Induction can build mature students' belonging, but only if universities design beyond the default student
Updated Apr 13, 2026
At Student Voice AI, we pay close attention to the feedback students give in their first weeks, because transition problems often appear in comments about confidence, communication, and belonging before they show up in annual survey results. Recent work on what new students need to feel they belong and stay well points in the same direction. That is why Jennifer Jones, Joanna MacDonnell and Abeer Aamir's paper in Innovations in Education and Teaching International, "Mature undergraduates' experiences of a UK university induction programme: accruing social capital, evolving habitus and developing a sense of belonging", matters for UK universities trying to make induction and transition support work for mature students as well as the cohort imagined by default.
Context and research question
Many induction programmes still assume that new students are young, residential, and free to attend a dense run of welcome-week activities. Mature undergraduates often start from a different position. They may be balancing paid work, caring responsibilities, financial pressure, travel, and the challenge of returning to formal study in a more digital university environment. That makes belonging less about one social event and more about whether the institution feels navigable, respectful, and realistic. Research on welcome-week attendance and peer belonging suggests those first encounters matter, but this paper shows they need to be designed around different student circumstances rather than around the default entrant.
Jones, MacDonnell and Aamir examine a UK university's belonging induction programme as part of a wider mixed-methods evaluation running from 2020 to 2025. The qualitative element used paired and individual Appreciative Inquiry interviews with nine first-year undergraduates across disciplines, with the paper focusing on mature students' experiences. The practical question is highly relevant for Student Experience teams: how does an induction programme shape mature students' belonging, confidence, engagement, and wellbeing, and where does a well-meant design still leave them feeling outside the norm?
Key findings
Induction started working before students arrived. The programme included pre-entry activities such as short readings, videos, writing tasks, discussion board participation, and equality, diversity and inclusion training. The paper suggests these activities helped mature students feel more prepared for university, reduced anxiety, and gave them an earlier sense of being welcomed into the course and institution. For UK teams, that matters because transition does not begin on day one of welcome week. It begins when communications, tasks, and expectations first signal who the university has been designed for.
Belonging was strengthened through relationships, not only information. The paper shows that mature students valued connections with staff, their course, and the wider university community, not simply practical orientation. This is an important distinction. A timetable explanation can reduce confusion, but it does not by itself create the sense that a student is recognised and expected to succeed. Mature students appeared to benefit when induction created a route into those relationships, rather than treating them as a later add-on.
"The findings show that the BP activities enhanced mature students' belonging, confidence, engagement and wellbeing"
The programme helped, but it did not erase othering. One of the paper's most useful contributions is that it refuses a simple success story. Mature students sometimes still felt like "other" in the induction context, and the findings identify practical pressure points around communication, attendance at belonging programme sessions, session timings, and pre-entry activities. In other words, institutions can improve belonging while still asking some students to fit around assumptions that were built with someone else in mind.
The evaluation method itself is part of the lesson. The interviews were co-conducted with student engagement partners and organised through an Appreciative Inquiry approach. That matters because the paper is not only about what mature students said, but about a listening method that produced actionable findings. Senior managers reportedly used the research to enhance the programme further. For universities collecting transition feedback, this is a reminder that student voice becomes more useful when it is built into redesign, not just gathered at the end of a process.
Practical implications
First, universities should ask more specific induction questions of mature students. Instead of relying on a generic "Did you feel welcome?" item, ask what helped them feel prepared before arrival, what made attendance easier or harder, whether communications were clear, and when they first felt part of their course. One open-text prompt can do a lot of work here: "What has most helped, or hindered, your sense of belonging since you accepted your place?"
Second, institutions should segment induction and belonging feedback more deliberately. Mature students are often hidden inside an overall first-year average, even though their transition pressures may differ sharply from school-leaver entrants. Student Voice Analytics fits naturally here: categorising comments on belonging, staff connection, communication, timetable fit, and confidence makes it easier to see whether mature students are describing a distinct pattern that a headline score would miss. That picture gets stronger when teams track induction comments against how belonging changes over time instead of treating one early snapshot as the whole story.
Third, UK universities should treat induction as an extended transition process, not a single welcome-week product. This paper points to the value of pre-entry preparation, relationship-building with staff, and practical flexibility around session design. If mature students repeatedly mention timing clashes, unclear information, or difficulty joining the social core of induction, those are not soft issues. They are design issues that can be changed.
FAQ
Q: How should universities redesign induction feedback for mature students after reading this paper?
A: Keep the survey short, but make the questions more diagnostic. Ask separately about pre-arrival information, session timings, academic preparedness, staff connection, and whether students could realistically participate alongside work or caring commitments. Add one open-text question so mature students can explain barriers in their own words rather than forcing everything into a single belonging score. Then use early follow-up routes such as personal tutor check-ins or short pulse surveys to see whether the same issues are still surfacing.
Q: What are the methodological limits of this study?
A: This is a small qualitative study within one UK university's wider mixed-methods evaluation, so it is designed to explain mechanisms and lived experience rather than estimate sector-wide prevalence. That means the findings should not be treated as a benchmark. They are strongest when used to sharpen local induction design, interpret transition comments, and test whether similar themes appear in your own feedback.
Q: What does this change about how we use student voice on transition and belonging?
A: It shifts the focus from asking whether induction was "good" to understanding who it worked for, how it worked, and where it still reproduced exclusion. For student voice practice, that means pairing a small number of scaled items with open-text feedback and then analysing the comments by student group. Universities get a much clearer route from student experience evidence to practical action when they do that.
References
[Paper Source]: Jennifer Jones, Joanna MacDonnell and Abeer Aamir "Mature undergraduates' experiences of a UK university induction programme: accruing social capital, evolving habitus and developing a sense of belonging" DOI: 10.1080/14703297.2025.2555959
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