Since 2022, the Mizzou Student Communications team has been building the relationships, trust, and literal playbook for organizing and prioritizing the communication students need to succeed. By systematically defining and sharing communication goals at the institutional level, we have empowered others to engage in the processes at the unit and individual levels, creating a culture of trust in student communication and improving student outcomes.

This session will consider the meaning of “sense of belonging” within the context of student communications, using our work with our student content creators at the University of Sheffield to explore how we can create a sense of belonging through student-led content and communications.

A student's need to belong at University begins long before the rhythm of the semester settles. Universities must put tangible and empathetic effort into initial conversations they have with their incoming students, carefully considering representation, voice and inclusivity to ensure that the process of becoming part of the community is effectively launched. This session will guide participants through activities drawn from Adrienne Maree Brown's facilitation frameworks and asks for reflections on questions of representation, inclusion and student voice. It will also demonstrate the content and approach of the pre-arrival resource from the University of Manchester, which has seen over 10,000 users interact with its content more than 55,000 times since launch and aligns with further activities in the traditional welcome and induction period. Participants in the session will walk away with the framework for similar communications from their context, an understanding of ways the development team negotiated disparate and sometimes conflicting stakeholder demands and an overview of the evaluation and metrics around such a resource.

What can we learn from other universities around the world about how to provide world class student communications? What does ‘normal’ practice look like and where are the examples of standout excellence? What’s missing? As we look to the future, Justin Shaw will share specific examples of innovations from universities and colleges globally, identify gaps, and share a future world vision for student communications excellence.

Sharing our transformative journey of visual content and how our focus on video has reshaped our approach to engaging students and enhancing their experience at the University of Southampton. Through case studies and collaborative discussions, we will delve into how visual content has and can humanize university communications, improve the representation of student services, and amplify student voices.

We work within the Post-Entry academic skills team at the University of Southampton and rather uniquely sit within Widening Participation Department. Our roles involve creating interventions to develop students’ confidence with academic skills including writing, study skills and maths and statistics. This work feeds into our Access and Participation Plan (APP) but benefits students of all levels and disciplines. Education development is a term that covers a wide range of work within Higher Education (Little and Green 2022) and working in this “third space” between academic colleagues and professional services is a distinctive and challenging place to exist. Our presentation will discuss some of the ways we are flexible to student needs, outlining some of the challenges we face and seeks to explore collaborative opportunities to enhance student communications. We will be presenting two case studies, both of which were new to the students engaging with them. These projects began with a theory of change, a tool to ensure constant and rigorous evaluation of the success of our interventions. Combining this with our proximity to students, we were able to ensure our communications were inclusive, authentic and relevant. These case studies will look at our Writing Cafés, which provide protected time for students to build a writing culture and our Peer Assisted Learning (PAL) Scheme which supports both academic and non-academic transition to HE. Our communications are integral to removing barriers to participation for students from underrepresented backgrounds as well as the wider student population at Southampton.

Please choose one roundtable. The roundtable sessions are facilitated discussions.

As new freedom of speech laws take effect for universities in the UK, how should we navigate divisive and sensitive debates on campus? What is our role as student communicators in upholding universities' duties around freedom of speech? How do we balance this with our values and duty of care to students? Our panellists will share a wide variety of experiences, including reactive work in response to challenges, as well as proactive work to encourage more empathetic conversations on campus.

In 2023, Middlesex achieved high in the NSS – demonstrating a positive UG experience for students. Through the feedback loop and continuous improvement, we achieved a institutional record high 79% uptake rate demonstrating the value we place on the 'student voice' as a learning organisation. Find out how we achieved this.