This paper presents work developed from the QAA Collaborative Enhancement Project 2021 Belonging through assessment: Pipelines of compassion, in which the three participating institutions – University of the Arts London, Glasgow School of Art and Leeds Arts University – reflected on how considering assessment through the lens of compassion can help address social justice, belonging, and inclusion towards resilient learning communities.

A core strand of our collaborative work focused on feedback as a critical area where the emotional impact of assessment is at play (Falchikov & Boud 2007; Rowe, Fitness & Wood 2014; Winstone & Carless 2020) and where compassion can be a primary driver towards more inclusive practices. Our objectives were to develop definitions of what compassionate feedback might look and feel like and devise guidance and support for approaches to compassionate feedback within the art and design disciplines in collaboration with academic staff. What advice might we give to ourselves, colleagues, and students for a compassionate approach to feedback? By developing discursive workshop models to help us answer these questions, we also aimed to explore how existing structures and processes may be adapted and modified to enable compassionate feedback, bearing in mind the potential cost for staff of the 'emotional labour of feedback' (Spaeth 2018), including issues of workload. Our workshop approach aimed to explore compassionate feedback through an enactment of compassionate pedagogy principles, putting the wellbeing of staff and students at the forefront, creating learning communities for staff as much as for students. The outcomes of those workshops form the basis for a resource for utilising the principles of compassionate pedagogy in assessment and the construction of feedback.

Responding to Jan McArthur's call to restore 'joy' in assessment (McArthur 2018) by furthering approaches that are both manageable and compassionate, we interrogate our findings and situate our work within the collaborative production of the Belonging through assessment online resource. We also reflect on ways to use our resource in different contexts including disciplines other than the arts, to support changes of practice towards more compassionate pedagogies.