Hearing voices

Author

Tom Lowe

Assistant Head of Finance & Accounting, University of Westminster

There are several common problems often associated with the development and uses of mechanisms to capture student feedback and to promote engagement with, and amplify the impacts of, the student voice.

The first is the time lag. Most notoriously, institutions' strategic responses to issues raised by the National Student Survey will impact upon students studying a year or two after the cohorts who raised those issues have graduated, by which time those issues may no longer be relevant or even remembered.

This time lag can limit the impacts of internal surveys, and efforts to glean modular feedback early enough to act upon during a module's actual period of delivery can lead to unreliable results, or (if also followed by end-of-module surveys) a growing sense of survey fatigue.

A second issue is the potential for undue influence: there have been concerns expressed in some quarters that a fear of negative student feedback may, unconsciously or otherwise, influence lecturers in their approaches to assessment and marking.

Student representation mechanisms may circumvent the issues provoked by an overreliance on surveys. But other common concerns relate to the reliability and inclusivity of that student representation: to what extent student representatives represent the diversity of views held by their constituencies, and to what extent they, in terms of their individual characteristics, represent the diversity of their student bodies.

It is, in other words, easier to let oneself believe that one has synthesised that imaginary entity we call the student voice than to reliably capture and empower the reality of the plethora of student voices. Real-time student representation can have immediate positive impacts upon the learner experience: but only if it is truly representative and appropriately inclusive.

And so, across the sector, diverse institutions and their students' unions have been making significant and innovative efforts to ensure the efficacy of those processes of representation.

State of play

Before turning to look at some of those more inventive interventions, it's worth taking a few moments to consider the current state of play across the sector. This will inevitably get a bit data-heavy, but it feels useful to share these numbers in order to demonstrate the diversity (or disparities) of practice out there.

A new survey involving participants from 78 institutions, conducted as part of our QAA-funded Collaborative Enhancement Project, has found that student representation and strategies to engage the student voice continue to be significant priorities for higher education, with 100 per cent of those surveyed practising programme-level representation, 62.23 per cent practising school/faculty-level representation, and 82.05 per cent conducting programme or module level feedback surveys – with 67.95 per cent of those providers conducting module-based survey evaluations, and 43.58 per cent  conducting such evaluations at both module and programme levels.

The majority of institutions have more than one level of representation: 69.23 per cent of our respondents reported that they had more than one level of student representation (including programme level), whereas 30.77 per cent reported only had one level of representation (at programme level).

The number of representatives per programme was typically between two and five, with often two in each year group. The ratio of programme representatives to students can generally be anywhere between 1:20 and 1:50.

Some form of higher institutional level representative body (such as a Student Council often associated with the Students’ Union) was reported by 53.85 per cent of respondents.

Five respondents reported that they had no SU sabbatical officers. The rest typically had between one and six sabbatical officers as most common. One outlier had 17.

The majority of programme representatives (84.61 per cent) perform their roles on a voluntary basis, without financial rewards. Certificates were provided by 28 institutions and a further 12 provided additional incentives such as bursaries (in one case), academic credit (in two) and vouchers (in seven).

The majority of higher-level representatives (57.69 per cent) do their role on a voluntary basis, with no financial reward. Eight institutions provided certificates and a further nine provided additional incentives and rewards.

Course representatives most frequently give 10-20 hours of their time per academic year (at 23 of the providers surveyed). A commitment of 20-30 hours was reported by 15 respondents. Ten reported fewer than 10 hours, three around 40 hours, and four more than 50 hours.

There's a mixed approach to the recruitment and selection of programme reps, with 26 per cent using self-nomination processes, 54 per cent some sort of election process, and 12 per cent application and selection processes. At higher levels, 48 per cent were selected, 35 per cent elected and only 4 per cent self-nominated.

All providers reported that students’ unions provided the training of representatives. Programme reps generally received 1-2 hours training. Longer training sessions (totally 6-8 hours) was often available for student representatives working at higher levels.

Strategies for making student representation opportunities accessible to underrepresented groups were reported by 76.92 per cent of respondents. These included apprentices, students on placements, and online-only learners.

Innovating and learning

Our research also included a series of case studies which identified areas of particular challenge and evaluated effective interventions to address those challenges. It is at this point that we may start to see the broad disparities of practice already noted as representing a valuable diversity of institutional interventions.

These case studies highlighted both the breadth of approaches tailored to meet the specificities of local needs, and the importance of collaborative processes which promote two-way communication, flexibility, agility and opportunities for continual review and enhancement in response to ever-changing conditions and expectations – such as in the case of Huddersfield Students’ Union's emphasis on student-centred engagement underpinned by flexibility, partnership, innovative collaboration, data-informed evaluation and responsive resource allocation.

Though there's clearly no one-size-fits-all solution, core themes which emerged from these studies also included the importance of institutional support and resourcing, the value of phased approaches, and the importance of ensuring that students are rewarded for their participation in these processes.

Such rewards can offer material benefits, as in the case of Liverpool John Moores University which operates a scheme designed to support curriculum enhancement projects through funded student internships that emphasise meaningful student engagement rather than being employed merely to supply administrative support.

Sheffield Hallam SU has developed have a ‘Badge’ system through which student reps can log and be rewarded for their contributions, recognising levels of engagement from the basic expectations to participation in more advanced student voice projects. Having spent some significant time attempting approaches that hadn't proven practically scalable, that Students' Union has stressed that it's crucial to think carefully about such scalability and sustainability.

And sometimes, they suggest, the simplest rewards can be the most effective: "Don't underestimate the value of a simple thank you or note of recognition."

Indeed, rewards for participation aren't necessarily material and can relate more broadly to the senses of empowerment, belonging and sheer enjoyment that students gain from their involvement in such initiatives.

The University of Manchester Student Union, for example, has found that prioritising the enjoyment of representatives and the building of a strong social community can provide the foundation for the success of student voice schemes. Faced with falling student engagement with representation activities, difficulty in recruiting and retaining reps, and lack of staff confidence in these processes, its strategy has been to focus the representation role on creating a positive working environment, centred on building communities, the enjoyment of working together, and creating a sense of psychological safety, to foster an environment in which views can be shared freely and openly. Belief in being part of a community is key – and student voice work is most effectively built on that foundation.

The flexible and student-centred approach adopted by the University of Southampton’s Student Co-Design Panels has similarly found that working collaboratively and seeing its meetings as enjoyable, positive occasions in their own right have enhanced their effectiveness and sustainability.

It's essential that these mechanisms function as positive, rewarding and equitable partnerships, as Anglia Ruskin University has also found, highlighting "the need for communication, collaboration, and consistency across the university to address the challenge of disparate and fragmented feedback systems".

Clarity of communication was also the basis of enhancements at the University of Nottingham and the University of Warwick, whose SUs – finding inconsistencies in the reporting of their SSLC meetings – developed a standard mechanism to produce focused and accessible annual reports – which led to students feeling their voices were better heard and supported.

The social engagement of students, through emphases on communication and belonging, needs of course to be backed up by appropriate levels of resource and support. When it found that having only a single role responsible for managing more than 900 course reps was ineffective in promoting their engagement, the University of Westminster Students’ Union extended those responsibilities to three locally focused roles, and now reports that "academic representation thrives when it is strategically aligned, adequately resourced, and socially engaging, with strong institutional support".

In order to improve the efficacy of course representatives as a means of gathering and representing student feedback, the University of Portsmouth Students’ Union transitioned from course representatives to school representatives, but has noted that the rapid implementation of this initiative across all the institution's 17 schools initially led to resource challenges. As such developments require time and investment, that SU has gone on to observe that a phased pilot might have allowed for more focused support and immediately improved outcomes.

Meanwhile, an initiative at the University of Leeds – which sought to further embed the ethos of students as partners into its educational strategy and prioritised inclusivity, aiming to involve a broad spectrum of students beyond traditional student representation roles and the most engaged students – also found the value of incremental steps, building trust and a culture of partnership between students and staff.

We're listening

It may come as no surprise to find that planning, resourcing, communication, collaboration and inclusion are clearly crucial. But it also wouldn't perhaps be too presumptuous to suggest that the lessons learnt by these exercises in the enhancement of student representation might also usefully be heeded across other areas of activity in our sector.

Authenticity, trust and relationship-building are key – showing that you're in this for the long term, that you're serious about it, that you're actively listening, and that you're willing to meet students where they are, not just where you want them to be.

The amplification and empowerment of student voices, in all their diversity, is clearly vital to the ongoing sustainability of providers across the sector. Those which will be most successful in the long term will be those which understand that students are not simply customers to be acknowledged and appeased but partners in our shared learning journeys – partners who will gain and grow from these interactions just as their institutions benefit from them… and which act meaningfully and impactfully on that understanding.