Student wellbeing - how to improve and measure it
Student wellbeing is a term which encompasses the overall health of a student. This can include their mental, physical, and emotional health.
Student wellbeing is now being a measure that is used and considered when analysing student retention, academic performance, and the overall reputation of a higher education institution.
A student’s wellbeing can decline at any time. Whether it's exams, determining next steps, or personal issues. In order for it to be managed well, students must be able to learn how to not only look after their physical health, but their mental health too.
If you are a university or college you will be aware that in the last few years national student wellbeing has been in decline and you may be looking for new ways to help improve it so your students can get the best experience possible.
By the end of this article you should have a variety of tips and methods on not only how to improve student wellbeing, but how best to monitor it too, so you can have more effective preventative measures in place to avoid student drop-out rates increasing and a further decline in student’s’ mental health.
At Access Elemental Social Prescribing, we want to make sure all universities and colleges can easily record, track, and analyse, their student’s progress without it being time-consuming and resulting in staff re-keying the same information over and over.
This article will explore what student wellbeing is and what it means for students as well as universities and colleges to explain better methods in measuring it, improving it, and most importantly analysing it so student wellbeing can continuously improve, so students can make the best progress without feeling of stressed, anxious or lonely.
What is student wellbeing?
Student wellbeing can be a complex thing to define. In short, wellbeing describes an overall state of mental, physical, emotional, and social health. It is often described as neither permanent or innate but rather a state of mind and body which is acquired over time but equally can be lost over time too.
There are many factors and wider social determinants of health that can impact a student’s wellbeing including: access to a safe and supportive learning environment, access to healthcare, housing, and positive relationships, as well as opportunities for personal growth and development too.
Ensuring all students can manage their wellbeing effectively is crucial for both their academic success and long-term life satisfaction. Through addressing things like stress, mental health, physical health and creating an environment where students can be educated safely, students can then thrive both academically and personally.
Student wellbeing is often referred to as a subset of wellbeing in general which is tailored to specific student needs. This is often due to the specific life stage and environment students are in. For example, in an education environment factors such as stressors related to academics and exams would be considered, whereas general wellbeing will tend to consider a broader range of factors such as work and family life.
Both forms, however, are essential for individuals to lead fulfilling balanced lives, but involve different contexts and challenges. The remainder of this article will explain why student wellbeing is important as well as ways not only to measure it but also improve it.
Why is student wellbeing important?
There are many reasons why student wellbeing is important. The British Medical Association state there are many benefits of taking action to support your wellbeing including:
- Gaining greater self-confidence and control
- Improving your quality of life
- Having healthier behaviours
- Gaining a better understanding of your own health
Taking action to support student wellbeing is no different. Through understanding student wellbeing, teachers, lecturers, parents and guardians, as well as students themselves can notice when their wellbeing may be slipping so action can be taken to boost it. Here more preventative measures can be put in place in schools, colleges, and universities to ensure everyone understands the importance of wellbeing and what to do when a student’s wellbeing declines.
Student wellbeing is often the way students perceive themselves and their lives and it is essential not just to understand what it is but how it can change over time, and how to manage and improve it as academic success and wellbeing are intertwined.
Schools, colleges, and universities can play pivotal roles through educating students and their parents signs of mental health issues and provide safe and comfortable environments, so students feel happy talking about their problems without any embarrassment.
The table below shows the importance of student wellbeing for not just students, but for schools, colleges, universities, and parents and guardians themselves.
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Students |
Schools, colleges, and universities |
Parents and guardians |
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Importance of student wellbeing |
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The table above clearly demonstrates that the importance of student wellbeing goes further than the student themselves.
Overall promoting and improving student wellbeing helps students both in the short and long-term. They can learn skills to manage any stressors and challenges of life and better their manage mental health. Through encouraging and teaching the importance of student wellbeing from a young age students can learn the importance of both physical and mental health and what can happen if they don’t look after both, that way by the time students move away to university they can be fully equipped with the tools, strategies, and skills needed to cope with the transition to university life better and be more proactive in managing their mental health.
Equally, educating people about student wellbeing also provides parents and guardians reassurance that when the transition to university and college takes place they know their children are fully prepared and can cope with the change, but also can happily ask for help if they are struggling.
Through institutions being educated on what student wellbeing is and the impacts it can have on student when wellbeing is declining, more preventative measures can be put in place to support students when they need it. This in turn, helps to prevent student drop-out rates, improve their reputation by demonstrating their care for their students’ welfare as well as provide institutions with cost savings by preventing more and more dropouts.
What affects student wellbeing?
Like discussed above, it is one thing knowing what student wellbeing is but it is equally important to know what affects and impacts student wellbeing too so effective support can be put in place to prevent student’s mental health and wellbeing declining further.
Below is a list of some of the factors and wider social determinants of health that impact a student’s wellbeing:
1. Academic pressures
High expectations, excessive workloads and exam stress all can negatively impact a student’s wellbeing. This is why academic pressure is one of biggest factors which can impact a student’s wellbeing. External issues have also intensified these academic pressures in recent years including strikes, the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis.
Here the disruption to the typical quality of teaching that students normally would receive has been inconsistent, often leading to students having to teach themselves using online resources. Equally, the cost-of-living crisis has meant institutions’ budgets are even tighter than before increasing the risk of students using out of date textbooks and being less prepared for their exams.
2. Social relationships
Social relationships are another factor which can impact a student’s wellbeing because they can both motivate students to do the best, they can but equally be detrimental to their wellbeing when there is a breakdown in friendships or relationships.
Equally, the struggle to make friends when starting college or university can also impact a student’s wellbeing as they can feel more isolated and lonelier, and if that does not improve it can lead to students dropping out altogether.
3. Physical health
Like general wellbeing, it is crucial that both mental health and physical health are looked after. Having poorer physical health can lead to complex health issues. Poor diet, a lack of exercise, and a lack of sleep can all impact a student’s wellbeing. Their concentration can decline which can turn can decline their academic progress and student satisfaction. Again, if this continues in the long-term students can acquire long-term health issues and end up leaving college and university because they will no longer be able to cope.
4. Financial stress
Another set of factors which can impact a student’s wellbeing are financial stresses. These, like general wellbeing, have impacted most people one way or another. The cost-of-living crisis has exacerbated this further by making it even harder for students to afford to attend college or university.
These financial worries can then increase the stress and anxiety of students and without efficient support in place students can continue to suffer and struggle to afford to pay for heating, food, and the resources they need for their studies. This in turn, can reduce academic success and lead to serious health conditions.
5. Support Networks
Studies have also shown it can be harder for students to succeed in their academics if they have had a distressing upbringing.
Currently only 6% of care leavers will attend university compared to 50% of the rest of the population. It has been shown there is an increase in interest of care leavers wanting to attend university however due to a limited support network at home and outside of home, 60% of care leavers interested receive no specific guidance at school or college about how to apply. The stresses of not knowing what a student’s next steps are and not having the support networks around them to help can quickly reduce a student’s wellbeing.
A stable and supportive family environment can bolster wellbeing where equally family problems, a lack of stability, or estrangement can be distressing and can cause student wellbeing to decline.
6. Accessibility
Accessibility can also reduce a student’s wellbeing. If a student cannot access adequate resources, healthcare, counselling and extracurricular activities then wellbeing can rapidly decline.
Access to all these facilities can help encourage new friendships to be made as well as the opportunity for students to be more proactive in managing their own health and wellbeing.
7. Housing
Housing is an example of a wider social determinant of health that can impact everyone’s wellbeing. The pressure of the cost-of-living crisis has led to many students living in fuel poverty.
A study on student fuel poverty found that currently 59% of students in the private rented sector have felt uncomfortably cold in their current accommodation with 54% of them living with reporting issues of damp and mold.
The cost-of-living crisis has meant there have been wider shortages in rented housing across the UK leaving students to have to accept lower quality accommodation. These living conditions can hugely impact students’ physical and mental wellbeing and can lead to complex health issues especially for students who already suffer with respiratory conditions.
8. Personal reasons
A final example of a factor that can impact students’ mental wellbeing is more personal reasons. These can include struggling to access healthcare, family and relationship breakdowns, losing a job, and bereavements.
What can make personal reasons harder to manage for students is often when some of these events occur it will be the first time, they will have to cope with them without their typical support network around them. If students have struggled to make friends at college or university this can make it even harder to cope and increases the likelihood of students leaving to return home.
Student wellbeing – how to measure it?
As mentioned above it can be very difficult to measure student wellbeing due to the multiple factors that can have an impact. Many schools, colleges, and universities will use a combination of both quantitative and qualitative methods. For example, surveys, questionnaires, and interviews can assess emotional or social aspects of a student’s wellbeing, and tracking and monitoring behaviour, attendance and performance, can help assess more academic aspects.
Since the pandemic the need to put student wellbeing at the forefront of education has been vital. It is now being more widely understood that the awareness of student wellbeing and how it can change overtime needs to be understood.
Wellbeing can be very subjective, and this can make it difficult to measure. Talking to students is a crucial way to understand it better and have a more holistic picture of their strengths and needs.
One method that is being adopted heavily across the education sector is social prescribing. Social prescribing offers a non-medical, non-clinical alternative for students to seek support with. It has grown massively in popularity since the social prescribing model was embedded in the NHS’ Long Term Plan. Social prescribing in education helps to deliver and track impactful social prescribing programmes to give students the opportunity to improve their health and wellbeing and focus on their education.
Students can then have more enhanced social connections and be offered more early interventions to support students sooner and prevent them suffering in silence of leaving altogether.
Examples of measuring student wellbeing
Now it’s not just colleges and universities that are concentrating on measuring and improving student wellbeing, schools are getting more involved too. Cambridge CEM has now launched the Cambridge Wellbeing Check for students aged 7 to 18 from primary to secondary and beyond, so teachers can use the measure to monitor their student’s wellbeing and support their conversations.
It is a digital assessment that takes just 20 minutes to do so it can be done quickly. The results from these assessments can then be used to tailor lesson plans on educating students on the importance of looking after both their physical and mental health.
Similar to the Cambridge Wellbeing Check there are a number of other well-known student well-being measuring tools including:
- Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (WEMWBS)
- Student Wellbeing Questionnaire
- Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (k10)
- Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS)
- Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ)
- Perceived Stress Scale (PSS)
- Social Wellbeing Scale
- Resilience Scale
- Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS)
Despite there being a number of tools out there it is crucial for schools, colleges, and universities to consider which ones align with your specific goals and the different wellbeing dimensions you want to assess, the age of the students you are monitoring, and how easy it is to store, find and interpret the information you need.
Finding a method to store and track all this information and results can be difficult. It can be time-consuming if you rely on manual or paper processes or if you have to continuously re-key in the same information over and over again. Investing in a system which can store all this information in one centralised place can help measure a student’s wellbeing more easily. Here wellbeing scores can be automatically updated on the platform as they change, this in turn can save time on admin and allow more time to be spent working with students to help improve their mental health and wellbeing.
Adopting the social prescribing model within education in another way which can make using these wellbeing tools easier. Through using social prescribing, students and student support services can work together on what matters to the individual. Investing in digital social prescribing can help your institution go one step further by offering better insights into your students' wellbeing as well as help your institution identify gaps for improvement.
Best ways to improve student wellbeing
Like discussed above, there are many different methods and tools to use to improve and track student wellbeing. Improving student wellbeing involves a holistic and co-production approach that addresses physical, mental, and emotional health.
Often many schools, colleges, and universities rely on counselling to help improve student wellbeing. It is important to have a variety of options as the demand for student support services is increasing continuously and waiting lists are getting bigger.
By offering a variety of different types of support services your services will be diverse and will be able to cater to every need.
One way to organise all the support services together is through social prescribing where lecturers can refer students to wellbeing managers or coaches to seek the support they need. Equally students can also make a social prescribing self-referral themselves when they realise their wellbeing is in decline.
At Access Elemental Social Prescribing we know it’s vital you are able to demonstrate the impact and value your student wellbeing programmes provides. Using our reporting features allows our customers to access, report, and showcase detailed data and analytics at any time. This can help you measure student wellbeing and the impact of social prescribing more effectively to make more data-driven decisions for the future.
Our digital social prescribing platform also allows you to record actions of high dependency groups and vulnerable students to gain better overviews of a student’s pastoral journey within your institution.
For more information in how best to implement social prescribing in your institution download our social prescribing in education guide today.
Summarising the importance of improving student wellbeing
In this article I have explained what student wellbeing is, what it entails, and why it is important for students, their loved ones, and schools, colleges, and universities themselves. This article has also reviewed what the different factors are which impact student wellbeing and how they can differ from general wellbeing.
One of the biggest impacts currently for many schools, colleges, and universities is the level of disruption which has been caused over the past few years with the pandemic, strikes and the cost-of-living crisis. This article has explained that one of the most important things education institutions need to do is educate everyone on the importance of student wellbeing and signs to look out for when it is in decline.
This can allow schools, colleges, and universities to offer more preventative measures so students can receive the support they need quicker, waiting lists for support can reduce, and students can be more proactive in managing their health and wellbeing.
This article has explained there are a variety of tools and strategies which can be used to measure student wellbeing but it is crucial your institution knows their objectives before finalising which ones to use.
At Access Elemental we are aware of how crucial collecting this information is to improve your student’s experience. Our platform offers a centralised place where all this information can be found to save your student support services time so they can spend more time helping students.
Through our social prescribing software we offer safe and assured pathways for students to make it easier for them to find support and interventions that matter to them whether they self-refer themselves, self-serve, or receive help from a wellbeing manager.
For more information in how social prescribing software can help you measure and improve student wellbeing contact us today to see first-hand what other universities and colleges are doing to improve student wellbeing, prevent student drop-outs, and more crucially share awareness about the importance of student wellbeing altogether.
