would authentic compassion look like?

Kathryn Waddington: I think it’s in the really small things that people do and the fact that people take the time to stop and notice and look and listen. But it’s the little things that make it authentic rather than the big gestures. And again, I’ve said this several times, if universities ever have a compassionate excellence framework, which means that Vice Chancellors can put shiny notices in their offices, we’ve lost the plot. It’s the little interpersonal day-to-day things that make the huge difference.

Jenny Shaw: So it’s sort of how you do things?

Kathryn Waddington: Rather than what you do. Yes. And again, we should also avoid conspicuous compassion, which says, “Oh, aren’t I a great, kind person?” But if it’s not followed up with the small acts of kindness, then it’s just all talk.

Jenny Shaw: Thank you. Julia, I know that the University of Central Lancashire has done lots of work to make your processes more compassionate. It’d be great to get into just some of the details of that. How did you approach it?

Julia Hunt: So we’ve got a quarterly meeting within the university, so our suicide prevention review group, and that’s made up of a number of stakeholders from across the university. So what we do within that group is kind of come together, discuss things in the sector as well as things that have happened within the university. So kind of near-miss cases, as you know, we have those sometimes and lessons learned, but within the sector we were focusing a lot on what was coming out of HEMHIT and the priority areas there.

We were covering everything, we’re engaged in the charter, we’re doing early analytics in terms of student wellbeing, knowing when there’s issues and getting in there early. But one of the things that we weren’t proactively working towards was around, as it was known then, compassionate commitment. So from those discussions, I think it was March last year, we decided – or our director of student support services decided – that we would set up a compassionate communications working group.

I chair that and stakeholders from those areas where communications are most likely to cause distress. So academic registry, finance, academic registry, of course covering areas like student immigration and compliance teams, student casework. So we took those big areas first, those that were most likely to send out those communications, be they of an academic or behavioural nature, and set about looking at what we’re going to do introspectively in our own team areas.

And that’s how it started really. And we’ve come quite away from that point in March, but that’s how we set up.

Jenny Shaw: It sounds very easy, doesn’t it, to say, “Oh, we’re going to be compassionate now.” But actually there’s a lot of detail, particularly when it comes to communications. How did you go about that?

Julia Hunt: Well, once we got the stakeholders involved, and there’s a few other areas involved as well, so around our student achievement services, and that’s made up of a number of different working parts to that. We have our achievement coaches – they have a lot of contact with students in terms of their academic progress, et cetera, and some pastoral element to that as well.

But yeah, this was kind of pre-release of the commitment of course, but we kind of knew the things that we would be looking at. So a particular focus on release of communications, be that academic or conduct behavioural outcomes. So looking at some universities we were aware were maybe doing an embargo on those kinds of communications on a Friday or they were just looking at releases on a morning so that there was more support scaffolding around students who may require it.

So there was those things we knew about looking at areas where there was a lot of, one of my colleagues describes it as, legalese. So within student immigration and compliance team within the student casework area, it was stripping back that legalese for want of a better term and looking at where we could put things into plain English.

Because there’s some language that’s used that even adults haven’t come across, that those who are quite young, 18-19, have never seen this terminology before. So stripping those things back.

I think the biggest thing is getting the buy-in from people and understanding why it’s important. So we looked at the why: why are we communicating like this? And sadly looking at very tragic cases where communications and processes have had quite catastrophic consequences. And we know that there’s, in terms of suicide, there’s more than one causal factor.

It’s not simple, but I think getting that buy-in, understanding the why, and then looking at the importance of doing it. And actually I think sometimes particularly behind the scenes where colleagues work in areas where they’re not necessarily student-facing a lot of the time, it can become quite mechanical. And that’s not because anybody wants to cause any distress, there’s never any motive to do with that. It just becomes a process forgetting that there’s a person on the other side of it.

So it’s really kind of like resetting, putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes. How do we want this to land? What are we trying to say? But also, again, it’s been spoken about earlier – but it’s not what we say, it’s how we say it. And sometimes the outcomes of things aren’t going to be what a student wants to hear, but how we phrase that, how we say it, the scaffolding we put around it is really important.

Jenny Shaw: And have you seen any impacts on students since you’ve been doing this work?

Julia Hunt: So this is one of the areas that we need to do more work on. We’re looking at the ‘how’s, but in terms of the after effects or the impact it’s had, no – but that is an area that we’re looking at. So how we get student feedback on this along with obviously the rollout to the wider university because communications go out day in, day out from all areas. It’s not just these particular stakeholder groups that I’ve talked about.

So I have drafted along with the working group, a compassionate communications guidance document, and as part of that we’re looking at how to get student feedback as well and how to engage the rest of the university with this as well.

Jenny Shaw: Thanks, Julia. Just there’s such a lot of work goes into this, isn’t there.

Katy, what does compassion mean in a student accommodation context? Because it’s not an area that we’ve particularly focused on, I think, within the sector, but is this thinking starting to come into student accommodation do you think?

Katy Lemmon: Yeah, I think it’s definitely starting to make its way into student accommodation and I think compassion in student accommodation has always been present, just not necessarily spoken about.

It’s been there in recruiting the right teams, it’s been there in supporting the students through ResLife and pastoral services. It’s always been there, but it hasn’t necessarily been embedded as a culture I suppose. So for me, I think that compassion within student accommodation falls into two main areas.

The first is our people and the second is our processes and making sure that both of those work together and provide a really good environment for our students to thrive, but also actually provide a great environment for our staff and our teams to work as well and make sure that they’re supported through those sort of difficult and challenging situations that we all know can crop up within student accommodation.

So I think one of the things that we’ve seen quite recently, actually within the last few months is that there is now research and feedback from students to support this idea that we should be working more compassionately within student accommodation. And a big part of what we’re seeing at the moment is exactly what Julia was saying and Kathryn about the small parts of it and those little acts of kindness and those small changes to processes can make a difference to those students.

And we’re seeing this now fed back from students to say that actually those small interactions are really key for them. From a staff perspective, I would say it’s really around promoting a culture of kindness. It’s about making sure that you are recruiting your teams really well and you are actually having compassion built into your recruitment processes.

I think it’s a really key area to find out, especially for people who are working in student accommodation – we want to make sure they’re people people and that they can go in and support students where it’s needed.

Jenny Shaw: Yeah, thank you. While you were talking, I was just thinking that accommodation teams are uniquely placed to spot those small little things earlier than anyone else usually in the university. So there’s lots of opportunities there aren’t there to show that compassion.

Katy Lemmon: Yeah, there absolutely is. And that’s why I think it’s really important to embed, where you can, compassion into your recruitment practices. So you are getting people with the right skill sets to be able to pick up on those little nuances because a very basic interaction of a student coming to collect a piece of post from reception can actually be a far more in-depth and important interaction than what anybody realises at that point.

If it’s a student who is maybe becoming withdrawn, maybe hasn’t been attending their lectures and just needs that sort of contact point of how are you doing, how’s your day? That can have a really positive impact on that student.

I think as well – I don’t want to bring up the dreaded Covid – but possibly through Covid and possibly before that, I think student accommodation went on a trajectory of becoming very systems-driven and everything was done where possible online or it was done through a system, and ultimately to pick up that sort of heavy lifting inside of it to free up people’s time to be able to be on-site and to be involved in other things, which is great.

But then I think we lost a lot of human interaction within that. And what we’re definitely seeing now is a move back to that human element of our processes. And that’s something that we’ve been really trying to do at the university is build back in those touchpoints within those processes. So exactly what Julia was saying, where processes can become very just behind the scenes, not really much interaction within it, we’re trying to put that back in.

And one of our examples of that is around our contract termination process, which sounds very dry and very boring, but this is a very common policy within all student accommodation where students for one reason or another will need to leave accommodation. And it’s obviously down to each individual university or provider to have their own framework on how those are assessed and decided on whether they’re going to be released from their contracts or not.

For us, through Covid and slightly before that, it went onto a very systems-based process where the students would go onto their online accounts, they submit a termination request and then that would be reviewed by one of my team who would then say yes or no through the system.

So the whole process for the student was a very faceless process, when actually there’s a lot of feeling and worry and concern that probably sits behind that decision, especially if it’s not just a decision to leave accommodation, but it’s potentially tied into a decision to leave university.

What we’ve done over the last couple of years is tie a real human element back into that. So the student can still put their request online, but as soon as that then comes through, we actually invite them in for a meeting with us. And the point of that is to have a chat with them and actually find out what the reason is behind them wanting to leave accommodation. Is there a wider issue that we can potentially tie up with our academic compliance teams? Is there something that we could do within student services as well?

And through taking that approach, we’ve actually seen a reduction in our cancellations from accommodation. We’ve actually retained more students in accommodation and we’ve been able to fix those issues for them. A lot of them have just been very, very basic things where they’ve not necessarily been getting on with their flatmates and have wanted a change but haven’t known how to approach us for that change to actually find them something that’s more suitable. So we’ve been able to resolve those issues.

We’ve been able to pick up where there’s been course concerns. For example, we had a student who just wasn’t happy on their course, but felt they couldn’t approach their student experience team to have that discussion. And so we could then put the framework in place to support them through that and make sure that they were also tying in with advice and guidance so they could pick up on any other wellbeing worries that there might be there as well.

So yeah, we’ve completely knocked a lot of our processes now on the head and started to put those human elements back in because we’ve had such success with some really key processes within accommodation.

Jenny Shaw: And it’s so good for the students and for you as well, a real opportunity to make a difference in that moment.

Becca, I want to come to you because I know that your team’s been working on some new approaches that bring compassion into some of the things you do as well. Do you want to tell me about them?

Becca Hayhurst: Yeah, absolutely. So we’ve been working on a couple of different things that really help bring some of this compassion to life, and one of the areas is to do with our service principles. So our service philosophy is centred around CARE, which stands for Connect, Act, Respect, and Encourage. And it’s like our golden thread of how we communicate, how we interact with students, and we stripped it right back to brilliant basics. That’s been our focus for this year.

And compassion is at the heart of that. So the day that you move into your accommodation, it’s a huge day, it’s a huge day for you, your family, supporters, whoever’s with you. And we’ve all mentioned those sort of process and transactional activities and I think we’d strayed into quite transactional territory. So by stripping it back actually, we focused on the little things, those things that make a difference.

Using people’s names, introducing yourself, connecting with them, learning something about them, trying to remember that so that you can connect people to others. So compassion then becomes more natural and we don’t need to make a big deal about being compassionate. It becomes part of who you are, how you speak, and how you interact.

So that’s the first area of work that we focused on and we’ve seen the results of that. We’ve seen improved sense of community, improved sense of care and support. And actually what we’ve done is not anything groundbreaking. It’s those simple compassionate moments.

So that was stage one. And then stage two is that we have looked at our Support to Stay framework, which is our framework for ensuring that students are supported in those moments of difficulty or mental health crisis that we’re referring back into universities appropriately.

So we were using that framework very much for student mental health and wellbeing and crisis moments or incidents. And actually we were dealing with conduct matters very separately from that. And what we’ve done is built conduct into that framework.

So actually no matter what students are experiencing or faced with, our staff can approach that situation in quite a structured way and then giving them the skills and the right tone to be able to manage that.

Again, that golden thread of CARE runs through that. So all your conversations, whether it’s about conduct, whether it’s about wellbeing, have the same tone, the same respect, and we’re introducing different levels of conversation to be able to conduct those meetings.

So your first level is a CARE conversation. It’s understanding the situation – why did it happen, where are they coming from, what are the challenges, what are the mitigating factors? And really listening to that. So even if it’s a conduct issue, you’re taking the same approach as you would if it was a wellbeing difficulty.

Then the next phase is a coaching conversation and then a final phase is a critical conversation. So they’re escalated, but the tone, the compassion, the way that you communicate is consistent all the way through.

And then the other bit that we’ve done as part of that is take a look at some of the correspondence that we send out. So the letters that they get, summarising those meetings, stripping out some of that legal language that Julia was talking about, and actually keeping it really human, really informative, always signposting for where to get support and actually making it more appropriate for the reader.

So I think we’ve moved into a space where this should become more natural, not forced. Actually, this should just become the norm.

So it will be interesting to see how it’s perceived. Some of the work that we’ve done, we’ve already been able to evaluate and we can see the effects of it. And moving forward, I’m hopeful that our teams will feel that this comes naturally. We’re not asking them to do anything new or different, we’re just asking them to be a little bit more gentle, listen to what people are saying, and then build that into their work and their conversations.

Jenny Shaw: When all of you have been speaking, I’ve actually been really struck by the scaffolding that’s been put around this and how much detail you need to go into because it just sounds really easy to say, “Oh, just be compassionate, just be kind.” But without those processes, those frameworks, those systems, you miss those opportunities and you can’t be sure that it’s going to be done in a consistent way throughout the service.

Becca Hayhurst: I was just going to comment on something that Katy said before about recruitment and having the right people with the right skills. And I think that’s part of it, Jenny. It’s us being able to trust that our staff and our teams will take the right tone and have the right approach. Even if they’re having a really bad day, they still need to be able to operate in the right way.

And I think giving the right toolkit to be able to do that and giving a bit of guidance on the how, including where we’re having difficult conversations in some cases is how do you do that but still keep that compassion? So a bit of scaffolding it around that is essential, especially when I can’t speak for others, but for ourselves, we have difficulty recruiting sometimes and then it’s harder to get the right people with the right skills and the right attitude. So there’s more emphasis down on having to give them the right toolkit to be able to do it.

So I think that scaffolding and that framework is essential to be able to just manage some of these challenges that they have to deal with.

Jenny Shaw: And you mentioned conduct, and that’s a question I’ve had over the last year. How do you get that right balance between challenge, appropriate challenge, things that you will and will not condone, but also being compassionate? How do you find that balance, particularly in something like conduct processes?

Kathryn Waddington: A phrase, if I can come in gently, that I’ve used is- it might sound like a contradiction in terms, but sometimes you have to be ruthless with compassion. I’ve had situations – certainly when I was a Head of Psychology, and previously I had a background in nursing – sometimes you have to break bad news. You have to break bad news, but you have to do it with compassion, but you also have to be sometimes actually quite tough, that kind of tough love.

You also have to judge it on a one-to-one basis. You can never have a one-size fits all.

Jenny Shaw: And how does that work in accommodation, Katy?

Katy Lemmon: Yeah, I completely agree with what Kathryn just said then. It does definitely come down to taking into consideration each request or each situation that you come across. It’s not about just saying yes or saying no, it’s about actually understanding the why’s and the how’s and the context behind it.

What we try to do is we try through quite structured training with our teams, we try to empower them to be able to do that sort of low-level information finding and also decision-making as well to be able to make those decisions around whether it’s conduct and also hold those conversations compassionately.

I think the other thing that the university do really well is that, and I think all universities probably work in a similar way, is that our support and our conduct teams are two very different teams. They are kept separate for that purpose because although somebody is potentially going through some sort of conduct or disciplinary process equally, they still need support and guidance and be supported through their university life.

And so those teams are kept very, very separate and independent from each other, and that works really well for us in those complex situations.

Jenny Shaw: Yeah, thank you. Becca, do you want to weigh in on this one?

Becca Hayhurst: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting what you said about keeping those teams separate. I would love it if we could double our workforce and we have people that deal with the conduct and people that deal with the wellbeing. And I think one of the challenges that we have in property is actually that’s always going to be the same person, but they’re just dealing with it in that first instance and obviously can then signpost into universities.

But you definitely can’t shy away from those conduct conversations and it goes hand in hand with the age group, which we’re working – alcohol, nights out, whatever else. We’re always going to have some challenges that come up out of that. So I think it really is about being equipped and prepared to be able to have those conversations, not shying away from them.

I think for us, having those points of escalation is one of the ways of managing that because you can’t give free range to people to behave however they like with zero consequences. That’s not how society works, not how accommodation works. So there have to be consequences, but there’s also got to be a level of responsibility, personal responsibility from our students to be able to acknowledge when they’ve done something wrong.

I think one of the roles that we play, and compassionate communication plays, is helping them to learn and understand and moderate behaviour and hopefully see improvements. And that’s academic accommodation, whatever the setting, we have got a role to play in helping to develop brilliant human beings so that they go off and work and behave appropriately when they do.

Jenny Shaw: Part of their education, isn’t it?

Becca Hayhurst: Absolutely. Yeah.

Jenny Shaw: So one of the compassionate communication principles is inclusivity. Now everyone knows I bang on about this a lot, but I’d like to hear from you – why do you think that that is an important part of compassion? Or do you disagree with that? I’m open to thoughts on this one.

Kathryn Waddington: I think for me, coming back to the definition of compassionate pedagogy that we’ve developed in students as co-researchers and importantly equal thinking partners, it’s about recognising and noticing, and again, noticing is so important, the different discrimination and bias in how people are being treated and how students are learning and being taught.

But the thing that I’ve noticed is some people are completely oblivious to people feeling excluded, not included, coming from a different culture. So you really have to do a piece of awareness raising sometimes around that. I’ll give you a concrete example.

We did – again, when I was Head of Psychology – a reciprocal mentoring scheme with some of, at the time the term was BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic students), undergraduate psychology students who were mentors – they weren’t mentored, they were mentors – to senior university leaders, which we have subsequently published, and it’s on our university’s website to actually get an understanding of what it was like.

And I can remember one of the senior team saying, I have no idea how expensive it was for some of our international students, it cost to bring their families over for graduation day. I had no idea. And so I think things like reciprocal mentoring opportunities where students can have honest conversations about their experience, particularly with people who are in positions of power and influence to make a difference and take actions.

Jenny Shaw: Thank you. Katy?

Katy Lemmon: Yeah, completely agree with that. And I also think it’s really important when looking at communication, looking specifically at face-to-face communication, I think it’s really important that we have teams that reflect the diversity of our student populations because we know that people are more likely to open up to somebody who understands and respects their culture. And so again, this comes down then to a really strong recruitment strategy and to make sure that you’re getting the right people into those positions.

Also then once you’ve got your teams built and in place, is again pulling on that training and development of them and making sure that your teams have got the confidence within themselves to ask questions and to then signpost and provide the additional advice of where students then go and find further support if they need it.

I think it’s so important to take that approach with our teams and within student accommodation, especially because they are such diverse groups of students all thrown together. Some of them want to be there, some of them not so necessarily wanting to be in that accommodation. And so have people that can support them through that complete change of lifestyle from what they’ve been used to, I think is a massive benefit.

Julia Hunt: I think it’s about understanding mode of delivery as well, isn’t it? Depending on what area you’re in within a university and what the communications are around that. If you know that certain students have challenges in terms of processing information, anything about their background, so what kind of family support, social support they have, that should also guide you as to what mode you use to deliver certain communications as well.

Jenny Shaw: Is that similar to taking a trauma-informed approach, for example?

Julia Hunt: Yeah, where possible. Yeah, we can’t know everything about everybody’s background, but we know the students who make disclosures on disabilities in terms of social communication disorders. And we might know other things about students if you’re a personal tutor for example, or you’ve worked with a particular student and just within student support services or something about their background. But it is just where possible that very careful thought about mode of delivery and if face-to-face is better than to do that.

Jenny Shaw: Thank you. Kathryn, I want to come back to you because I know you’ve been advising on a project called Compassionate Campus and it’d be great to hear a little bit more about that, what that entails.

Kathryn Waddington: Yeah, sure. I’m an external advisory board member on a big project of which the Compassionate Campus is part of.

So I’ll say a little bit about the big project. It’s called Nurture-U, and they’ve got a fantastic website. It’s a six-university funded research study led by the University of Exeter. Essentially it’s about promoting student wellbeing and mental health and then their kind of strapline is “Research with students, for students and by students.” So again, it’s very student-led.

The Compassionate Campus is being carried out by two of the six universities, so the University of Exeter and Kings College London. And essentially their approach to compassion on campus is about understanding and helping others, especially those in need and nurturing students to thrive.

They have, for example, a community garden and a place for student community is really important and the notion of compassionate conversations. So they’ve got some really good initiatives.

And if you just Google ‘Nurture-U’, there’s a whole range of things that are there and it’s a really good long-term research study. And I suppose just one other thing in relation to things like a compassionate campus more generally, you know that when you’re buying a house and you think, “Oh, I could live here, it just feels right.”

A compassionate campus, the minute you walk through the door, whether you’re a staff student, visitor, parent, contractor – it should feel compassionate.

Jenny Shaw: And that’s so important for student accommodation, isn’t it? If that’s your home away from home, first time you leave home, it’d be great to have that feeling when you walk in.

We are coming towards the end of the show, and I do have a final question for each of you. Could you suggest just one small act or change that would help to bring compassion to life? And Becca, can I start with you?

Becca Hayhurst: I have to go first. Okay. I have actually thought about this. It’s not a little thing. It’s around collaboration and it’s that crossover between the academic world and accommodation, particularly around difficult times in the academic calendar. So receiving results, that’s a big one, hand-in deadlines and things like that.

I think there is a space for more collaboration so that we can focus on doing that compassionately together, particularly where you’re giving students their academic results and they’re not going to be what they wanted or expected and they’re in their accommodation without their family around them. How do we deal with those situations much more compassionately and in a more joined up way.

It’ll help to manage risk, but also it’s just a much more gentle experience for them. I think it’s a really easy one to do, but that’s what I would be looking for.

Jenny Shaw: That’s a great idea. Thanks Becca. Katy?

Katy Lemmon: So I’ve also thought about my answer to this and I just have to say, stay with this. Okay. It’s got some reasoning behind it. So outside of student accommodation, I am a 12-year-old pony girl. I love ponies. I’ve got my own horse. I’m very lucky to be in that situation. And with horses, they obviously can’t talk to you, they can’t give you any guidance on how they’re feeling except for through the reactions.

So you have to really learn really quickly how to pick up on very small, nuanced behaviour changes, like if there’s an issue or anything around it.

What I’m trying to say with this is my tip is if you are having a conversation with somebody, although humans can talk, they won’t necessarily give you much of a response other than something that’s quite face value.

So if your spider senses start tingling and you think that maybe you need to delve a bit deeper, have the confidence to delve a bit deeper and ask a leading question and see if you can get anything out of it, because that might really help that person.

Jenny Shaw: That’s a great tip. Thanks Katy. Julia?

Julia Hunt: I suppose something quite similar, the NHS – you might have heard of it – have a public health behaviour change type strapline that they’ve had for some time called ‘Make every contact count’. And this is something that was talked about quite a bit about a year ago within the university and one of our BCG members took that and threw it out there to some senior leaders and said, it doesn’t matter where we sit in the university, we can all make every contact count.

So just for staff, staff to students, staff to staff, students to students. Wouldn’t it be great if we could roll out this, make every contact count with that smile and just looking out for people, particularly if they might be on their own. “Are you okay?” And just asking those questions and then just kind of offer that other information about support services. It’s just taking that opportunity really where you can.

Jenny Shaw: I think that’s great. Great tip, Kathryn.

Kathryn Waddington: For me, it’s about being good role models for self-compassion and thinking about Kristin Neff’s three components of self-compassion. One is self-kindness. Being as kind to yourself as you would be to a friend or a student that’s in distress. We don’t always do that for ourselves. So self-kindness. It’s about recognising our shared humanity. Treating and talking to people as other human beings and equal thinking partners.

And the third component of self-compassion is about accepting the situation if it’s difficult, but not overthinking it, not denying it, not catastrophising it, but taking some reasoned action. So I think to be good role models for self-compassion and actually you can’t be self-compassionate to somebody else if you haven’t got a good reservoir of your own compassion and you keep it chopped up.

Jenny Shaw: Fantastic tip. Thank you to all my guests today. And thank you as well to Jen Steadman and Ed Palmer who make this podcast possible. We’ll be back in a few weeks’ time with a brand new episode, but until then, be kind to yourself and everyone else and you take care.