If you have a student-facing role at Exeter University, compassion is on your mind. It is the guiding principle that infuses all communications that reach students. 

The strategy is simple: communicating with clarity, empathy, and helpful directives. Faculty and staff are learning to share information with students with care, improving both the content and tone in ways that contribute to student success and wellbeing.  

The U.K. university’s Compassionate Communications project is getting noticed. Last summer, two staff members who help spearhead the project—Jo Cole, Student Communications Manager, and Ciaran Stoker, Education and Student Support Special Projects Programme Manager—presented “Passionate About Compassionate: Bringing Empathy Into Comms” at the May 2025 CASE Student Communications conference in Birmingham, U.K. And in April 2025, they published “Communicating compassionately: how the University of Exeter is changing the way it speaks with its students and why” in the journal Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education. 

Compassionate Communications, they explain in the article, “seeks to ensure that the communications we send in challenging situations are crafted to empower and engage the student to understand their situation, the options available to them, and the action required from them. We also want them to feel genuinely supported during this process. This in turn must be connected with a wider movement to ensure that education policy and process is clear and comprehensive in how it is written and accessed by students.”