The Framework › Social
Sense of Belonging & Community
Distribution of responses
How institutions vary
Middle 80% of the 148 institutions with enough responses. Social domain mean: 8.0.
Institution is a major factor here: weaker and stronger institutions are 2.8 points apart on this topic. Where a student studies shapes their experience more than the topic itself does.
What we ask
“I feel socially included.”
What students say, and why
Exclusion and not feeling safe to be oneself; weak ties across cohorts.
"I don’t feel I can be myself in class, or welcome enough to take part."
"No cohesion between classes, specialisms or year groups."
Class culture: mutual help, shared humour, a felt community.
"I love the community in my class."
"Good class culture, we help each other, and good humour."
Representative, de-identified comments from the lowest- and highest-scoring responses, translated where needed.
Related insights
Students who feel they belong cope far better with academic pressure
Across thousands of paired student responses, students with a strong sense of belonging score close to two points higher on stress and wellbeing than students who feel they don't belong. Belonging is not a nice-to-have. It is a buffer.
RetentionWhat keeps students engaged through their studies
Students arrive wanting to finish. Whether they stay engaged is shaped by a handful of experience factors we can measure continuously: belonging, relevance, confidence, and the pressures that wear them down. Exam-readiness confidence runs above 8 out of 10 at term start and falls to 5.3 by April.
Single-stat insightStudents' most reliable source of help is each other
Peer-to-peer help scores 8.4 out of 10, higher than any formal peer-support structure built around it.
How we measure it
This is the topic-level average across its subtopics, on a 0-10 scale (higher is better), so an individual subtopic can score higher or lower than the topic shown here. Figures are scored responses from the last 12 months, mapped to the 2026 framework via the canonical question mapping; the cross-2020 figure on the Index uses the full response base. Movement compares the most recent six months with the prior six. Distribution bands: 0-4, >4-<8, 8-10. Cross-institution aggregate; no single institution identified; minimum group size applied.
Read the State of the Student Experience 2026
Our annual report: what three million student datapoints reveal about wellbeing, teaching and belonging, and what actually moves recommendation and retention. Free, for a work email.