Enhancing Student Engagement and Belonging through Collaborative Partnership

This report presents a framework and evidence-based strategies for enhancing student belonging across Irish universities. The empirical analysis, drawn from primary data (staff interviews, N =18; HCC survey, N = 11) and secondary data (reviews of Healthy Campus and NStEP case studies, N = 62), confirms that students’ engagement and belonging is socio-economically constrained, particularly by the housing crisis, commuting, and financial precarity. The research synthesises these constraints and successful interventions into three highconsensus strategies for building belonging: Promoting Peer Relationships, which uses students’ peers as the primary agents of support and authentic “safety nets” for transition (e.g., the NStEP Griffin study); Student CoDesign and Partnership, which establishes a meaningful, equitable collaboration framework that requires remuneration for student partners to ensure service relevance and foster student ownership; and finally, Creating Access through Structural Resources, which involves top-down action to remove physical and financial barriers through non-commodified social spaces, flexible timetabling and hardship resources (e.g., foodbanks like DCU’s The Pantry).

The structure of this report outlines both the theoretical foundation and empirical evidence. Section 2 synthesises academic literature to develop a comprehensive theoretical framework for student belonging, recognising its multidimensionality and the importance of continual interventions across the student lifecycle. Section 3 details the methodology used for the empirical analysis within the Irish university context, including surveying Healthy Campus Coordinators (N = 11), and interviewing staff involved in core belonging areas such as accommodation support, orientation and societies (N = 18). Section 4 presents the core results from the empirical interview and survey data and the secondary case studies. Section 5 synthesises the results and contextualises them with key literature. Section 6 explicitly outlines how these recommendations align with various national HEI policies, including those focused on student mental wellbeing. Finally, Section 7 provides four targeted Scalability Recommendations for embedding sustainable and effective belonging initiatives in Irish universities, focusing on implementing affordability infrastructure, strengthening remunerated peer and partnership roles, integrating belonging principles into academic design, and conducting ongoing empirical evaluation.