Residence Life has a hand in who students become, which makes it matter who gets to take part. For the University of Leeds Residence Life team, inclusion is a core part of all their activity.
“It’s not a nice-to-have – this is just what we do. It’s just the Leeds way” says Assistant Director of Residence Life Rebecca O’Hare.
Inclusion runs through much of the team’s work. Leeds has developed resources for different student communities, changed how it recruits some of its Residence Life staff, worked more closely with student societies, and built accessibility considerations into how events are planned. But behind those individual initiatives is a broader view of what Residence Life is for.
GSL News spoke to O’Hare and colleagues Sarah Djuric, Residence Life Manager and Aphrael Spindloe, Residence Life Marketing Executive about that approach – and about some of the changes they are now seeing in the students they support.
The role of events
Leeds’ Residence Life programme is organised around four pillars: community, life skills, responsibility and identity.
The last of these is particularly important to the team’s thinking. Sarah explains that students continue to develop their identities throughout their time at university, and that much of that development happens outside the classroom.
“Our team plays a role in the way students develop while they’re in university,” she says.
That means considering student development when designing programmes, events and resources rather than seeing Residence Life primarily as a calendar of social activities. The question becomes not simply what event we should run, but what students might learn, experience or gain from it.
Accessibility has become a key part of the event provision too. Online event information explains where an event takes place as well as what the room is like and what students can expect when they arrive. Larger events will often include a quiet room. Sarah says these relatively small changes can make attending much easier for neurodivergent students and for students who are anxious about unfamiliar situations.
Helping students find their community
One practical example is the growing collection of Life in Leeds guides.
The first, developed following the Living Black at University research, brought together information for Black students on everything from cultural and safe spaces to food shops, barbers and hair braiders. Leeds has since developed guides for other groups including students with a disability, Asian, LGBTQ+, Muslim, and neurodivergent students, mature students with families and commuter students, with further guides in development.
The pages are not among the university’s highest-traffic web content, but the team says visitors spend considerably longer on them than on many other pages – suggesting that the students who find them are using them in some depth. Students can also suggest resources themselves so that the information stays current.
A whole-university approach
Key to how the team works is collaboration – both with student groups and with colleagues across the wider university. Rather than seeing Residence Life as a self-contained service, the team has deliberately taken a whole-university approach to creating opportunities and support for students.
Rather than assuming Residence Life needs to create every community itself, the team works with existing student societies. That has included work with the Black Feminist Society, LGBTQ+ and Muslim student mixers and events involving neurodivergent students and societies.
“If there is something that we know we are not experts in, we will go to the expert groups and collaborate with them. For us it’s about getting our students connected with each other in halls, but if there are other safe spaces for them, cultural spaces where they are going to feel welcomed and included, we are not precious about whether it’s with us,” says Sarah. If students find their community through a student society rather than directly through Residence Life, “that is great, we just want to get them there”.
For Rebecca, collaboration is not simply a practical way of delivering more activity,it is part of the team’s philosophy.
Residence Life does not need to own or brand every initiative. Events can be delivered with Leeds University Union, student societies or other parts of the University.
“I think what I often see in lots of universities is people being very precious about, this is my project, this is my team, and this is my area of work. We don’t necessarily label everything as Res Life. For example, if an event is in collaboration with LUU, it will be jointly branded. So, it’s this whole university approach as opposed to, oh, this is a Res Life thing and only like no one can touch us. It’s not about that. And I think that approach has raised not only our external brand awareness, but internally as well.” Rebecca explains.
Inclusion starts with recruitment
The team’s work on inclusion has included examining who students encounter when they seek support in residences and actively working to ensure students see themselves reflected in the Residence Life teams.
Leeds’ Residence Life Assistant cohort – students who live and work in halls – is already highly diverse, according to the team. The bigger challenge had been the Warden team, which Sarah describes as historically very white.
Rather than changing who was selected at the end of the process, the team changed how it reached potential applicants. To avoid tokenism, the team has been more deliberate about where it advertises roles. Roles are promoted through staff networks including Muslim, Jewish, LGBTQ+ and minoritised ethnic staff networks, alongside the University’s normal recruitment channels. The team has also reviewed the questions it asks at interviews.
It is now considering similar changes to recruitment for its Residence Life Intern programme after noticing that some strong applicants do not necessarily perform best under the existing interview format.
From student volunteer to residence life career
One of the outcomes of the team’s work on inclusion that the team is most pleased about is actually unintended.
Leeds is beginning to see a pathway emerge from students joining hall social committees, to becoming Residence Life Assistants and interns, and in at least one case moving on to become a Residence Life Manager at another University.
Rebecca is careful not to claim a direct causal relationship. But she believes giving students responsibility, training and experience is helping some of them recognise Residence Life as a career in which they can make a difference. The Residence Life Intern programme is now in its fifth year and is also one way Leeds keeps student voice close to how the programme runs, with the current Intern joining the team from spending a year in the Residence Life Social Committee Programme.
It is another example of a broader philosophy that runs through the team’s work: Residence Life is not simply about providing activities or responding when something goes wrong. It is about creating an environment in which students can develop, find community and feel that they belong.
That philosophy is visible across the Leeds approach – in how the team designs events, recruits staff, works with student societies and colleagues across the university, learns from the wider sector and shares its own experience in return. No single initiative defines the “Leeds way”; rather, it is the cumulative effect of these choices becoming part of everyday practice.
As Rebecca puts it, the ambition is for teams to eventually stop thinking of inclusion as something that’s additional.
It is simply what they do.
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Want to learn more about the University of Leeds Residence Life team’s work on inclusion? Leeds’ work also features in the 2026 GSL and CUBO report exploring faith, ethnicity and belonging in student accommodation: Common Ground: Faith, Ethnicity and Belonging in Student Accommodation in the UK & Ireland.
