WEEKEND READING: What assumptions should we rethink about today’s students?

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

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.

Much of the discussion surrounding the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) focuses on the future. As I argued previously for HEPI, the LLE is not simply a funding reform, but a pedagogical challenge that asks institutions to rethink curriculum design, assessment practice and student engagement from the ground up.

How will universities respond to students who move in and out of education? How will curricula adapt to modular study? How will institutions support students who combine learning with work and other responsibilities?

Yet the recently published Student Academic Experience Survey 2026 raises a different question.

What if many of these students are already here?

The lifelong scholar

In a recent post, I argued that the language we use to describe non-traditional participation in higher education matters more than we often acknowledge. The term ‘learner’ implies someone in the act of acquiring knowledge. ‘Student’ implies formal, continuous enrolment. Neither quite captures someone who moves in and out of study across a lifetime, combining academic engagement with work, family and community life.

I proposed instead the term ‘lifelong scholar’: a term that carries intellectual dignity without implying that study is someone’s primary identity. As I put it: you can be a scholar whether you studied last year or last decade.

The lifelong scholar is not a future student type. Read the 2026 SAES carefully, and it is clear that lifelong scholars are already the majority of those responding to the survey.

The student we imagine

Higher education continues to be shaped by a powerful, and increasingly inaccurate, image of what a student is.

This imagined student is available throughout the week. They attend at scheduled times. They engage continuously with study. They have substantial time for independent learning. Assessment can be concentrated at predictable points in the calendar. Learning is the primary focus of their daily life.

Few of us would consciously describe our students in this way. Yet many curricula, timetables, assessment regimes and institutional processes continue to assume precisely these conditions. The assumption is embedded in the design.

The student we have

The 2026 SAES paints a different picture, and the specifics matter.

Around 65% of full-time undergraduates are now in paid employment during term time, working an average of nearly 14 hours per week. When combined with study, students in paid work are managing 44.2 hours of total combined commitment each week, which is significantly higher than the ONS average for a full-time employee (36.6 hours).

Independent study hours, meanwhile, are at their lowest level since the Survey began measuring them: 11.1 hours per week on average. This is not a story of disengagement. It is a story of prioritisation under pressure.

Commuting patterns tell a similar story. While just under half of students (48%) spend up to two hours per week travelling to and from university, 12% spend more than six hours commuting each week, and 2% spend more than ten. Some 12% study remotely and do not commute at all.

The geographic picture adds further complexity.Rural students report lower wellbeing and a weaker sense of belonging than their urban peers. Students living in villages are more likely to be first-in-family (42%), to live at home (67%), and to be balancing caring responsibilities.

What is striking is not simply that these pressures exist. It is that they increasingly represent the norm rather than the exception. The ‘non-traditional’ student is becoming progressively harder to distinguish from the wider student population.

What assumptions should we challenge?

This matters because educational design is built upon assumptions. When those assumptions no longer reflect the lives of most students, the design begins to work against the people it was intended to serve.

The 2026 SAES gives us specific grounds to revisit a number of these:

• Attendance equals engagement. Students working 44-hour combined weeks are not disengaged; they are making complex decisions about how to allocate finite time. The Survey shows that students in paid employment are no more likely to have considered leaving their course than those not working (22% versus 23%). More strikingly, students working 1–9 hours per week report the highest sense of belonging of any group: 70%, compared to 67% for those working 10+ hours and only 63% for those not in paid employment at all. Engagement, evidently, does not require continuous physical presence.
• Participation is continuous. The LLE is built on the premise that many people will study episodically – entering, pausing and returning to higher education across a lifetime. But the SAES suggests that episodic patterns of engagement already characterise many full-time students, whose participation in any given week is shaped by shift patterns, commuting times and caring commitments.
• Students are available during normal working hours. With 65% in paid employment and many commuting for significant periods, the assumption that students can attend flexibly across the full working week no longer holds for the majority. Timetabling and support services designed around 9-to-5 availability will increasingly miss the students who most need them.
• Independent study time is abundant. Independent study hours have fallen to historically low levels. This is not surprising given the combined demands students are managing. Curriculum design that assumes students will compensate for limited contact through extensive self-directed study is increasingly misaligned with the reality of student lives.
• Assessment can be concentrated at predictable points. The Survey notes that volumes of both summative and formative assessment remain high. For students managing significant employment and other commitments, concentrated assessment periods create compounding pressures. The data suggests students value contact and feedback highly; what they need is assessment that is well-distributed and authentically connected to their contexts.

What the LLE really asks us to do

The sector conversation about the LLE often centres on funding mechanisms, credit transfer and the regulatory framework, driven by the Department for Education’s policy. These issues matter.

But the deeper challenge is pedagogical.

The question is not simply whether students can access learning at different points in their lives. It is whether our curricula, assessment practices and support systems are designed for lives that are complex, interrupted and genuinely unpredictable.

This is, fundamentally, a design challenge. And it is one that cannot be deferred until the LLE is fully implemented. The students who will benefit from better-designed provision are not only those who will enrol in the future. Many of them are already here.

Designing for real student lives

What does this redesign look like in practice?

The SAES data points towards some clear directions. Students report high and improving satisfaction with teaching quality: 68% say their staff are helpful and supportive; 62% say staff used contact hours to guide their independent study; 48% say staff regularly initiated discussion and debate. These are not just measures of teaching quality. They are indicators of the kind of relational engagement that helps students navigate complex lives.

In the Being, Belonging, Becoming (BBB) framework, each of these interactions serves a distinct purpose. When staff are helpful and supportive, they recognise students as individuals with particular circumstances (Being). When they initiate discussion, they build the sense of connection and participation that generates belonging (Belonging). When they help students explore their interests and guide their development, they invest in students’ futures (Becoming). For students whose time on campus is limited, these relational moments are not incidental. They may be the primary means through which belonging is built. As Liz Thomas reported in 2012, belonging is key for student success:

It is the human side of higher education that comes first – finding friends, feeling confident and, above all, feeling a part of your course of study and the institution – that is the necessary starting point for academic success.

(Thomas, 2012)

Alongside this relational dimension, curriculum design itself needs to shift. This means thinking carefully about:

• authentic assessment that connects learning to real-world contexts and accommodates complex lives;
• flexible and varied forms of participation that do not assume continuous, scheduled availability;
• coherent learning journeys that work for students who engage episodically as well as continuously;
• clear expectations and structured support for re-engagement after periods of interruption; and
• approaches that actively strengthen students’ sense of being, belonging and becoming throughout the programme.

In practice, this might mean offering assessment submission windows rather than fixed deadlines, or building structured asynchronous participation options into seminars for students who do not have continuous scheduled availability.

These principles form the basis of Designing Curriculum for Real Student Lives, a toolkit for higher education leaders and curriculum teams that I published in June 2026 as part of my Visiting Fellowship at Oxford. The toolkit offers a practical framework for auditing current provision against the realities of today’s student lives, and for identifying where design assumptions most need revisiting.

The aim is not to reduce academic expectations or lower standards. It is to ensure that academic excellence remains genuinely achievable under real-life conditions for the lifelong scholars who are already here, and for those who are yet to come.

Conclusion

The question may not be whether higher education is ready for lifelong learning.

It may be whether we are ready to acknowledge that lifelong learners are already among us.

If the 2026 SAES tells us anything, it is that the students we often describe as future learners: complex, balancing multiple roles, engaging episodically, navigating lives that do not pause for academic calendars; increasingly resemble the students already sitting in our classrooms.

The challenge is not simply preparing for a different student population.

It is redesigning, thoughtfully and urgently, for the one we already have.