Student partnership can fail when hierarchy shapes the work
Updated Aug 28, 2026
Inviting students into the room does not create partnership. If staff already own the goals, timetable, and final decisions, a co-creation project can reproduce the hierarchy it was meant to challenge. Meng Zhang, Kelly E. Matthews and Shuang Liu's Studies in Higher Education paper, "When engaging students as partners fails: the ease of maintaining the status quo", shows how that happens in practice. For universities using student voice to improve assessment, feedback, and course design, the paper offers a valuable warning: permission to participate is not the same as power to shape the work.
Context and research question
Students-as-partners initiatives promise a more reciprocal relationship between students and staff. Yet much of the literature reports successful projects, which can make failure look like a problem with individual motivation or communication. Zhang, Matthews and Liu instead ask how and why students and teachers can maintain a traditional power hierarchy inside a project explicitly designed as partnership.
The researchers studied a 16-week Change Academy pilot at a research-intensive Australian university. The university-wide programme focused on culturally inclusive assessment and feedback, and began with a four-day development workshop. Across the wider study, 12 students and six teaching staff took part in three project groups. The article examines one group in depth: a course coordinator, a tutor, a learning designer, and two former students working to review assessment feedback practices.
The focused ethnography combined individual interviews, focus groups, documents, and audio-visual observations of group meetings. The authors used reflective thematic analysis and close analysis of selected interactions, interpreted through Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, capital, and field. This matters for UK institutions because it reveals what participants did together, not only what they later said about partnership.
Key findings
The partnership began too late to share meaningful control. The course structure and intended assessment changes were already in place. Staff invited the student partners to review proposals and suggest small adjustments, but the core direction was not open for negotiation. The project therefore started as consultation around a staff-owned plan, a risk also raised by recent sector guidance that student voice should help define problems before consultation begins.
Unclear roles pushed students back towards familiar academic behaviour. One student struggled to identify what he could contribute, while the coordinator expected the students to take more initiative. Without explicit decision rights or shared responsibility, both sides fell back on established roles: staff proposed and decided, while students responded to instructions. Good intentions could not overcome a structure that still treated staff expertise as the dominant form of knowledge.
Student experience was heard, but it did not consistently shape decisions. When the group discussed 20-minute video feedback, both student partners initially favoured shorter recordings. The coordinator explained why the detail mattered, and the discussion moved towards surveying current students rather than exploring the partners' experience more fully. The later survey and roundtable did reveal that some students who spoke English as an additional language preferred written feedback. The useful evidence arrived, but only after an earlier opportunity for co-creation had narrowed.
Task allocation replaced shared ownership. Staff set the survey timetable and assigned question-writing to the student partners. Once teaching staff moved into implementation, communication declined because there were few remaining tasks for students to own. The partners prioritised assignments and placements, meetings stopped, and one student linked his withdrawal to uncertainty about how he could contribute. A partnership designed around delegated tasks made disengagement easier once those tasks ran out.
The coordinator's own reflection captures the central problem:
"It was more like I have two student assistants."
The authors treat this as a structural failure, not a story about difficult individuals. The coordinator remained accountable for delivery and worked on a fixed-term contract, making a controlled, outcome-led project safer than open-ended experimentation. Students, meanwhile, had less authority to challenge the arrangement. The institution endorsed partnership, but its routines, employment conditions, and accountability structures continued to reward familiar hierarchy.
Practical implications
For UK universities, the first implication is to bring students in before the problem and solution have hardened. Student partners should help frame the question, define success, choose the evidence, and decide which parts of a project are genuinely negotiable. If they join only after the syllabus, intervention, or survey has been designed, the work is more likely to remain consultation. Starting earlier gives student knowledge a real chance to change direction.
Second, institutions should make roles, decision rights, and accountability explicit. A partnership brief should state what students can decide, what staff remain responsible for, how disagreements will be handled, and what happens during implementation. Staff also need support to examine how routine teaching authority can reappear inside co-creation, because participation must be designed rather than assumed. Clear rules reduce the chance that students become assistants by default.
Third, universities should use more than one route for feedback and make the routes work together. In this case, a short survey raised concerns about honesty and response, while a roundtable added context about confidence, language, and format preferences. Surveys, open comments, facilitated discussion, and student partners each reveal different evidence. Combining them helps teams test whether a visible concern is isolated, shared, or concentrated among particular groups.
That is where Student Voice Analytics can add a restrained practical layer. Systematic analysis can compare themes raised by student partners with free-text comments from module evaluations, pulse surveys, or wider student experience work. It cannot create shared power, but it can show whether a small partnership group reflects broader patterns and whose experience is still missing. Used that way, comment analysis strengthens the evidence around partnership without pretending to replace it.
Finally, teams should evaluate the partnership process as well as the project output. Ask who shaped the agenda, whose suggestions changed a decision, when participation declined, and whether students could influence implementation rather than only ideation. This turns a disappointing project into evidence about institutional design, and it helps the next partnership redistribute power more deliberately.
FAQ
Q: How can a university stop a student partnership from becoming consultation?
A: Recruit students before the institution settles the problem definition or preferred solution. Agree the negotiable scope, decision rights, roles, meeting rhythm, and evidence of influence at the outset. Then revisit those agreements when the project moves from design to implementation, because that is often when student involvement narrows.
Q: What are the methodological limits of this study?
A: The article provides an in-depth analysis of one partnership group within a wider programme at one Australian university. It explains mechanisms and interactions rather than estimating how often partnerships fail across the sector. UK teams should use the findings as a diagnostic lens for local practice, not as a prevalence claim.
Q: What does this mean for student voice beyond formal partnership projects?
A: It shows that voice depends on audience and influence, not only opportunities to speak. Surveys and open comments are most useful when students can see where the evidence goes, who can act on it, and what remains outside the institution's control. That is also why trust grows when students can see what their input changed.
References
[Paper Source]: Meng Zhang, Kelly E. Matthews and Shuang Liu "When engaging students as partners fails: the ease of maintaining the status quo" DOI: 10.1080/03075079.2025.2552826
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