Support Is Part of the Learning: Rethinking Equity in Creative Education

conversation

Abstract

At Bath Spa University London, many students are not entering higher education from a position of ease. Around 80% are from the lowest socio-economic backgrounds; the average age is 33; many begin at Foundation level, speak English as an additional language, work nights, care for others, parent children, or navigate undiagnosed learning differences. Yet they arrive with ambition: to change their lives, build confidence and access futures that may once have felt closed. This conversation asks what creative education can learn from high-support students. What if their needs are not deficits, but design prompts for a more explicit, humane and equitable university?

Session and activities

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This session will be structured as a facilitated conversation rather than a formal paper. I will open with a provocation drawn from my role as University Centre Deputy Director at Bath Spa University London, a centre of around 1,500 students studying from Foundation through to MBA level. Many of our students arrive through non-traditional routes into higher education: around 80% are from the lowest socio-economic backgrounds; the average age is 33; many speak English as an additional language, work nights, care for others, parent children, or navigate undiagnosed learning differences.

At BSU London, a key challenge is ensuring that support does not become a substitute for students’ agency. Helping someone understand an email, complete a form, navigate a digital system, ask a tutor for help, or make sense of a university process can look like administration. But these small acts can also be part of the learning journey: moments where students build confidence, language, agency and trust.

The session will ask how universities can create safe, inclusive environments where students are able to ask questions, make mistakes, grow gradually and become more confident participants in higher education. Drawing briefly on my own UAL student journey — including not understanding what my university email was for until halfway through my second year — I will invite participants to consider what universities assume students already know.

Participants will reflect individually and then discuss in pairs or small groups using three prompts:

What does your institution assume students should already know?

Which small acts of support are actually moments of learning?

How can we support students without creating dependency — and challenge them without abandoning them?

The conversation will then open into whole-room discussion, drawing examples across teaching, student support, administration, digital learning, assessment and induction. The session will close by inviting participants to identify one assumption or process they could make clearer, safer or more developmental in their own context.

The aim is not to present BSU London as a model to copy, but to use high-support student experience as a lens for rethinking creative education: support not as an add-on, but as educational design itself.