Designing community in student accommodation

To celebrate four years of Accommodation Matters, we took the show on the road to GSL Live and recorded a live episode!

Join host Jenny Shaw for a lively panel discussion about designing community within student accommodation – including how the physical design can support community-building, the role of accommodation teams, whether themed accommodation works, and how to measure the success of community-building events.

Our panel includes:

• Jo Blair, Head of Specification at Unite Students
• Paul Mercer, Director at Kaplan Living
• Vanya Campbell, Engagement Manager at the University of Essex

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: ‘Designing community in student accommodation‘

Jenny Shaw: Hello and welcome to Accommodation Matters Live. I’m your host Jenny Shaw, and we are coming to you today from the GSL Live conference. And as you’ve already heard, we are recording in front of a live audience. I swear these guys are on fire today! We are going to be hearing from them again shortly.

So, we are well into October now and most new students are starting to settle into university life, but it is that time of year that difficulties can start to kick in. So we are not very far away from Wobble Week. We know that a sense of belonging is an important aspect to the student experience, feeling included, having friends, feeling accepted. These are all really important to students, to their wellbeing, to their success. And student accommodation can make such a difference here. So today, our topic is designing community.

Over the last decade we’ve seen the concept of community and belonging develop within the sector and student accommodation really owning their ability to influence the communities within their buildings. So I’m looking forward to today’s conversation! And as ever we have a fantastic panel, but unusually we’re all in the same room. So I’m going to just turn my head and look them in the eye and ask them if they will introduce themselves.

Jo Blair: Hi Jenny, thanks for having me back. I’m Jo, I’m Head of Specification for Unite Students.

Paul Mercer: Hi Jenny, I’m Paul. I’m Director of Kaplan Living.

Vanya Campbell: Hi Jenny. Hi everybody here today. I’m Vanya. I’m the Engagement Manager for accommodation at the University of Essex.

Jenny: Fantastic, thank you. So let’s dive straight into it and Paul, I’m going to start with you, because Kaplan won the GSL Best Sense of Community Award last year! So tell us the secrets of your success.

Paul: I don’t think there’s a big secret, and I don’t think it was a surprise either that we were the only non-university that was nominated in the final last year. University teams and PBSA provider teams have very different focuses when they’re running their buildings. And most PBSA providers spend most of their time selling rooms. They’re trying to get students in from the next year. The sales cycle is so long that that is such a huge focus for them.

We rebranded about 4-5 years ago as Kaplan Living and we wanted to be known as building communities. We wanted to be known as leading in the sector for student wellbeing and we started to focus on that.

And what we started to look at was: how can we automate processes? How can we take time and work away from the residence teams to allow them to focus on students? And that’s what we tried to do. Even this year we’ve removed the responsibility for bookings, and brought that centrally within one of our teams. And that really then gave the team on-site the capacity to prioritise student wellbeing and building a community across all of our buildings.

So we focus on respecting every individual student and recognising that they’re all different and we want to celebrate every single one of them and give them the opportunity to celebrate themselves, their culture, where they’re from, their nationality, their sex, their race, whatever it might be. Wanting to give students a voice in our buildings. And the reason why we think that’s important is that: 1, it makes them feel that they’re part of something. It makes them feel that they can talk to other people and it just makes them feel that they are part of a wider group rather than just individuals.

So our teams, we really focus on support and the availability of support. And our team – which is our team, we don’t have standard external staff in the buildings. It’s our team 24/7 and they’re very highly trained and they focus all the time on just talking to students from the day they walk in the door till the day they leave. They are there as that person to talk to. And I think that’s what makes the difference.

But community doesn’t stop at the front door. A lot of our teams, and some of them are in this room, spend their time taking students out into the community, going to local sights, taking them, getting to meet other people. We have events around the building. We get involved in residence groups to make sure that we are part of the community. So Kaplan’s part of the community, which means the students feel that they’re part of the community as well.

And that’s what really makes a difference. Working with local charities, local events, even litter picking in parks and Bournemouth Beach and things like that that the teams get involved with all the time. And I think that’s it really. There is no big secret. It’s making student community and wellbeing a priority and giving your team the training and the resources and the belief that that’s what we want you to focus on. We don’t want you focusing on sales, we want you focusing on the students that are in the building now and how can we help create a great experience for them.

Jenny: I think that’s so important. Yeah, it’s something that we did at Unite Students, separating the sales and the service a few years ago as well. Tell me about your students though, Paul. Who are they? Where do they come from? What do they want?

Paul: Oh, everywhere. About 70% of our students are all international in a recent count, over 114 different nationalities and countries within that. So we can’t focus on one nationality, one group, one area of the world. Everyone can do Chinese New Year decorations as we’ve spoken about another sessions today, but we’ve got 114 different nationalities, so how do we celebrate all of them? So that’s what we look to do.

And I think Zoe mentioned in the session earlier about looking to cultural calendars and things like that to create more awareness of students and their experiences and the cultures across the world. So what we try to do is encourage them to be part of a community and to share their experiences.

Jenny: And what are some of the challenges of having students from all over the world? What kind of challenges do you see?

Paul: A language barrier, to start with. But at the same time, there is a time where they do try to migrate to the people that they know and the cultures that they know because it’s safe, they know what it is. But then I think I read – there was a stat earlier today – 41% of students said that universities could help make a better experience by increasing the variety of nationalities in their residence. And I thought that was great because lots of students want to be around more diverse people, but it’s not necessarily all the time easy for them to be able to be open and sort of vocal with that.

Jenny: There’s a real kind of learning in that isn’t there. And skills, intercultural skills. Is that something you explicitly do with them or is it something that they kind of learn through that living experience?

Paul: I think we try to do both. We have to try and guide them to do things for themselves and give them the advice and point them in the right direction, but the onus still has to be on them to grow and develop themselves as they sort of progress into adulthood.

Jenny: Great, thank you. So I’m going to come to you now Jo. So you’ve been working in the sector for many years. You’ve done a lot of operational roles, but more recently you’ve been working on building and room design and it is very much about community isn’t it? What’s come out of your work so far?

Jo: So I think there’s two buckets almost that I would talk about. So the first one is just how important your customer voice is.

So, when we were doing the work around – what does behind a flat door look like, what does a student bedroom look like? What does a student kitchen look like? We thought we’d lock that design down. We went and took that through a lot of customer research and then we identified, oh actually, the colour that we’ve put the cabinets, they don’t like it. Or the colour of that sofa, the fabric of that sofa. Students don’t like it. So why would we then go and release that en masse if you already know that somebody doesn’t like it?

So actually we went back and redesigned the bedrooms pretty much wholesale and made some real tweaks to those kitchen spaces. And some things are never going to change in a bedroom. You need a bed, you need a wardrobe, you need a kitchen counter, you’ll need cabinets. But we’ve been able to develop those spaces to be much more flexible, particularly in those kitchen areas.

So we’ve done things like introduce dining tables, dining chairs, created space where you can use that for pre-drinks if you choose to do that or you can use it for group study, some other wee bits and pieces as well that we’re looking at incorporating it in some of our future endeavours. But I think I’d probably get hung drawn and quartered if I shared that today.

Jenny: Another time!

Jo: The other thing I would say in our amenity spaces, communal spaces. It’s really about how you manage that flow or your zoning of a property, however you want to think about it, but it’s spaces with purpose. I’ve seen many, many student accommodation providers, many, many properties where you’ll walk into a common room and it’s just a huge space and it’ll have some sofas, some chairs, some tables, not really much else in it. And you’re kind of going, well, what’s the point of this space? What’s it here for?

And through the student research and some work we’ve done with our designers, we’ve really understood you need to have purpose. Students need to know what that space is meant for.

It also needs to be, or at least have a level of adaptability and flexibility because if you go in and refurbish a property or you build a new property, that’s got to last for a good 10 years until you’re back in again spending millions of pounds on it to redo it again.

So if you’ve got a level of flexibility, you can make that space more inclusive so you can allow for those large scale community events, but also for the people who aren’t confident in those spaces and create those ‘ones and twos’ spaces so people can find their own communities and then find the space that they can enjoy those communities and build up their social networks.

And I think there’s also the balance around social versus study. We all sitting in this room, there’s not many of us in here that are 18. I know we’re all 21, but we’re not 18. And I think we can make choices and decisions about the buildings that we think are right, but that’s not right for the people who actually live in our buildings.

So we’ll go, oh yeah, study space is really important – and it is – but each building might have a little bit of a variation of what that percentage of social to study needs to be. So again, going back to that adaptable, flexible, inclusive, if we can make those buildings as adaptable as possible or those spaces as adaptable as possible, but still with purpose, you can then adapt it and change it as your student base adapts and changes.

Jenny: Thank you. Yeah, we’ve come a long way, haven’t we, from where you’d go into a common room and it looked like a dentist’s waiting room.

Jo: Yeah, yeah. Well, yesterday actually I was in some of our properties in London and I was talking to the team there and I said, “Oh, how’s everybody getting on?” They went, “Do you know what? That study space we used to have, nobody ever used it.” And I walked in, I’ve taken a photo, which I’ll happily share, but each space had somebody in it, and I was so proud. I had a little bit of a tear in my eye. I was like, “Oh, that worked!”

Jenny: That’s great to hear. I mean there’s no better endorsement is there than students actually using the spaces. So obviously we’re at a conference today and earlier in the conference we did have a session around the needs of marginalised students. How have you taken into account different demographics of students when you’ve been looking at the design?

Jo: So our colleagues in the Brand team have really done an amazing job with the research aspects of this. So obviously we’ll use data from GSL, we’ll use data from all the reviews like Student Crowd or Google or wherever. But when we’ve gone through the research, we’ve made a point of ensuring that we have international representation, we have representation from neurodivergent students or students with accessibility needs because you cannot understand what they need if you don’t include them in the conversation.

It’s really been having some quite in-depth focus groups with a lot of people over a lot of time to truly understand what it is that they want and we won’t get it right all the time. And you might go in and design a space, and then we have to go back and do some tweaks to it because we haven’t just got it quite right. But it’s a journey. And I think as long as we keep going back to those student communities and going back and listening to those voices, we’ll keep refining and getting it right.

Jenny: Yeah, it’s that dialogue isn’t it with students? A hundred percent.

Jo: Yeah.

Jenny: Okay, that’s great. So I’m going to move on now. So the idea of themed living/learning communities is something that I first came across about 12 years ago. It came from the United States and when I saw it I thought, “That is a great idea, I bet it will catch on over here.” And it didn’t really, haven’t seen so much about it until now because Vanya, you are doing something very similar at Essex. Can you tell us more about it?

Vanya: Like Jo, we’ve been using data from the Global Student Living Index, pulse surveys. We’ve been doing focus groups working closely with the student union, societies and sabbatical officers to get feedback on student experience really and how we can change it.

And a lot of the students vocalised that they wanted to live in specific communities, so with like-minded people. So we got a specific focus group of students over a period of time – different students from different ethnicities, cultures, countries – to see what their thoughts were basically. And we selected the top two or three ideas that they came up with of who they’d like to live with.

So we’ve created some new living and learning communities on campus. So we’ve always done mature flats for our older students. We’ve always done single gender accommodation for specific groups of students that prefer to live with the same gender, which is fine, but we wanted to broaden that.

So now we have the athletes’ village. So this is a big cohort of students that are- our university is very sporty, we’re very competitive. Basketball, netball, football, you can always hear them screaming on the backfield. So to push that, to emphasise that, we have built a village in one of our accommodation areas. So these are students who have participated in sports at a sort of reasonable level at college or at school or anywhere prior to coming to university. And we house them together.

We’ve put all vinyls and quotes and pictures of famous athletes all across the accommodation and they get about £700 worth of benefits if they choose to live in this athlete village. So we pay for their subscriptions to the sports clubs. We provide their kit, we give them a hundred pound laundry card so they can wash their kits. We give them two weeks free accommodation so they can do the training before term starts. And it’s really popular. We try to be very specific on it. So making them kind of prove that they’ve done sport before.

But that’s really difficult actually to manage. So what we’ve done is: what is your intention? Is your intention to be involved in our sports clubs, to play for the university? And if it is, you can join this athlete village and get all the benefits from that. So we’re into the second year of that. The first year was successful and it looks like the numbers for the second year are much higher than the first year, which is really good.

So we also have LGBTQ+ accommodation, which is massively, massively popular. And we have that across the board in both our campuses, in Colchester and Southend. So these are not for allies, these are for those in that community. We don’t want to say it’s so they feel safer. It’s just so that they’re with like-minded people who’ve experienced the same things that they have and that they kind of feel safer in that environment being surrounded by those people. And so far it’s been really positive.

Students voted on entrepreneurship too. So we have an innovation centre at Essex University called Essex Startups. So they provide space for small businesses, new businesses for graduates to start off. It might just be a chair in a room and then they can help them build two bigger businesses later on. So we are working with them and they provide welcome packs. They do one-to-one coaching, they do workshops, all sorts of specific for these groups of students.

And we’re hoping by living with people that are like themselves, it can help with brainstorming sessions. We are really hoping for some really big businesses to come out of this because I’m going to put my name on it afterwards, on some accreditation there. That’s brand new this year. So it’s started and they’ve started on their workshops. So I’m going to touch base with the start-up team to see how it’s going, what else I can do. Perhaps there’s more communication needed from our side, so we’ll work really, really closely together.

And then the final one really is our volunteer square, we call it. So we have the student union ‘VTeam’. So they are the volunteer team. They’ve been running for quite a few years. They’re quite a big enterprise in theirselves really. And they do lots of work at the university, but they do lots of community work as well. So it could be litter picking on the local beaches, could be helping out in a local retirement village and doing the gardening. It could be absolutely anything. They do drives for the food bank, things like that.

So we created a little community where again, you’re with like-minded people and we’re hoping that they’ll encourage that behaviour across the university as well eventually. And again, they get welcome packs, they get tours, they get bespoke projects for those students in that flat or flats. And what again, work is really started to rumble on really quickly already. And again, I’ll work with them to see how it’s going.

And what we have done this time, actually, is had some bespoke questions added to the GSL Index survey this year to get specific feedback on those learning communities. Then at the end of the year we can review the information, review how it’s gone and decide whether we are going to continue with those, change them, have more of them, have less of them – we don’t know yet. We’ll see how it goes and then we’ll get the feedback from the students, from the departments that we’ve been working with and then go from there. But so far all looks really, really positive.

Jenny: Thank you. That’s so interesting. I have all the questions, I’ll try and keep it to just maybe a few, but do you think it’s had an impact on recruitment either to the university itself or to the accommodation?

Vanya: Yes, I think so. We’ve certainly shared all the information on our website for our prospective students – open days, applicant days, done lots of affairs and events, Instagram lives, all sorts to reach out to give them that information. And I think it really, really has helped too. As you said, lots of them are 18, never lived away from home before. They’re quite frightened, but they might have this passion that they absolutely love – their sport, volunteering, they’ve got business ideas floating around in their heads everywhere.

I think it definitely is a draw for those students who may not necessarily – I’m not saying they wouldn’t have come to university, but it could just push them over the edge to come and especially to stay in our accommodation. We have a lot of PBSA in our local area now, so we want to be unique. We want to stand out. Although we are a university and we’re campus-based, which is still quite unique, we wanted to go the extra mile to get them onto campus. So yeah, definitely.

Jenny: That’s great to hear. And I know it’s quite early days, but are there any other communities that you would like to create in the future?

Vanya: Well, all the students ask for quiet accommodation, but I think as we all know, that’s completely impossible to do. We’d literally have to build something in one of our fields miles away from everything else. We did trial creative accommodation once where they had a big wall, one of the walls in the accommodation flat. They could decorate however they wanted to, but that didn’t actually work. And that was again based on feedback from students.

So I think I would like to do maybe neurodiverse, potentially wellbeing-based accommodation potentially. There’s so many different streams. I think we’d probably have to go back to the students again to see because each year you’re going to have a different cohort, they’re going to have different ideas. The world’s a different place every year now, isn’t it? It’s changing so fast. I think we’d probably have to go back to them and say, right, what we doing? What can we do more?

Now there was a suggestion of doing it by course, but then I’m thinking, well, they’re with their course mates all day in their classes, then they’re going to be with their course mates all night every weekend. Is that a bit too much? And then are they not getting that variety of people and cultures and relationships that I think they would get if we mix it up a bit more? So I dunno, we’ll see.

Jenny: Yeah, lots of great ideas there. Have there been any challenges so far?

Vanya: One of the challenges actually we’ve had is when students apply for accommodation, they’ll say their area, potentially who they want to live with. They have price points, things like that. And then they’ll select they want to live in one of these areas, one of our communities, and then it’s the priority of what they’re choosing as to where they go. And I think sometimes we’ve only put them in specific areas this year because it’s brand new, we are just starting out.

Sometimes students are taking other things as a priority over these community-based areas because that’s what’s more important to them. So that might be price, might be they want to live with their friends, their friends don’t want to live in that community. Might be the accommodation type that we’ve put them in that they don’t want. So then they would rather not, they’d rather go and live in the other accommodation area.

So I think that’s been a challenge, and that’s something if we continue these then that’s what I’ll look at, maybe broadening the options available for the students.

Jenny: Thank you Vanya. So very shortly we will be opening up to audience questions. So do be thinking about questions. Before we do that, I’m going to ask a few general questions about community. The first one I’m thinking about really is, if we get this right and if we create really fantastic communities, what does it do for students? What’s the value?

Paul: I think it gives students a sense of, I think you mentioned before, a sense of belonging. They feel that it’s their home and that’s what we’re trying to create for them. And I think it means they feel safe and they have that peer group around them that has a similar mindset to them in relation to how they want to be and how they want to be a student and how they want to experience that.

I think from a value perspective, and we see it from our data that this Kaplan college students who live in our buildings actually perform better academically. They have higher pass rates, they have higher progression rates into our partner universities. So from that perspective, it’s creating that community and that belonging and that sense of that nothing is too much trouble. We will do everything for you and everything we can to allow you to just experience being a student and that will make a difference for you for the rest of your life because you’ll end up hopefully with better grades.

Jo: A couple of years ago I read a research paper and it bucketed into five themes around the value of community to students from a long-term perspective. So it spoke about emotional wellbeing and social support, personal growth and skill building, sense of purpose and social growth. And every time I come to a project that’s going to impact one of our buildings, I try and think how am I going to impact one of those five areas to benefit the student in the best way?

So if you’re thinking about design, how can you create that social growth in a way that’s really inclusive, but also it’s not like I’m shoving somebody in a door and going, “You must have fun with your friends!”, because it’s just not appropriate for me to do that. So I think the value and the long-term value – I don’t think we wouldn’t have the data yet, because it probably isn’t something that we’ve spent a huge amount of time looking into. But if you come back and look at it in 20 years time, hopefully we’ll be able to demonstrate that in a really meaningful way.

Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. Vanya, did you want to add something?

Vanya: I was just going to say I think it gives students confidence when they’re in a safe environment somewhere where they like being, it’s comfortable, their academic success rockets – but it’s the confidence to go over those hurdles when it is getting a little bit tough and where things might be a little bit of a struggle.

And then when things are going great, it gives them that confidence to then take that next step and then to carry on and then they’re more likely to stay and continue and do their second and third and fourth year. So yeah, it’s a real boost for them.

Jenny: Yeah, I agree. So we’re talking about community. We’ve touched on the fun aspect of it, the support aspect. There’s also behaviour management, the conduct processes. I mean you have to wear a lot of different hats, don’t you, when you’re providing student accommodation. How do you get the right balance between all of those?

Vanya: Well, I actually oversee conduct for accommodation, low level conduct as well. And one of the communities we have the most issues with, that’s probably not a surprise, is sport. So on a Wednesday afternoon, there’s no lessons, they all go off and do their sport and then they retreat back to their lovely accommodation where they’re all together, which is great, and then they party hard.

That’s just been evident ever since I’ve worked at the university – our sporty students are much livelier, they’re more confident. They have a lot about them. We want ’em to be together, but then we’re like, actually, is that a good idea? What problems are we causing ourselves?

So again, it’s education, it’s making sure that we create these communities, but we’re involved in those communities as well. So it’s the respect they have for the accommodation team, the sports teams as well as themselves. And it’s just saying, yes, you can have fun, but you’ve got to bring it back when you need to. It’s a very difficult balance to be honest with you, but it’s fun at the same time.

Jenny: And how’s it going? Is it going all right?

Vanya: Yeah, great. It’s fine. It’s early days. I mean, the first few weeks are a bit crazy. I get lots of reports of noise and things like that and I’m like, “It’s fine. They’ll settle down, give ’em a bit of time to get to know each other,” and then towards the end of the year it then ramps up again because study’s over and the exams are nearly finished and then they get a bit excited again.

So yeah, it is very difficult, but I think it’s just as you said before, it’s building relationships, making sure they know who we are, what our responsibilities are, but what their responsibilities are as well and building respect. So sometimes you get it, sometimes you don’t.

Jenny: Jo?

Jo: So, I think you absolutely can combine the two. I think the key thing for us is the people that manage and look after the students in the accommodation spaces. We are not their parents and we should never try to be, and it’s so tempting. I’ve been there, 20 years of being in properties, where you just want to try and be somebody’s mum and it’s just not the right thing to do. But it’s so hard not to do it sometimes.

But I think you can do it in a really considered way. So as I said before, we definitely don’t want to force fun, but we want to provide the means for the kind of fun and let it live and breathe in its correct space, but always have the support available and build that trust in our processes and in our buildings and in our teams that when that support is required and it’s needed, that somebody’s right there and they’re willing to step up and help you when you can’t necessarily help yourself.

I think, yeah, definitely considered, it’s definitely possible, but it’s always – you’ve got to check yourself, make sure you’re not trying to parent somebody when they really don’t need you to.

Jenny: Yeah, because it’s so tempting, isn’t it?

Jo: Yeah.

Jenny: Yeah. Paul?

Paul: Yeah, I echo what everyone has said so far. I think one of the things we’re overseeing that students now are they’re not necessarily wanting our support or they don’t want to go to a student assistance programme. They don’t want to talk to somebody who’s specifically there talking to them about their mental health. They want perhaps support from their peers and the student support network around them.

And something that we’re looking into at the moment is how do we give the students in the building the skills to build that network and to help each other? As Jo said, it shouldn’t just be us doing that. It’s not necessarily our responsibility to parent them, but if we can give them the skills to help each other, that makes a massive difference and hopefully that improves all of things and is less trouble and everything going forward.

The wider Kaplan have recently recruited lady called Anna Ma who set up the Student Grief Network while she was at university. She’d set that up because there was nobody to support her when she was a student and she’s passionate about wanting to train staff, but actually starting to look at training students and how to deal with those types of things.

And then creating that, again, community network where students can support each other.

Jenny: I mean that sounds great. I know it’s early days for her. What are her plans? What’s she looking to do in the first instance?

Paul: Looking at staff training to begin with and then hopefully putting a programme together that can be rolled out to students across all of our residences and colleges to really give them the skills that they’re going to need as they grow up.

Jenny: I’ll be following that one with interest. That sounds really good. Is there anything new or new-ish that you’re seeing among students this year?

Jo: I was reading an article this morning seeing the biggest change in students in 2024 is actually the volume of students that are now in part-time work. And that really links to our affordability position within the UK at the moment. I think the numbers said it was about 150% increase year on year of students that are having to go into part-time work.

So it’s definitely a responsibility that I know Unite Students [is looking at] – I personally take it as a real responsibility piece: how can we do things in a way that is considered affordable but without being poor quality? Because heaven forbid you give somebody a poor standard because it’s a bit cheaper, it should never be that. So I think that’s definitely something that I’ve not seen at that scale before.

Jenny: Vanya, do you want to come in on this one?

Vanya: A change in how they behave. So a few years ago prior to Covid, it was very much party party, lots of clubbing and balls and various different things and that’s completely different now. Our students aren’t in that frame of mind anymore. We have nightclubs on campus and they’re not utilised as much as they used to be.

Now they’ll have board game evenings and we’ll have non-drinking evenings and support networks and hanging out and it’s very different. And I think as a university it’s very different for us as well. So we’re navigating that really now, trying to work out how best we can change the way we do things. And I think because things are moving so fast, everyone’s trying to catch up with it and we are in a weird position at the moment on what do they need, what can we provide and what do they want? So yeah, it’s a very different dynamic now I think with students.

Jenny: It really is, isn’t it? I mean we had some interns in over the summer and the one thing that they all said they’d like to have had more of when they first started university is more non-drinking based activities. So it’s really big at the moment. Paul, what are you seeing?

Paul: What we’ve seen recently is a slight fall in student engagement in our bigger events that we try to put on. Students seem to be a bit more individual now, I wanting to do their own thing and not necessarily wanting to follow the crowd. So we’re looking at how we can rejig our social calendar and our social activities to try and create individual events.

But still in a group setting, if you have lots of students who are musicians, for example, doing an open mic night and things so that they can still be individual, but they’re all getting together and doing it at the same time. So I think that’s what we’ve been seeing this year, especially the last few weeks.

Jenny: It’s funny, isn’t it? How things just change even in a year or two years. Great. Well we are coming to that time now where I’m going to open it up to questions from the audience. So any questions for our fabulous panel?

Sam Hollex: Sam Hollex, Director of Operations for Host. So on the panel this morning we’d talked about the advantages and disadvantages of perhaps having segregated dedicated flats or communities. You’ve obviously done that within your campus. What’s the advantages and disadvantages?

Do you think that not having those students integrate with people from a different background, does that help? Does that then limit their experience? I’m all for people being in safe spaces but does that then continue into society and we end up with ghettoisation of certain groups?

Jenny: That’s a fantastic question.

Vanya: I’ll take that one. Yes. When we created the LGBTQ+ accommodation, it was what the students have asked for. Lots of our students have asked for it, so we’re absolutely happy to do that.

But one of the reservations we have was that are we creating ghettos? Are we segregating them from the rest of the students? Are people going to find out where they are and target them? Are they then going to remove themselves from other groups of students when actually, no, it’s fine. So far they just want to be with like-minded people and people who’ve shared experiences.

So far there’s no aggravation, there’s no problems. They’re still happy to get involved with everything that we are doing. There’s no animosity at all. I mean, we aren’t checking people. I dunno how you would check students on whether they’re part of that community or not. If it feels like a safer space for you to be your natural self, then absolutely fine. We did have concerns, but so far no problems at all.

Jenny: Thank you. Any more questions?

Francesca: So my name is Francesca and we come from Campus X PBSA student holding company in Italy. And we are very interested in understanding a bit more about community activities that you deliver in your accommodation.

And also you mentioned about wellbeing. So is there dedicated stuff for properties or do you plan activities centrally, and what kind of wellbeing activities are delivered? And if it comes with a background from specific studies, are they prepared to discuss that subject with students?

Jenny: Thank you. Some really good questions there.

Paul: So we have permanent roles within our teams that are called wellbeing coordinators. So they are students who have got experience of, most of ’em are international students, so they’ve got the experience of living across the world and their role is to look after the students. Their role is to create social events, but also they’re the first point of contact when somebody has a problem.

If two o’clock in the morning somebody needs to go to the hospital, they go with them. It’s kind of that level of support, but they’re there to check in on them, they’re there to make sure that if they have anything at all that they can talk to them and they would then organise events with them as well.

You mentioned what types of events, again, sort of helping to build with wellbeing. Arts and crafts works really well, things that people are engaging in, but they don’t necessarily have to talk to each other, they’re just sort of zoning out and trying. Being creative always works very well, so anything along those lines really works with wellbeing.

Jo: Certainly from our perspective, we do huge amount of events over the UK and there’ll be really varying events.

So from a wellbeing perspective, I’ve seen it where we’ve brought therapy animals from charities and they’re always massively popular, whether it’s dogs or llamas, you will always get a huge crowd of people coming to see animals because particularly if you think about our international students, lots of them have pets at home, they come to the UK and they really miss their pets. So when you can provide that in the accommodation is really, really popular.

Arts and crafts, I would absolutely agree, and anything where you can kind of upcycle things tends to be very popular as well. And then that’s giving back to your communities where you can link our students into their local communities also is quite popular. So if you have volunteering events and think, oh, we’re all going to go to the food bank and take all this stuff down, you will always get students that are willing to come along and support that.

Our teams are absolutely trained to support and some of our student support team are in the room, so I’m just looking at them for when they start shaking their heads. So our student support team are fabulous and I’m not just saying that because they’re in the room, but our teams on the ground absolutely are trained to give that initial support when it’s required from a wellbeing perspective.

We have a module called Support to Stay. So when things start to escalate, you can bring those teams in at the appropriate point. But we will also work with our university partners where it’s appropriate as well because there is nothing more important than the safety and the wellbeing of those students in those moments. So we need to make sure that, again, without being somebody’s mum or dad, we get them the right support at the right time.

Jenny: Thanks Jo. And Vanya?

Vanya: So we have various different things that take place throughout the year. So the therapy dogs, we have therapy dogs come to campus most weeks during term time – I’m there as well. And we have the local police come and bring the sniffer dogs just to educate and they’re really good therapy dogs as well, so you’re allowed to have a cuddle with them. So that’s really nice.

We have an allotment, which is run by staff and students, so that’s a really good space for staff and students to go and have a bit of time to do something physical but relax and clear their mind. We also have our own cat campus, cat Pebbles who just had a big statue built of it as well on one of the squares. I’m like, there’s pictures of, it’s got its own social media, it’s got its own T-shirts. It’s crazy, it’s very famous, but it’s just great therapy.

The students will go and sit when it’s having its lunch and they’ll take photos and just hang out and there’s lots and lots that we try and do. And then lots of the students will do stuff themselves. They’ll do walking clubs, running clubs, lots of arts and crafts. We did lots of arts and crafts at the university and it’ll just be a stall in one of the squares on a Wednesday afternoon or a Thursday afternoon and they’ll go and paint some mugs or whatever it is.

So yeah, it’s not always about talking, it’s just about being there and doing something different. I think

Jenny: I want to come to your campus now to meet Pebbles the cat and see some llamas. Yeah. Great. Any more questions?

Mark Hannon: It’s a simple and open question really. How do you measure the success of your events? I’m Mark Hannon from Campus Living Villages.

Vanya: Well, I suppose we use the housing survey to get feedback on our communities itself. We will be doing little pulse surveys at the end of those events to find out how it went, what was good, what was bad, and then we’ll use that to reshape them for the next events that we do.

And then the usual just random ones that we do, we sometimes do a little quiz and do a little prize. So we’ll have a tablet on the stand and we’ll just get ’em say, “Oh, can you answer a few questions? And then you can have this big bar of chocolate.”

We work closely with a lot of companies that give us free stuff. So I’ve got cases of Red Bull at the moment behind my desk. We’re able to use that sort of collateral to give out to our students as well. And we have specific things made like accommodation slippers and sunglasses and stuff like that. So we’ll use that to entice students in to give us a little bit of feedback about what we’re doing and then we’ll use that data to mix it up next time perhaps.

Paul: I think, well, I’d switch the question actually is it depends what you’re measuring as a successful event. Is one person turning up a successful event, if that’s the one thing that they do and that they’re excited about and passionate about and no one else in the building is and you keep doing it and they keep turning up, I think that’s a successful event.

So you don’t have to have dozens of people, you don’t have to have dozens of dozens of people turning up to an event for it to be successful. All you’re trying to do is reach every student and if you reach one student from an event, for me that’s a success.

Jo: I would agree with that. I think it’s not always about the number. So certainly in Unite Students, our Resident Ambassadors are really heavily involved in creating that events calendar, events schedule. So generally within the student community, they understand the pulse of the student community far better than we will. And like Paul mentioned, if one person turns up to event about politics and history and that’s the thing they’re really passionate about, that’s been a successful event.

But they will also give us the feedback and say, well, we did this event, we don’t think it worked because of X, Y, and Z. And they’re absolutely empowered as our Resident Ambassadors not to run that event again or to try something a bit different. We give them a good bit of freedom within parameters of course, because we want everybody to be safe and well.

But yeah, I think you have to give that trust over to the people that live and breathe that event because as I said before, at 46 years old, I don’t think I can be trusted to know what an 18 year old’s going to want to do on a Friday night.

Jenny: Yes, who knows? Only another 18-year-old. So as is our tradition, we have a final quickfire round and I’m going to give each of you 30 seconds to answer this question. What is the secret ingredient in a good student community, Jo?

Jo: So I think there is no secret ingredient to a good student community. I think there’s lots of things that we probably all know, and it’s things like you have to make it as easy as possible for students to get involved with what’s going on in your accommodation or in your campus.

You have to listen to those voices, utilise the community around you to almost self-build that community and provide as many opportunities as you can and use every digital platform that you have available to you to communicate that out because that’s ultimately how our students are going to know about it.

Jenny: Thank you. Paul?

Paul: Well, communication was top of my list, so you just stole on that one. Thank you.

Vanya: You stole mine as well, and I’m last!

Paul: Sorry. Yeah, communication, listening to your students and being brave as well. Try new things. Not everything will work. You have new students in your buildings every year with different likes, different wishes, different passions. What might work last year won’t work this year or the other way around, but be persistent.

You know, I mentioned before about one person coming to an event. Keep going, keep going, keep pushing it and you will succeed and create that better community.

Jenny: Thank you. Vanya?

Vanya: I don’t know what to say now. I think it is all of those, it’s variety. Communication. I think communication for me is probably the key factor. And that’s both ways. That’s not just you saying this is happening, this is happening. It’s getting the feedback from the students, giving them the voice that they need to say how they’re feeling and what’s going well for them and how you can improve it. And listening.

You’ve got to listen to what’s happening, what’s on the ground, what’s happening in the environment, other universities, other providers, what are the trends? Is scanning your horizon, I suppose, to see what’s going on. And then using that to make decisions and then ultimately just listening to the students really.

Jenny: That’s a great note on which to finish. And that is the end of the show. We’ve come to the end. Thank you so much to my guests today – Paul, Jo, Vanya, you’ve been fantastic. Thank you. Thank you to our live audience! You have been brilliant. Thank you to GSL for hosting us at your conference. It’s been an excellent conference so far. Looking forward to the rest of it.

Thank you to Jen Steadman and Ed Palmer who make this podcast happen. And of course, thank you to you for listening. We really appreciate your support and love to hear your feedback. That is all from us this month, but we will be back and in the meantime, be kind to yourselves as the long nights start to draw in, and you take care.

Read more about Unite Students’ student support offer on our website.