Off-campus student accommodation in the form of shared rental housing has become increasingly significant in the UK, with studies suggesting that this is having important consequences for housing markets in university towns. However, the continuing expansion of higher education, the increased involvement of private investment capital, and changing student demands are seen to be encouraging a move away from houses in multiple occupation towards purpose-built accommodation. Drawing on housing surveys and interviews conducted with current students in Loughborough (in the English East Midlands), I conclude that such purpose-built developments are implicated in processes of urban gentrification, having potentially major consequences for studentification and community cohesion in British cities.

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Now a recognised phenomenon in many British cities, studentification is the process by which specific neighbourhoods become dominated by student residential occupation. Outlining the causes and consequences of this process, this paper suggests that studentification raises important questions about community cohesiveness and that intervention may be required by local authorities if social and cultural conflicts are to be avoided. Detailing the social impacts of studentification in Loughborough, a market town in the English East Midlands, the paper accordingly considers recent housing policies designed to prevent the formation of exclusive`student ghettos'. The paper concludes by suggesting that the type of`threshold analysis' utilised in Loughborough may well spread students more thinly across a city, but that the relationship between students and the wider community requires other forms of regulation if town^university tensions are to be effectively managed. Throughout, comparison is made between the Loughborough and other UK university towns where the challenges and opportunities associated with studentification have been differently addressed.

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This paper engages with Hanson Thiem’s (2009) critique of geographies of education. Accepting the premise that education warrants fuller attention by geographers, the paper nonetheless argues that engaging with research on children, youth and families reshapes understanding of what has been, and might be, achieved. Foregrounding young people as the subjects rather than objects of education demands that attention be paid to their current and future life-worlds, in both inward and outward looking geographies of education. It also requires a broadening of our spatial lens, in terms of what ‘count’ as educational spaces, and the places where we study these.