WEEKEND READING: Belonging beyond the metrics

A response to the HEPI Student Academic Experience Survey 2026: Part Two

This blog was kindly authored by Professor Harriet Dunbar-Morris, Provost and Pro Vice-Chancellor Academic at the University of Buckingham, on sabbatical while undertaking a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Oxford. From 1 September, she will take up the role of Deputy President and Chief Academic Officer at South East Technological University (SETU), Ireland.

Part One is available here.

Belonging has become one of the most important concepts in higher education. We measure it. We track it. We include it in strategies, access and participation plans and enhancement frameworks, see for example Thomas, 2012, and Meehan and Howells, 2018.

The 2026 Student Academic Experience Survey (SAES) offers the sector a valuable opportunity to look again at what the data can, and cannot, tell us about how belonging is created.

My argument is this: the most important belonging signals in the 2026 SAES are not where most readers will look for them.

The headline numbers

Overall, 66% of students agreed that they have a sense of belonging at their university – the highest figure since the Survey began measuring this. That is genuinely encouraging and reflects real effort across the sector.

Yet only 20% agreed ‘strongly’. And 22% remained neutral, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. Belonging, even in its best year, remains contested, uncertain or simply absent for a significant minority of students.

This is reason enough to look beyond the headline.

Paid work: a story we may have got wrong

Two-thirds of full-time undergraduates (65%) are now in paid employment during term time, working an average of nearly 14 hours per week. Combined with study, students in paid work are managing 44.2 hours of total commitment each week – well above the ONS average for a full-time employee.

The conventional reading of this is straightforward: paid work crowds out study, reduces engagement and threatens belonging.

The data tell a more interesting story.

When we look directly at the belonging question broken down by paid employment status, students who work 1–9 hours per week report the highest sense of belonging of any group: 70%, compared to 67% for those working 10 or more hours, and – notably – only 63% for those not in paid employment at all.

This is not what we might expect. Students doing some paid work appear to feel more connected, not less. One reasonable interpretation, consistent with research on student identity, is that navigating different roles and environments can strengthen rather than fragment a sense of self and place.

This reading is reinforced elsewhere in the Survey. Students in paid employment are no more likely to have considered leaving than those not in work (22% versus 23%). And satisfaction with contact hours among working students is virtually indistinguishable from that of non-working peers.

Contact hours: quantity or quality?

The Survey shows that satisfaction with contact hours has returned to high levels (66%), and that satisfaction rises with volume of contact – from 61% among students with fewer than 10 scheduled hours to around 70% among those receiving 10–19 hours.

But when we look at the belonging data broken down by contact hours, the picture is remarkably flat: 64% of students with 0–9 hours of timetabled contact agree they have a sense of belonging, rising only to 68% among those with 20–29 hours. More contact is marginally associated with higher belonging – but the relationship is not strong.

What varies more meaningfully is the nature of the contact. The Survey’s teaching quality data tells us that 68% of students say their staff were ‘helpful and supportive’, 51% say staff helped them to explore their own areas of interest, and 48% say staff regularly initiated debates and discussions. These scores – statistically significant improvements on last year, and in some cases the highest since the Survey began – are not simply measures of teaching quality – they are indicators of recognition, connection and mattering.

In the language of the Being, Belonging, Becoming (BBB) framework, they touch all three dimensions simultaneously. Staff who are helpful and supportive are recognising students as individuals (Being). Staff who initiate discussion are creating connection (Belonging). Staff who help students explore their interests are investing in their futures (Becoming).

The most important number in the Survey

Section 11.2 of the SAES asks how many academic staff know each student’s name and have some idea of their progress. The average answer is 3.95. One in five students (19%) say only three staff know them; 17% say just two. A low number given that on average, a student will be taught by 8 to 15 different staff members per year during a full-time undergraduate course when they typically take 4 to 8 modules per year, depending on subject and institution, with each module often managed by a module leader and supported by additional teaching staff, as well as being assigned a personal tutor or academic advisor.

The report explicitly links this question to belonging. And rightly so. A rich body of research – including work on ‘small moments’ of connection in higher education – argues that belonging is not primarily constructed through formal programmes or institutional initiatives. It is built through repeated, small interactions in which students feel seen, known and valued.

That nearly one in five students feel known by fewer than three staff – and that the average across all students is under four – is perhaps the most significant belonging signal in the entire Survey. It is not a number that will appear on a belonging dashboard. But it may matter more than the belonging score itself.

The intangible assets argument

In 2019, researchers from Abertay University, the University of the West of England and Edinburgh Napier University published a QAA Scotland-funded report: ‘Beyond the Metrics: Identifying, evidencing and enhancing the less tangible assets of higher education’ (Robertson, Cleaver & Smart, 2019). Through nine stakeholder workshops across the UK, involving 147 participants drawn from academic staff, professional services, senior managers and student representatives, they asked which aspects of higher education matter most but are hardest to measure.

The number one intangible asset identified – ranked highest for both importance and difficulty of measurement – was a sense of belonging and being part of an academic community.

The second was building effective relationships between students and staff.

This finding sits at the heart of the challenge the 2026 SAES presents to the sector.

Robertson et al. situate their argument within a concept called the McNamara Fallacy, named after Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defence during the Vietnam War, who applied quantitative business methods to the management of the conflict – most notoriously using body count as the primary measure of success. The concept was articulated by sociologist Daniel Yankelovich (1972), who described its four-step logic as follows:

The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can’t be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist. This is suicide.

(Yankelovich, 1972, cited in Robertson et al., 2019)

Robertson et al. are careful to note that this is not an argument against metrics. Metrics have an important role to play. The concern is a more specific one: that the sector risks ‘measuring educational quality without counting all of the education’ – a phrase they adapt from Haskel & Westlake’s work on the intangible economy.

When we read the 2026 SAES through this lens, the implications are clear. The Survey captures belonging as a headline percentage. But the factors that most strongly generate belonging – being known by name, staff who notice when you are struggling, relationships built over the course of a year – live in the spaces between the questions.

These intangible assets do not appear in dashboards. Yet the SAES data, read carefully, points towards them repeatedly: in the teaching quality ratings that function as proxies for relational care; in the free speech data, where 33% of students who feel comfortable expressing their views attribute this partly to feeling that they belong, while 19% of those who feel uncomfortable cite a lack of belonging as a reason; and in the finding that students known by more staff report stronger belonging.

The 2026 Survey is a genuinely positive set of results for the sector. But the most important lesson it offers may be about what lies just beyond the edge of what we are currently measuring.

A different question

Universities should continue to measure belonging. Longitudinal data like the SAES is essential for understanding trends and holding institutions to account.

But measurement is not the same as understanding. And improvement on a belonging scale is not the same as creating the conditions in which belonging genuinely flourishes.

The most generative question the 2026 SAES prompts is not: how do we increase our belonging score?

It is: what experiences help students feel known, valued and connected – particularly those navigating increasingly complex lives?

Some of those experiences can be designed. Many cannot be mandated. All of them depend on the quality of relationships – between students, staff and the communities that encompass them both.

Belonging is not a metric. It is what the metrics are trying to reach.