Student-led wellbeing strategy works best when students lead the consultation
Updated Aug 06, 2026
Student wellbeing strategies often fail for a simple reason: the people writing them are usually not the people trying to use them. That is why William Carey, Zoi Vatrani, Gian Fazey-Koven, Rob Samuels, Cerys Vernon and Marcia Ody's Student Engagement in Higher Education Journal paper, "What we got was so much more! Student-Led Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy: Insights from the 'Barometer Project' at Bangor University, utilising a 'Students as Consultants' model", matters. For UK universities trying to treat student voice as operational evidence rather than a late-stage consultation, it shows what changes when students help gather, interpret, and shape the evidence behind wellbeing strategy.
Context and research question
Universities now talk more openly about mental health, belonging, cost pressures, and support access, but strategy documents can still sit at a distance from how students actually experience those issues. That gap matters in UK higher education because wellbeing problems rarely arrive as one neat category. Students experience them through communication failures, unclear support routes, weak peer connection, delays in practical help, and uncertainty about where to turn first.
This case study examines Bangor University's Barometer Project, a collaborative initiative between the university and students' union designed to review and inform the institution's Student-Led Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy for 2022 to 2025. Using a Students as Consultants model, undergraduate and postgraduate students were trained as consultants, helped design consultation activities, and then gathered qualitative evidence from peers across the university community. The research question is practical: what happens when students are positioned not only as respondents, but as active partners in shaping wellbeing policy and institutional culture?
Key findings
The clearest finding is that peer-led consultation changed the quality of the evidence. Rather than relying only on formal survey returns or staff-led meetings, the project asked trained student consultants to co-design activities and gather qualitative data from fellow students. That matters because wellbeing concerns are often easier to explain to peers than to an unfamiliar institutional channel. For UK Student Experience teams, the lesson is that method affects candour.
The paper captures that shift in one concise phrase:
"active agents in shaping wellbeing policy and institutional culture"
The consultation did not just generate general sentiment. It surfaced concrete improvement priorities. According to the abstract, the Barometer Project informed clearer communication about services, more responsive resources, and wider use of peer-led support. That is important because many wellbeing strategies stay too high-level to guide action. This project appears to have produced operational intelligence about what students found confusing, useful, or missing.
The work also changed the students who took part in it. The student consultants reported gains in confidence, leadership, institutional literacy, and community. That is more than a useful secondary outcome. It suggests that well-designed student voice work can itself be part of a healthier student experience, especially when students can see that their role has substance rather than symbolism.
Staff learning was another significant outcome. The abstract notes that staff reflected on assumptions being challenged, power dynamics shifting, and student perspectives becoming deeper and more authentic through the process. For universities, that is a useful reminder that partnership is not only a way of extracting better data from students. It is also a way of improving how staff interpret the student experience.
The project's final contribution is transferability. The authors argue that the model could extend beyond mental health into curriculum development, inclusion work, and service design. That matters because the underlying issue is bigger than wellbeing strategy alone. It is about whether institutions can build feedback processes that are trusted, specific, and usable across different parts of the student experience.
Practical implications
For UK higher education teams, the first implication is to treat wellbeing strategy as a live listening system, not a periodic consultation exercise. If feedback only appears at the end of the year, or after a strategy cycle is effectively settled, universities lose the chance to improve support for the students currently struggling. That is one reason recent practice has started moving beyond end-of-unit surveys towards earlier, multi-channel routes. The benefit is earlier action while students can still feel the difference.
Second, universities should use peer-led consultation when the issue is sensitive, relational, or hard to reduce to a rating scale. Mental health, confidence, belonging, and help-seeking behaviour often produce richer evidence when students can speak to trained peers who understand the context. That does not remove the need for safeguarding, escalation routes, or staff support for the student consultants themselves. It does mean institutions are more likely to hear what students actually find hard to say, which improves the quality of the evidence.
Third, institutions should make visible what changed because students did the work. This paper sits close to a wider lesson from our recent review of trust in student-staff partnerships: students are more likely to keep contributing when they can see where their effort led. Action logs, response updates, and named owners are not communication extras. They are part of what makes student voice credible.
Fourth, universities should connect partnership work to a governed evidence system rather than leaving it as a standalone project. A student consultation can generate powerful insight, but it needs to sit alongside surveys, representative channels, casework, and open comments in a framework people can follow. Glasgow's recent Student Voice Framework is useful here because it shows how cadence, ownership, and visible response can be standardised. The practical benefit is that student wellbeing evidence becomes easier to compare, act on, and defend.
The broader lesson is straightforward. If a university wants more useful wellbeing evidence, it should not only ask students what they think. It should also ask whether students can help shape how that evidence is gathered and used. This is where Student Voice Analytics fits naturally: it helps teams group recurring themes across consultation notes, survey comments, and representative feedback, so support priorities are guided by patterns rather than anecdotes.
FAQ
Q: How could a university use this model without overburdening student consultants?
A: Keep the role bounded and supported. Student consultants need training, clear expectations, referral routes for distressing disclosures, and staff backup when issues need escalation. The point is not to ask students to replace wellbeing professionals. It is to involve them in shaping how evidence is gathered and interpreted.
Q: What should institutions keep in mind before generalising from this study?
A: This is a practice-based case study from one UK university, so it is most useful as evidence about mechanisms rather than a sector benchmark. The abstract makes clear that the work was collaborative, qualitative, and locally embedded. UK teams should treat it as a strong example of what a student consultant model can surface, then test whether the same design would fit their scale, support structure, and institutional culture.
Q: What does this change about student voice more broadly?
A: It strengthens the case for seeing student voice as part of institutional problem-solving, not only as a satisfaction measure or a representative meeting. When universities involve students in how questions are framed, how evidence is gathered, and how findings are interpreted, student voice becomes more diagnostic and more actionable.
References
[Paper Source]: William Carey, Zoi Vatrani, Gian Fazey-Koven, Rob Samuels, Cerys Vernon and Marcia Ody "What we got was so much more! Student-Led Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy: Insights from the ‘Barometer Project’ at Bangor University, utilising a ‘Students as Consultants’ model" DOI: 10.66561/sehej.v7i1.1414
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