Reflections from “Building Connections: The Power of Residence Life in Student Experience” | CUBO Residence Life Conference 2026 | Part Two of Two
By Heba Khan, Marketing Coordinator, Kinetic
This is the second of two articles drawing on research presented by Sarah Ead, Head of Insight at GSL, at the CUBO Residence Life Conference 2026. The first article looked at belonging: why it matters, when it is lost, and who is most at risk. This one looks at engagement: why students say they want things they do not show up for, what actually moves them, and what the data says about designing a programme that reaches more of them.
The full GSL report will be released at the CUBO Summer Conference in July.
The engagement gap is real, and it is widely shared
One of the most honest conversations of the conference happened in this session, when the room collectively admitted what most residence life teams already know but rarely say out loud: students fill in the survey, tell you what they want, and then do not come.
The research asked students to describe their level of engagement with extracurricular activities in their accommodation. The picture that emerged was more divided than many teams might expect.
The largest group, though only just, said they had an engaging experience with plenty to get involved in. But around 30% said they were at university purely to study and had no interest in anything outside their course. A fifth said they had a fulfilling social life happening elsewhere, away from their accommodation entirely. And a meaningful minority said they wanted to be more involved but felt there were things stopping them.
That last group is worth particular attention. These are not students who have opted out. They are students who want to be reached. The question is understanding what is actually in their way, because the barriers are not the same for everyone.
Different students, different barriers
The research drew a clear distinction between the barriers facing international students and those facing domestic UK students, and it matters for how teams design their messaging and their programmes.
For international students, the biggest barrier to engagement was timetabling. Courses with demanding contact hours, intensive study schedules, and late lectures leave very little room for evening events. A student voice note played during the session made the frustration plain:
“The timings of the events are really, really awful. Like the timings, they don’t make sense. I won’t be able to get involved in the majority of things here.”
For domestic UK students, the barriers were more emotional in nature. A lack of confidence. Not knowing anyone. Struggling to motivate themselves to walk into a room full of strangers. These are different problems that need different solutions, and treating them the same way in your communications and outreach is likely to miss both groups.
The research also flagged that students with disabilities, neurodivergent students, and LGBTQI+ students were significantly more likely to report barriers to involvement. These findings were consistent with GSL’s wider Closing the Gap work, and they point to the same conclusion: a programme that works well for the average student is quietly inaccessible to some of the students who most need it.
What the TURF analysis tells us about programme design
One of the most practically useful findings in the session came from a TURF analysis of student event preferences. TURF stands for Total Unduplicated Reach and Frequency, and it is a method for identifying which combination of activities will reach the greatest number of different students.
Students were asked which types of events they would most like to see in their accommodation. Work experience and career-related opportunities came top, followed by academic skills masterclasses, sports and exercise, and cinema or film nights.
The TURF analysis then looked at combinations. Offering work experience events alone would reach just over a third of students. Adding academic skills masterclasses would push that to just over half. Adding sports and exercise would bring it close to two-thirds. Swapping sports for cinema and film nights would give you a slightly lower reach but a considerably easier event to organise.
The key finding was that after five event types, the additional reach gained from adding more becomes negligible. For teams working with limited budgets and limited staff time, this is a useful lens. Three well-chosen event types, selected for complementary appeal rather than overlap, can reach the majority of students. More than five is unlikely to move the needle significantly.
Why food keeps coming up
The gap between survey data and actual attendance generated the liveliest exchange in the room. Work experience topped the list of what students said they wanted. But as practitioner after practitioner noted, putting on work experience events does not fill a room. Food does.
A residence life professional from Sheffield described putting on a Greek feast during Welcome Week. It was the highest attendance their accommodation had ever recorded. Students came from a separate village site, and staff had to walk over to collect them. Another described a pizza on the piazza event that drew 300 people. A third noted that their student association had set up their own WhatsApp group specifically to alert residents whenever there was free food on.
The research offered a useful explanation for this. Catered accommodation scores significantly higher on community than self-catered accommodation. It is not just that food brings people together, though it does. It is that in a cost-of-living crisis, a free meal is not a gimmick. For some students, it is the main meal of the day. The social dimension and the practical dimension are the same thing.
Sarah noted that GSL’s forthcoming segmentation work is exploring this further, looking at attitudinal groups within the student population. Some of those segments, she mentioned, are strongly food-motivated. Understanding which students you are trying to reach, and what actually moves them to act, is a more useful question than asking what they tick on a survey form.
The honest conclusion from the session was that surveys capture aspiration, not behaviour. What gets students out of their rooms is usually lower-friction, more social, and less structured than what they report wanting. Both pieces of information are useful. But one of them tells you what to put in the programme, and the other tells you how to get people through the door.
What specialist accommodation actually delivers
The session also presented findings on specialist accommodation, and the results challenged some assumptions about which types of specialism actually make a difference.
The research distinguished between demographic-based specialism and lifestyle-based specialism. Demographic types include postgraduate only, international only, and single sex accommodation. Lifestyle types include quiet floors, alcohol-free accommodation, LGBTQI+ specific housing, and sports-focused accommodation.
The findings were clear. Demographic-based specialism showed little to no improvement in belonging, well-being, or satisfaction compared to standard accommodation. Lifestyle-based specialism, by contrast, showed meaningful and in some cases significant improvement across all of those measures.
Quiet accommodation stood out most strongly. It delivered the best outcomes across wellbeing, retention and sense of belonging of any accommodation type in the study. And when students were asked which type of specialist accommodation they would most like to live in, quiet floors came first by a considerable margin.
LGBTQI+ specific accommodation also showed strong positive outcomes for students who identified with that community, with meaningfully higher scores on belonging and wellbeing compared to the average.
The explanation offered in the session was straightforward: lifestyle-based specialism works because it puts students with shared preferences and needs together, rather than grouping people by demographic category alone. When students feel genuinely comfortable in their environment from the start, the conditions for social connection are already in place.
One finding worth flagging: course-aligned accommodation showed a small but notable improvement on belonging and stress outcomes. The suggestion was that students dealing with similar academic pressures, navigating the same workload and the same financial anxieties, find something quietly useful in being around people who understand what they are going through.
Putting it into practice
The practical takeaways from this session are straightforward, even if acting on them requires deliberate effort.
Understand your barriers before you design your programme. Timetabling constraints need a different response to confidence barriers. Demographic accessibility issues need a different response to both. Segmenting your outreach and your messaging by what is actually stopping different student groups is more effective than a single one-size-fits-all approach.
Use the TURF logic when planning your event calendar. Three complementary event types, chosen for breadth of appeal rather than overlap, will reach more of your student population than five events that all attract the same people.
Take food seriously as a community-building tool, not just an attendance incentive. In the current cost-of-living climate, it is doing more than one kind of work.
If you have not yet introduced quiet floors or other lifestyle-based specialist accommodation, the data makes a compelling case for starting the conversation. The demand is there, and the outcomes are significant.
And finally: read the full GSL report when it lands in July. These findings are preliminary. The complete picture will have considerably more depth, and the segmentation work in particular is likely to be one of the more useful outputs the sector has seen in recent years.
This is the second of two articles drawing on GSL’s research session at the CUBO Residence Life Conference 2026. The first article, on belonging and why it is harder to recover than you think, is available here.
The full GSL annual student experience report will be presented at the CUBO Summer Conference in July 2026.
Kinetic was the Headline Sponsor of the CUBO Residence Life Conference 2026. This is part of an ongoing series of articles reflecting on sessions from the event.
Read more Kinetic Voices here.
