In this post, a group of staff and students from the School of Informatics – Fiona McNeill, Vincent Danys, Agam Cohen, Elisa Fraticelli, Lewis Simpson and Anastasia Trainor – describe a pilot scheme based on creating ‘academic families’ to build community and a sense of belonging within undergraduate (UG) students. They also share key findings from a research project that they conducted to evaluate the pilot. This post is part of the Student Partnership Agreement 2025 series.
Building community and sense of belonging in computing departments is notoriously challenging: early-year classes are frequently very large; students often complete much of the work online; huge differences in prior experience with the subject; and significant demographic inequalities. Last year, we piloted an ‘academic families’ scheme in Informatics. The idea is to help build community and identity within the school by creating groups of students we call families, with 10-15 academic children (UG1 students) and 2-3 ‘academic parents’ (UG2-5 students who volunteer for the role). UG1 students are introduce to their families before they arrive in Edinburgh, and then attend various events with their families, from small single-family activities organised by parents to large school-organised events that families could attend together.
In order to understand the impact of the pilot and to improve it for future years, we carried out research towards the end of semester 2 in AY 24/25, funded by the Student Partnership Agreement. The research was led by five UG students, working with an academic. We ran seven focus groups, some for UG1 students (all theoretically children, although not all had engaged), some for academic parents, and some for UG2-5 students who had not been parents. We have written up our findings in more detail in (Danys et al, 2025). In this post, we share the key findings and the ways in which we are working to improve the scheme for the future, which we hope will be useful for anyone thinking of setting up a similar scheme.
What worked?
Students who engaged with the scheme – both parents and children – found it did build confidence and belonging. UG1 students valued interaction with students in higher years and found it helped them settle into Edinburgh. International students in particular found it really helpful to have an informal place to get advice on things, where they felt more intimidated about talking to a student advisor. Both parents and children really enjoyed the school-organised events, and many families had a lot of great ideas about on-going events, such as meeting after tutorials and going for ice cream.
What didn’t work?
The main problem – as with many student schemes – was engagement. We are not expecting 100% engagement because not all of our students will want to part of something like this. However, we did find that students who hadn’t been able to meet their families at the first family event, that we held in Week 3, sometimes felt like they’d missed the chance to engage and were less likely to engage with the family after that.
Some parents also didn’t engage that much. This is understandable because students can get overwhelmed with work during semester and have to step back from commitments. However, as we didn’t have any structure for supporting parents in place, this wasn’t noticed. Some UG1 students found themselves hearing about the concept of families but never having a parent getting in touch with them, which can be alienating.
How will we improve?
- Support structure: Create more structure to support parents by integrating the families scheme into cohorts. Families will be created within cohorts and cohort leads will work with their parents to check in on them, brainstorm ideas with them, supporting them when they are struggling, and identifying low engagement so we can either help parents engage better or find new parents if they are no longer able to carry out the role.
- More events: Hold more school-led family events to lower the effort of engagement.
- Keep connections close: Put families into the same tutorial groups in UG1 courses to build connections.
- Adding incentives for parents: Whilst most parents felt strongly that they were taking on the roles for altruistic reason – joining the scheme because they want to support other students – we would like to see some recognition of the work they do.
- We have introduced group sessions for parents Cohort Leads, allowing them to share tips and inspire each other to keep the scheme interesting, as well as building closer relationships with Cohort Leads.
- We are helping parents think about how to use their experience to showcase soft skills to employers.
- We are considering ways to recognise the time and effort put in, for example through a badges scheme.
References
Danys, A. Cohen, E. Fraticelli, L. Simpson, A. Trainor and F. McNeill (2026). Building Belonging: evaluating a student-led peer-support scheme in Computer Science, Computing Education Practice.
Fiona McNeill
Fiona is a Professor in Computing Education in Informatics. Her research focuses on access to Computer Science and STEM education for young people from diverse backgrounds, and on student support in university.
Agam Cohen
Agam is a 3rd year Computer Science Honours student at the University of Edinburgh. As a member of the Academic Families research project team, Agam has contributed to investigating the impact and effectiveness of the Academic Families scheme in Informatics. Agam served as Social Media Officer on the CompSoc committee in 2024-2025, helping to promote computing activities and build community within the school. Agam’s interests lie in software engineering, robotics, and inventing, with a focus on creating innovative solutions and enhancing the student experience through collaborative initiatives.
