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The project: From rhetoric to responsibility: cross-institutional insights on staff development and internationalisation

This funding was used to attend the AdvanceHE Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Conference 2026 Embedding EDI in Higher Education: Tradition Retold, Borrowed Insights, and Bold Innovations conference on 26 March 2026. There, we were able to present the preliminary findings of the QAA funded project ‘Supporting staff to enhance the international student experience’. This project and the presented slides reflected on the rapidly developing internationalisation and massification of higher education institutions, and institutional lag in staff-facing support to appropriately accommodate international students. As part of this project, workshops were conducted in four partner institutions across the United Kingdom (De Montfort University, University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University, University of Wolverhampton), and these workshops served as a form of introspective and reflective continuing professional development. The aims of the workshops were to encourage staff to reflect on their own positionality in the classroom when teaching and working with international students, to challenge preconceived notions surrounding deficit narratives and homogenisation and what this really means for staff who work with international students, to share existing measures in place to support staff with internationalisation (including their strengths and weaknesses) and to share or propose ideas on pedagogical innovation and opportunities for co-creation with international students.

Summary of project outcomes

The presentation shared the three main preliminary findings of the project, and these were that building belonging precedes pedagogy if staff and practitioners genuinely want to sustain engagement and positive rapports throughout the year with their students, that deficits can apply to staff rather than exclusively to international students as staff themselves may lack the professional and personal skills and repertoire needed to proactively communicate and engage with international students, and that support for internationalisation was fragmented in physical spaces and enigmatic locations which were difficult to physically access, but also in the hierarchy of academia and cascading of information and support from more senior academic positions to other positions. Sharing these findings and supporting these with quotations from the workshop participants and key considerations resulted in several questions at the end of the workshop from encouraging and supportive colleagues at the conference who promised to email us following the presentation.

Has the project supported further interdisciplinary work:

The wider project itself supports interdisciplinary work by directly addressing inequality, mobility, governance, and institutional cultures as intersecting within higher education internationalisation. The project foregrounds international students not as a homogenous or deficit group, but as individuals whose experiences are shaped by structural conditions and institutional systems – and more specifically, by looking at how well equipped or adept staff in higher education institutions are at managing rapid internationalisation. By interrogating how institutional inertia and underdeveloped staff development frameworks persist across four UK universities, the project highlights how intersecting inequalities are reproduced at individual, group, and organisational levels across entire disciplines and institutions.

International students exist in all facets of higher education and in all disciplines, making this a necessarily interdisciplinary project. More specifically, however, is that all the partner institution representatives come from different disciplines themselves, be it business and law, education, and medicine. Not only is this project cross-institutional but it is also cross- and interdisciplinary.