Belonging strategies fail without mattering and trust
Updated Jul 24, 2026
A university can tell students they belong and still send daily signals that some of them are not fully seen, valued, or safe to trust the institution. At Student Voice AI, that is exactly why student voice matters: belonging is not only a score, it is something students describe through curriculum, staff relationships, reporting confidence, and whether speaking up feels worthwhile. Claire Hamshire, Ryan Gerald Wilkinson, Rachel Forsyth and Awo Abdi's Higher Education Research & Development paper, "From belonging to mattering to trust: the experiences of minoritised ethnic students in UK higher education", published online on 27 November 2025, shows why UK universities should look past belonging rhetoric and ask a harder question. Do students from minoritised ethnic backgrounds feel that they matter enough to trust what the institution says and does?
Context and research question
Across higher education, belonging has become a popular answer to stubborn inequalities in access, continuation, and degree outcomes. That is understandable. If students feel recognised and connected, they are more likely to participate, persist, and ask for help. The problem, as this paper argues, is that belonging can become too vague. Institutions may measure it against strategic priorities, while students experience it through more concrete questions of value, recognition, and trust.
The study draws on five listening events with 15 minoritised ethnic students at a post-92 university in England. All participants were part of a peer-mentoring scheme connected to a wider institutional project on reducing awarding gaps, and the discussions were collected in 2021. The authors use those conversations to test whether belonging is the most useful concept for understanding students' experiences, or whether mattering and trust do a better job of explaining what helps students feel secure, recognised, and willing to engage.
Key findings
Belonging language did not always translate into feeling valued. Students understood that universities wanted them to feel that they belonged, but that language often sat awkwardly beside experiences of exclusion, unequal treatment, and institutional habits that still felt built around somebody else. For UK teams, that matters because a positive strategic narrative about belonging can sit alongside everyday student feedback that tells a less comfortable story.
One participant put the problem bluntly:
"It's pointless to believe that we're all on the same playing field."
Mattering captured something that belonging alone can hide. The paper argues that students were often describing whether they felt noticed, respected, and taken seriously in ordinary university life. That included interactions with staff, how inclusive a learning space felt, and whether the curriculum made room for their histories and perspectives. In practice, mattering is less abstract than belonging. It asks whether students feel that the institution values them, not only whether it claims to welcome them.
Trust is the practical hinge between policy and lived experience. Students wanted to trust their university, but trust was weakened by cultural homogeneity, microaggressions, and a sense that difficult conversations about race were too easily softened or avoided. That makes trust a very useful student voice signal for UK higher education teams. If students do not trust how concerns will be heard, they are less likely to report problems early, contribute honestly to consultations, or believe that feedback will lead anywhere.
The paper shifts responsibility back onto institutions. Rather than treating belonging as something students must somehow generate for themselves, the authors show how institutions produce conditions of mattering or not mattering through everyday structures and interactions. That echoes what we see in research on how students spot decolonisation gaps in curricula, belonging, and everyday university life: exclusion is often cumulative, ordinary, and built into routines that look neutral from the institutional side.
Practical implications
The first implication for UK universities is to collect feedback on mattering and trust, not only on belonging. A pulse survey or annual student experience questionnaire can ask whether students feel part of a course, but it should also ask what made them feel taken seriously, what made them hesitate to raise a concern, and what helped them trust a response. That gives Student Experience teams a more actionable picture than a single belonging item alone.
Second, institutions should treat repeated comments about race, recognition, and visibility as institutional evidence, not as isolated pastoral issues. If students keep describing curriculum invisibility, low confidence in reporting, microaggressions, or thin staff engagement with race, those are not side notes. They are evidence about how the institution is functioning. This is where Student Voice Analytics fits naturally: it helps teams group those signals at scale and compare them across cohorts, which gives work on student representation in quality assurance a stronger evidence base.
Third, universities should make the response visible and governed. Trust does not grow only because students are invited to speak. It grows when students can see who owns the issue, what changed, and how confidentiality is being protected. That matters especially when collecting open comments on race, belonging, and institutional culture. A clear student comment analysis governance checklist helps keep that work credible, safer, and easier to defend.
The wider lesson is that belonging work becomes stronger when it moves from aspiration to proof. Institutions need evidence not just that students are present, but that they feel valued enough to trust the systems around them. When universities listen for mattering and trust in open comments, they get a clearer basis for deciding whether the problem sits in staff practice, curriculum design, reporting systems, or the everyday culture of a programme.
FAQ
Q: How should a university capture mattering and trust in routine student feedback?
A: Add one or two targeted prompts to existing surveys rather than launching a separate instrument. For example: "What made you feel taken seriously this term?" and "What made it easier or harder to trust that raising a concern would help?" Pair those answers with demographic and course context only where anonymity remains safe, then review patterns alongside existing belonging or inclusion measures.
Q: What are the methodological limits of this study?
A: This is a qualitative study from one post-92 university in England, based on five listening events with 15 students involved in a peer-mentoring scheme. The sample was also skewed towards women. That means the paper is best used to understand mechanisms and interpret feedback patterns, not to estimate how common each experience is across the whole sector.
Q: Does this mean universities should stop using belonging as a concept?
A: No. The paper does not reject belonging altogether. It argues that belonging becomes more useful when universities also ask whether students feel they matter and whether they trust institutional responses. In practice, that means keeping belonging in the frame, but using student voice evidence to show what sits underneath it.
References
[Paper Source]: Claire Hamshire, Ryan Gerald Wilkinson, Rachel Forsyth, Awo Abdi "From belonging to mattering to trust: the experiences of minoritised ethnic students in UK higher education" DOI: 10.1080/07294360.2025.2552319
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