Better Education through Long-term Investment into Inclusiveness and Student & Staff Wellbeing

We applied for this project to support our students and colleagues at our institutions whose lives were affected by the Covid-19 pandemic and we saw their mental health deteriorated significantly. We also saw that our institutions were not as inclusive as we wished them to be.

We wanted to contribute towards mapping student and staff members’ mental health and belonging across our institutions and then use that knowledge to prepare, conduct and evaluate initiatives that markedly impact inclusiveness, wellbeing and belonging of students and staff.

Thanks to situation mapping, our institutions now have data on student and staff mental health and belonging. We used that evidence for preparing an action plan and implemented some of the initiatives that we had identified as beneficial for students and colleagues. We organised several full-day events at different project partner universities to promote the importance of mental health, belonging and inclusive communication, improve knowledge and share good practice related to it. We wrote a book that is being published by a reputed publisher, Palgrave, to disseminate knowledge about long-term effects of teacher development programmes. We learnt about good practice that improves well-being and belonging across our consortium, which inspired us to convene other activities such as those deepening student and staff knowledge about their university. Data collected during the BELONG project, which we compared with data gathered before, signal that mental health of individuals at our institutions has markedly improved but also that our institutions need to continue carrying on policies that positively impact people’s well-being and belonging. We would like to contribute further, which is why we have prepared two new projects in this are