Student voice gets stronger when participation is designed, not assumed
Updated Jul 28, 2026
Student voice work gets thinner when universities mainly hear the students who are comfortable speaking first. At Student Voice AI, we see the same risk whenever survey results, representative systems, and committee discussions are treated as if they reach everyone equally. That is why Zinnia Mitchell-Smith, Ffion Evans and Rachael Rooke's Student Engagement in Higher Education Journal paper, "Drawing on Lundy: A Holistic Approach to Student Voice and Participation", matters for universities using student voice to improve teaching, curriculum, and assessment. Its argument is simple and useful: better participation does not come from adding one more channel, but from designing space, audience, and influence into everyday practice.
Context and research question
Many universities can point to surveys, course representatives, liaison committees, and periodic workshops as evidence that students are being heard. The harder question is whether those routes are equally usable for commuter students, students with caring responsibilities, students from marginalised groups, or students who do not thrive in live, fast-moving discussion. That matters in UK higher education because the updated QAA Quality Code now expects providers to show effective engagement with students as partners, not just formal opportunity.
This paper is a reflective case study from the Department of Social Care and Social Work at Manchester Metropolitan University. The authors describe how they reworked departmental student voice practice by adapting Laura Lundy's participation model around four elements: space, voice, audience, and influence. The paper is not framed as a controlled evaluation. It is a practice account of how one department tried to move from transactional feedback collection towards a more embedded culture of participation, and what that looked like in teaching, curriculum, assessment, and student support.
Key findings
The first finding is that student voice becomes more credible when participation is treated as infrastructure, not an event. The department did not abandon formal routes such as surveys and representation. Instead, it expanded them into a wider matrix of activity so students had multiple ways to contribute, at different levels of intensity, across the academic year. The practical shift was from assuming one route would suit everyone to designing a set of routes that students could enter in different ways.
The second finding is that institutions hear more when they go where students already are. Rather than relying only on extra-curricular forums, the department built voice work into timetabled teaching, informal "connect" sessions, tutorials, online Padlets, drop-ins, and peer events. That matters because it reduces the bias towards students who have spare time, confidence in meetings, or familiarity with university processes. For UK teams, this is a reminder that participation improves when voice routes are flexible, proximate, and normalised.
"to be a student in our classrooms means that you matter and have a valued voice"
The third finding is that co-creation changed what the department was able to notice and act on. The paper describes student networks, a reverse mentoring pilot, co-created resources, and paid partnership activity that surfaced issues such as hidden curriculum, jargon, accessibility of learning materials, racism in placements, and assessment language. Those are not the sort of concerns that always emerge clearly from a standard end-of-module instrument. They became more actionable because students were involved not only in commenting, but in framing problems and presenting recommendations to senior staff.
The fourth finding is more cautious but still important: the authors report that this embedded approach coincided with stronger student voice metrics, especially in the NSS, without claiming causation. That restraint matters. The paper does not pretend a single framework mechanically produces better scores. What it does show is that regular dialogue, visible staff proximity, and continuous closing of feedback loops can change the culture around student voice in ways that are plausible, practical, and worth testing elsewhere.
Practical implications
For UK universities, the first implication is to audit the participation norms inside student voice work itself. Ask which channels depend on live confidence, quick verbal response, physical presence, or prior familiarity with committees. Then ask which students are least likely to contribute under those conditions. The benefit is a less distorted evidence base for student experience decisions.
Second, institutions should design student voice around multiple routes that answer the same four questions: where can students speak, how can they shape the conversation, who will hear them, and what will change? That might include timetabled check-ins, representative routes, open-text forms, tutoring conversations, and asynchronous written prompts. If those written routes are going to matter, teams also need a repeatable open-text analysis methodology so recurring issues can be compared rather than cherry-picked. The benefit is stronger triangulation across channels.
Third, universities should treat inclusive comment analysis as part of participation design, not only as a reporting task. Multi-channel feedback can widen whose experience enters the evidence base, but only if institutions can store, segment, interpret, and escalate that material carefully. A student comment analysis governance checklist is useful here because it forces teams to decide how sensitive comments will be handled, who will review them, and how actions will be tracked. The benefit is that broader listening does not collapse into ad hoc interpretation.
Finally, teams should show influence precisely, not vaguely. If students raise concerns about accessibility, assessment wording, staff approachability, or peer belonging, report back on the design decisions that followed and what happened next. That sits closely alongside the case for closing the loop on student voice initiatives. The benefit is not only better communication, but more trust the next time students are asked to contribute.
FAQ
Q: How should a university apply this paper without scrapping its existing survey and representative systems?
A: Start by treating existing routes as the baseline, not the whole system. Keep the survey, the reps, and the committee structure if they are useful, but test what each one cannot hear well. Then add a small number of flexible routes such as timetabled discussion, asynchronous written prompts, or targeted partnership work where particular student groups need a stronger voice.
Q: What are the methodological limits of this study?
A: This is a reflective departmental case study, not a formal impact evaluation. It draws on one discipline area, one institutional context, and a values-led framework shaped by social work and community practice. Its strength is in showing mechanisms and design choices. Its limit is that it cannot prove that the same model will produce the same results everywhere.
Q: What does this change about student voice more broadly?
A: It shifts the focus from collection to design. Universities often ask whether students had a chance to respond. This paper asks a better question: who had space, audience, and influence in practice? That is a more useful lens for UK higher education because it makes student voice a question of institutional design rather than annual compliance.
References
[Paper Source]: Zinnia Mitchell-Smith, Ffion Evans and Rachael Rooke "Drawing on Lundy: A Holistic Approach to Student Voice and Participation" DOI: 10.66561/sehej.v7i1.1409
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