The Mary Poppins Principle Practising Magic, Designing Calm – Reframing Leadership for Sustainable Student Support

It is late on a Friday before a bank holiday weekend when the call comes – the kind that compresses time, heightens risk, and demands immediate action. There is no script, but there is expectation, often shaped by urgency, uncertainty, and the need for someone to take charge.

In these moments, student affairs leaders reach into what can feel like a Mary Poppins bag: producing solutions from a set of resources that are powerful, but largely unseen. Professional intuition, relational capital, institutional memory, values-driven judgement, and influence across boundaries come to the fore. This ‘magic’ enables responsive, compassionate decision-making in complex situations, but it is also unevenly distributed, difficult to scale, and rarely captured within formal systems.

The consequence is a model of practice that works, but at a cost: inconsistency in student experience, reliance on key individuals, unclear escalation pathways, and significant emotional labour. As demand and complexity increase, this approach becomes increasingly fragile, and the expectation of calm, composed response becomes harder to sustain.

This presentation reframes this challenge through the lens of systems thinking and strategic leadership, asking not how we perform the magic better, but how we design systems that do not depend on it. Evidence from the Irish Survey of Student Engagement (ISSE), institutional withdrawal and progression data, and UCD’s early-alert system (LEAP) highlights the critical role of belonging, engagement, and personal factors in shaping student outcomes, factors that are often not fully captured within reactive, crisis-led models of support.

In response, a set of interconnected, proactive initiatives will be explored. These include data-informed early intervention as part of UCD LEAP and the scaling of peer-support and engagement initiatives such as Mind Your Mate and FocusHub. A mixed-methods evaluation approach, combining engagement analytics, GPA/progression data, and qualitative feedback, demonstrates how these interventions contribute to more consistent, equitable, and preventative models of support.

Participants will gain insights into:

• Recognising and making visible the invisible labour underpinning crisis response.

• Applying systems thinking to reduce organisational dependency on individuals.

• Using institutional data to shift from reactive to proactive support models.

• Designing sustainable systems that preserve relational practice while enabling calmer, more consistent responses to student (and staff) need.

This session argues that the goal of leadership is not to carry the bag, but to design systems that make calm, consistent responses possible, without relying on individual acts of magic.