Advance HE's new National Teaching Fellow reframes student partnership evidence
Updated Aug 15, 2026
Student partnership evidence should show whether students' experiences changed, not simply whether an activity happened. On 14 August 2026, Advance HE published NTFS 2026: Changing universities means changing relationships, a reflection by new National Teaching Fellow Dr Syra Shakir on anti-racist educational change, co-created curricula and institutional evaluation. For teams responsible for student voice, the practical message is clear: evidence of participation is not the same as evidence that students influenced a decision or experienced an improvement.
What has changed in student partnership evidence
Shakir, Associate Professor of Learning and Teaching and Strategic Lead for Race Equity at Leeds Trinity University, draws together nearly two decades of work across teaching, leadership, research and national policy. Her examples include co-creating curricula with students, developing digital learning resources about racism, leading Race Equality Charter work, evaluating national race equality initiatives and creating student-success coaching programmes.
This is an Advance HE practice article, not a new regulation, survey methodology or implementation requirement. Its significance lies in the evaluation standard it sets out for student partnership. Shakir's central test is whether an activity changes students' experiences, not whether the activity was completed. She argues that evaluation should establish why an intervention works, for whom, under what circumstances and how it can be improved.
"Students are not beneficiaries, they are partners."
The article gives that principle a concrete meaning. Students helped design curricula, produce films, create digital learning resources, facilitate workshops, evaluate institutional change and challenge established knowledge hierarchies. Projects such as the Becoming Anti-Racist training and the films Mind the Gap and Re:Tension began with listening to the lived experiences of students and staff. The takeaway is not that every institution needs the same projects. It is that student partnership evidence should record how student knowledge shaped the work and what changed as a result.
What this means for institutions
The first implication is for evaluation design. Universities often record attendance, consultation numbers, resources produced and actions completed because those measures are easy to report. Shakir's account suggests adding a harder set of questions: Did students feel safer in the seminar? Did they believe their voices mattered? Did their sense of belonging change? These questions do not replace delivery measures, but they prevent activity data from being mistaken for evidence of impact.
The second implication is about when students enter the process. Advance HE recently argued that student voice should start before consultation. Shakir's examples take that logic further by showing students as designers, facilitators and evaluators, not only respondents. Student Experience and quality teams should therefore identify which decisions students can help frame, which evidence they can help interpret and where staff still retain final accountability. The immediate task is to make those roles explicit before a project or review begins.
The third implication concerns whose experience is visible. Institutional averages can conceal whether a change worked differently for students from different backgrounds or in different learning contexts. Shakir's emphasis on race equity, psychological safety and belonging makes the case for examining variation in experience without treating small groups as data points to be exposed. Quality teams need proportionate disaggregation, safe qualitative routes and a documented link from lived experience to institutional action. That gives student partnership a clearer evidence trail and protects it from becoming a label for consultation alone.
How student partnership evidence connects to feedback analysis
Questions about safety, belonging, influence and trust rarely fit neatly into a single rating scale. Open-text comments, workshop records and representative reports can explain why the same intervention works for some students but not others. A student comment analysis governance checklist is useful here because institutions need agreed rules for scope, redaction, access, interpretation and follow-up before combining sensitive evidence across sources.
A reproducible analysis process can then help teams compare recurring themes while keeping the original evidence traceable. Student Voice Analytics is one route for analysing those comments consistently, but analysis does not decide whether power was shared or whether action followed. Institutions still need students and staff to interpret findings together, assign ownership and return to the affected groups to test whether the experience has changed. The value of the analysis is a defensible route from what students said to what the institution did next.
FAQ
Q: What should institutions do now to strengthen student partnership evidence?
A: Add three questions to the next project or programme review: which students helped define the issue, what changed because of their involvement, and what evidence shows that student experience changed. Institutions do not necessarily need another survey. They need a clearer link between existing listening, decisions and follow-up.
Q: What is the timeline and scope of the Advance HE development?
A: Advance HE published Shakir's article on 14 August 2026 as part of its National Teaching Fellowship coverage. It has no implementation deadline and does not create a regulatory requirement. It is a UK higher education practice signal with particular relevance to curriculum, race equity, student experience and institutional evaluation.
Q: What is the broader implication for student voice?
A: Student voice is more credible when institutions can evidence influence as well as participation. Counting respondents or completed actions remains useful, but it cannot show on its own whether students shared power, whether different groups experienced the change, or whether the institution learnt from the result.
References
[Advance HE]: "NTFS 2026: Changing universities means changing relationships" Published: 2026-08-14
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