Elevating student support and resident experience for 24/25

As student needs evolve, we’re constantly learning and evolving to make sure our support offer meets those needs. So, over the past year, we’ve aligned our Student Support and Resident Experience teams to create a more holistic approach to student support.

Here’s how we’re doing that – along with some of the support and resident experience initiatives we worked on last year, and what’s new for 2024/25.

Since we first introduced a student welfare service into our buildings in 2015, dedicated support has become an expectation within student accommodation. Most wellbeing incidents take place in accommodation, and many of them outside of regular working hours – informing our need for a 24/7 emergency contact centre and for a 24/7 staff presence in our buildings.

Since the pandemic, the need for reactive support has grown. We learned in this year’s Applicant Index that domestic university applicants’ wellbeing scores remain far lower than they were pre-pandemic, while 36% of all applicants have missed school due to their mental health.

But proactive support is just as important. When asked how the Covid pandemic had impacted them, many of this year’s applicants expressed that a lack of social opportunities during this time meant their social confidence had dropped. “I became less social… so I’m a bit scared for uni,” wrote one applicant. Despite this, there has been little shift in the proportion of applicants that want to be an active part of the student community. They may just need a little help to get started.

As student needs evolve, we’re constantly learning and evolving to make sure our support offer meets those needs. So, over the past year, we’ve brought together our Resident Experience and Student Support teams to help us develop a more holistic, proactive approach to student support – one which is right at the heart of the living experience. And there are three key strands to this.

The ‘big three’ – a holistic approach to student support

In 2022, we were proud to launch our innovative Support to Stay framework, giving a structure to our reactive support modelled on universities’ own ‘Fitness to study’ processes. We’ve continued to adapt and embed it with our university partners ever since.

Our reactive student support work remains as important as ever – but, thanks to feedback from our residents and university partners, we’ve also taken time and care to evolve our proactive support offer. The most important elements of this have been the relaunch of our customer service principles CARE, and our Resident Ambassador initiative – launched in 2016, and revamped for 2023.

CARE stands for the four principles of ‘Connect, Act, Respect, Encourage’, and each principle is linked to specific actions. For ‘Connect’, our teams are encouraged to use students’ names to really personalise their experience and create a connection. (Our May interview with Serena Ferris, Resident Experience Programmes Manager, has more detail on CARE and how our teams bring the principles to life.)

Resident Ambassadors, meanwhile, are our trained student representatives who are paid at the National Living Wage to run events, provide peer-to-peer support and share their thoughts on national initiatives – including how we engaged students on the Building Safety Act and the content of the Community Living Guide, which sets out our expectations for inclusive community living.

“I’m something of a bridge between students and staff,” said Resident Ambassador Izzy Pemberton in our 2023 interview. “It’s important to have that connection – students have a better experience if they can talk about their concerns and things that need sorting out in the building.”

One outcome from our 2022 Living Black at University report was to increase the diversity of Resident Ambassadors, so that more of our residents felt seen, supported and represented in our buildings.

Listening to our residents

Student feedback and insight is vital to informing and sense-checking our approach – whether that’s through student reviews, survey results or our Resident Ambassadors feeding back to us. And our data tells a story. Student satisfaction is higher in our buildings which had Resident Ambassadors and where teams had completed their CARE training, and we’ve seen year-on-year increases in the proportion of students that are satisfied with social opportunities and care and support in our buildings.

Most of the qualitative feedback has been positive too. “When I first moved in, I felt incredibly lonely… The Resident Ambassadors were the first to reach out,” wrote one resident. “They organised a welcome event where I met other students. It was comforting to know that I wasn’t alone in feeling this way.  Over time, I’ve built friendships that have made my university experience so much better.”

But this wasn’t always consistent: “I think it’s already good, but if they can keep it going in second semester as well [that] would be great.” And that’s something we’re already planning to address.

Though these are the ‘big three’ things we look at in terms of student support and resident experience interacting to create a great home for students to live in, we offer much more to our residents to make sure support is there if they need it.

Supporting wellbeing over the past year

Perhaps the most exciting development for our support offer in the last year was the introduction of our Student Assistance Programme. The programme includes a 24/7 helpline and webchat, both staffed by clinical professionals – bolstering the support that our teams can provide in our buildings. It also gives residents access to the Wisdom app, where they can access tools and resources to support them with their wellbeing – whether it’s a step counter or advice on managing stress.

Data from the Student Assistance Programme has helped us to develop genuinely relevant content for our student wellbeing campaigns during the year. One surprising finding was the popularity of tracking sleep through the app – so we made this one of the pillars of our Spring Wellbeing campaign in March.

Though inflation is now back to the 2% target set out by the Bank of England, costs of everyday essentials remain high. We know this continues to be a concern for students and applicants: in our 2024 Applicant Index, 2 in 5 of this year’s university applicants agreed that financial issues were impacting their mental health, while cost of living is the greatest financial concern that applicants have about university.

So, since 2023, we have issued more than £80,000 of Aldi vouchers to help residents with day-to-day living expenses – distributed either through our university partners or directly to our residents. This has helped to support student pantries at universities including Aston University, the University of Kent and Bournemouth University.

Continuing to upskill our teams has also been a focus. Our Student Support specialists  have been up and down the country delivering mental health workshops, including Mental Health First Aid and duty manager scenarios – which draw on real-world examples relating to student mental health.

And our teams have also ventured further afield to deliver training, including our Living Black at University workshop for the University of Bristol in July.

What’s new for 2024/25

Although we always focus on offering a great place to live year-round, and particularly as students are settling into their new home, this year we’re putting on a six-week Welcome programme rather than focusing on the day of check-in. We’ll share more information on this in the coming weeks.

One thing that will support our Welcome programme is an increase in the number of Resident Ambassadors, who now have more guidance for events and in-person meetings to create a national network. As part of our continuing support of the Unite Foundation, care experienced residents will be guaranteed interviews for Resident Ambassador roles.

One of our most exciting new developments is the launch of our new student app. Again, we’ll share more information on this in the coming weeks, but there are a few things we can share right now. The new app has the option to call our Student Assistance Programme helpline directly through the app. And, speaking of the assistance programme, we’re also trialling face-to-face counselling services through the Student Assistance Programme from autumn.

We’ve seen an increase in the number of applicants who declare that they have a mobility issue or physical disability since the Applicant Index first launched. This, along with the recommendations from our 2023 report ‘Meeting the needs of neurodivergent students’, is the reason we’ve introduced a pre-arrival disclosure form to give residents the opportunity to request any reasonable adjustments that will help them to see our buildings as a real home where they can feel comfortable.

We’re also taking forward our neurodivergence report with an exciting pilot project in Nottingham to embed some of the recommendations across both our new and older stock. That’s in addition to staying involved in sector developments on student wellbeing, such as Universities UK’s Restricting access to means research, to be published in the autumn.

Finally, we’re currently working with university partners to develop consistent data sharing agreements which will help us to join up more effectively than ever on student support – giving students with complex support needs the wraparound support they need to thrive.

We’ll continue to bring you more information about what’s new for 2024/25 in the coming weeks – so stay tuned, and subscribe to our newsletter so you don’t miss any big updates!

Want to know who leads on student support in your region? Meet our Regional Student Support Managers.