Identity and Impact: Why Representation Matters in Education

How does staff diversity shape student experience, and how can universities make equality work for everyone?

These were the questions behind Identity and Impact, a research project led by Marilyn Clarke, Leah Gilbert and Dr Matthew Carlile at Goldsmiths, University of London. The project explored how diversity among student-facing staff across both academic and professional roles affects belonging, attainment and progression, particularly for students who experience racism or marginalisation linked to ethnicity or faith.

What the Project Found

The research confirmed (as if we needed confirmation!) that representation really matters.
Students were more likely to seek help, feel safe and imagine themselves succeeding when they saw staff who shared some part of their background or experience.

At the same time, staff from under-represented groups often carried a greater emotional workload, offering pastoral care, mentoring and advocacy that wasn’t always recognised in workload planning or promotion processes.

Participants also described how conversations about things like decolonising the curriculum could feel risky or misunderstood, yet were essential to genuine progress. We knew that tick-box approaches to ‘ethnicity monitoring’ shut down people’s opportunities to share important information about themselves and their backgrounds. So - we used open-text boxes to collect demographic data, and in the ‘ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, and culture’ section we received more than 200 different stories. For example, one participant shared that they were born in Kenya and had parents of South Indian origin, and that they had moved to Paris aged 14 and felt connected to a range of cultures, foods, music, and ways of relating. How would we have known this had they been forced to choose between the usual reductive categories? We used the same open-text approach to invite people’s stories about their own identities and experiences in relation to gender and disability.

Decolonising Beyond the Classroom

The team found that decolonising shouldn’t stop at reading lists. It also applies to everyday systems, from marking rubrics and mitigating-circumstances policies to recruitment, admissions and student support processes.
As one participant put it:

‘We need to move from asking students and staff to fit in, to re-thinking the culture of the institution itself’.

We used people’s stories about themselves to develop a much deeper understanding of what real representation means. It really comes down to creating space for people to share their lived experience within the curriculum, in the classroom, and in all the processes they interact with in a university.

Another key theme was about recognising faith as a lived identity, not just a belief system. Staff and students from faith backgrounds described both strength and stigma in how their identities were perceived within higher education.

Towards Change

Identity and Impact contributed to sector-wide work to close the award gap and ‘liberate our degrees’. It reminds us that inclusion isn’t only about who’s in the room, but whose voices fill the room.

For Connect 4 Change, this research underpins practical work with universities and schools: supporting leadership teams to embed equality in strategy, policy and daily practice, and ensuring the labour of inclusion is recognised, shared and sustained.