Nobody Knows my Name”: Cultivating Belonging as a Pathway to Wellbeing and Success in Legal Education

The impetus for this study, (“the anxiety project”) came from an earlier project that explored the barriers to effective engagement with formative assessment and feedback (“the formative study”). One of the key findings of the formative study challenged the characterisation of formative assessment as a low-stakes learning opportunity that allows knowledge to be tested and skills to be practiced in readiness for the high-stakes of summative assessment. Quite the contrary: for these students, formative assessment carried every bit of emotional weight and pressure as summative assessment. Participants emphasised that the process of writing an essay or answering a problem question for formative purposes felt no different to summative assessment in terms of the emotional impact. The uncertainty of how to tackle the task, the frustration of not knowing if the answer that was being written was correct, the fear of failure and the self-doubt that this engendered were all the same. The only meaningful difference for students was not that the formative mark did not count towards their module mark and/or degree classification (a factor that did little to reduce pressure) but that formative was avoidable. Students could opt out of emotional discomfort by not submitting the work at all or by submitting a self-selected easier version such as an essay plan or bullet points of indicative content. In this way, formative assessment anxiety differed from summative assessment anxiety not in its intensity but in the availability of an escape route.

Whilst this finding was significant, a further insight from the formative study provided the foundation for the present research. Students consistently linked their anxiety about assessment to wider aspects of the university experience. Assessment emerged not as an isolated source of stress but as a point at which a range of existing pressures converged. Participants identified factors such as inconsistent expectations, unclear guidance, competing work commitments and unproductive tutorials created a background sense of anxiety experienced as feelings of being lost and confused that crystallised around assessment tasks. In this way, assessment functioned less as an origin of anxiety and more as its focal point.

These findings suggest that it is unhelpful to treat assessment anxiety as a discrete phenomenon. Assessment is not inherently stressful: it becomes so when students feel unable to meet its demands. These feelings might stem from imperfect understanding of the subject matter, lack of mastery of the skills needed or lack of time to complete the work but the findings of the formative study indicated that students sometimes viewed these factors as arising from issues in their wider university life that only became actively problematic for them around assessment time. In other words, issues existed that were causing students to feel anxious and those feelings were accentuated when the issues impacted on their ability to tackle assessment effectively and with confidence. These insights suggested a need for a follow-up project that cast its net beyond assessment to explore the broader causes of student anxiety.

The purpose of this article is to provide insight into the causes and consequences of student anxiety in legal education, drawing on the experiences and insights of current undergraduate students across all year groups. It is founded on the premise that students themselves are uniquely placed to identify sources of stress in their learning environment and that they can make a meaningful and insightful contribution to the identification of possible solutions. The study employed the World Café as an informal collaborative problem-solving method that enabled students to articulate not only the conditions that generate anxiety but to build upon those insights to propose a series of practical solutions.

The consistent message that emerged from these discussions was that anxiety may be caused by a constellation of features of contemporary legal education yet it is frequently internalised by students as a personal failing. This contributes to an ever-present concern that they are not the “right sort of person” to become a lawyer or that they are “not good enough” compared to their peers. This self-doubt was exacerbated by the sense of being one invisible individual within a very large cohort of students who were perceived as competing both for the time and attention of lecturers and for jobs in an over-subscribed legal profession. The most compelling finding of the project was students’ desire for a stronger sense of community and, crucially, a community that actively and repeatedly invites them in rather than waiting for students to find the courage to join it. This sense of belonging was seen as critical as a basis for a more positive self-identity, fostering confidence and self-belief, but as a practical basis for addressing other problems as it inherently involves the creation of supportive relationships that can be a source of guidance and advice in times of difficulty. The importance of this community of support is encapsulated in the words of one participant who stated, “everything else can be fixed if you have someone you trust to turn to and who you know will try to help you but without that you’re just lost and on your own with your problems”.