This practice highlights that partnership working is an approach to student engagement within which students and staff fulfil mutually important roles in shaping the student experience. It recognises that students are experts in their own learning and are therefore key to successfully enhancing the quality of the student experience.

The guidance focuses on the importance of a strategic student-centred approach to working in partnership with students that fosters a culture of mutual respect, openness and information sharing. It emphasises the importance of senior leadership champions and offers key considerations to embed this approach.

This practice highlights the importance of establishing and developing arrangements for student engagement and representation activities that are clearly defined, communicated, and understood. The practice reflects that this will help to embed and enable effective

student engagement and representation across the different levels and breadth of a provider. The practice also encourages providers to examine their processes around the collation of the student feedback to ensure the collective voice can be acted upon.

The guidance focuses on the three key areas in relation to the practice including, defining student engagement and representation activities, communicating, and responding to student voice and resourcing and support for these activities.

This practice highlights the importance of engagement activities reaching and reflecting the diversity of the student body and subsequently how the outcomes of those activities are listened to and acted upon.

The guidance emphasises that whilst working with students as partners is the preferred framework it is recognised that not all students will want to or be able to engage in this way consistently (or at all). It offers a number of approaches and reflections for providers that will enable them to be confident that their engagement opportunities reach the full diversity of their student body. It also stresses the value of monitoring and evaluating engagement activities to ensure they reach and reflect the diversity of the student population.

This practice reminds providers to consider and understand the demographics of their student body and recognise the challenges and barriers that students face in relation to working with them. It highlights that in partnership with students and their representative bodies, providers listen without prejudice, and work to actively reduce any barriers to ensure student engagement opportunities and processes are inclusive.

The guidance underpinning this practice stresses the importance of taking time to understand the diversity of the student population and a provider wide commitment to ensure engagement activities reflect this and offers useful considerations for driving inclusivity across the different levels and areas of working within a provider.

This practice highlights the importance of recognition and celebration offered by a provider to acknowledge the contributions students have made through partnership working, and for the impact they have made to the enhancement of teaching and learning and the wider student experience for current and future students. It notes that recognising and celebrating student contributions helps build a culture of collaborative working and promotes the importance of students in building a dynamic and inclusive learning community.

The guidance emphasises recognition and celebration should not be one-size-fits-all nor standardised but instead should align with distinct levels of contribution and should be tailored to individual student contributions. It offers a useful framework that can be used to build effective recognition and celebration of student contribution and highlights considerations around different types of reward and recognition.

This practice enables providers to demonstrate how they are taking deliberate steps to empower students to actively shape and participate in all aspects of the student learning experience within and beyond the formal curriculum. It highlights the importance of meaningful engagement through student representation and partnership, combining to influence and enhance the strategic and day-to-day aspects of the student learning experience and campus life.

The guidance focuses on considerations around how providers and students can foster a culture of co-ownership in enhancing the student experience. It offers advice around the development of an approach that strengthens governance and enhancement practices, creating an inclusive, vibrant culture that extends beyond the formal curriculum.