The Future of Education

This article examines how students experience wellbeing and belonging through the lens of relational welfare. Drawing on a large body of student-written narratives, the study explores how mental health is shaped by relational and structural conditions in higher education. Students were invited to share personal stories about moments that felt meaningful or challenging in relation to their wellbeing. These anonymous, first-person accounts provide rich insights into both everyday interactions and significant life experiences. The material was approached using a qualitative, thematic analysis (Clarke & Braun, 2021), grounded in a relational perspective. We read the narratives closely and repeatedly, looking for recurring patterns in how students described what made a difference in their lives. Stories were selected strategically based on whether the student described the experience as having had a lasting emotional or existential impact. These included intense situations that shaped how they related to others, to themselves, or to the university. Our analysis was informed by Sarah White’s theory of relational welfare and the Mattering–Wellness–Fairness model, allowing us to attend not only to what happened in the stories, but how it was felt, and within what social and institutional contexts.From a relational perspective, our findings show that student wellbeing is shaped by everyday signals of inclusion or exclusion, and that fostering fairness, interpersonal recognition, and sustained belonging must be seen as shared institutional responsibilities.