This year’s Secret Life of Students event has the tagline “being real, getting real.” At the event, we’re being encouraged to consider the reality of the student condition in 2023; a year in which we’re still reeling from the turmoil of the pandemic and plunged into a cost-of-living crisis.
As a sector, we are in no doubt that students are feeling the impact of all of this – the recent Sutton Trust report on cost of living helpfully quantified this for us – but we would have known just by looking into those half empty classrooms that are becoming more and more frequent in universities and colleges across the UK.
At the core of all of this is what I would term a juxtaposition of effort. Those of us working in higher education continue to look for ways to help our students succeed, to support their wellbeing, to explore avenues to enhance the student voice.
We continue to review the accessibility of our curricula, to map and re-map our learning and teaching strategies to iron out any perceived bumps that are hinted at in our TEF metrics or NSS data, and so on, and so on.
