Student voice gets more inclusive when universities redesign how participation works
Updated Jun 03, 2026
student voiceA university can run surveys, appoint representatives, and still miss the students whose insight does not arrive through fast verbal discussion or visible confidence. At Student Voice AI, we see that risk whenever institutions assume the easiest voices to hear are the only ones that matter. That is why Kate Coldrick and Lili Ly's Student Engagement in Higher Education Journal paper, "Beyond voice: Re-imagining student engagement through a co-created project led by an autistic student", matters. For UK teams trying to design student voice routes more deliberately, it makes a clear argument: inclusion is not only about inviting more students in, but about redesigning the conditions under which participation happens.
Context and research question
Student voice work in higher education often rests on a small set of familiar channels: surveys, committees, course representatives, workshops, and staff-student discussions. Those routes matter, but they also carry hidden assumptions about what good participation looks like. Students may be expected to respond quickly, speak fluently, tolerate sensory pressure, or explain emotional experiences on demand. For some students, especially neurodivergent students, those expectations can make a supposedly inclusive process feel like a test of performance rather than a route into institutional change.
Coldrick and Ly examine that problem through a practice-based, student-led project focused on redesigning a university's postgraduate admissions interview process. An autistic postgraduate student identified the interview as structurally misaligned with how some neurodivergent applicants process information and communicate, then led the project through UCL's ChangeMakers programme. The team co-created a survey with scaled and open-text questions about postgraduate interview experiences, analysed the results through descriptive statistics, correlations, and structured qualitative coding, then translated the findings into a workshop for 15 postgraduate staff and a co-authored guidance leaflet now used in relevant departments. That makes the paper useful for UK higher education teams because it links student voice, method, and implementation rather than stopping at critique.
Key findings
The paper's first and most important finding is that conventional student voice can exclude the students it claims to include. Coldrick and Ly show that many co-creation and engagement activities still privilege verbal fluency, emotional self-disclosure, spontaneity, and confidence. Those norms may look neutral from the institution's side. From the student's side, they can operate as barriers that decide whose contribution feels legible, credible, or welcome.
The project changed because the student set the agenda rather than being asked to comment on someone else's plan. That reversal matters. The autistic student lead identified the problem, defined the focus, shaped the survey, and led the institutional critique, while staff adapted their roles around that leadership instead of directing it. The paper treats that not as a nice partnership story, but as a redistribution of epistemic authority.
"this is engagement that emerges from the student, not invited by the institution"
The survey findings also showed that inclusive adjustments were not niche requests for a small subgroup. Both neurodivergent and neurotypical respondents preferred practical changes such as advance access to questions, the option to use notes or written responses, and interviewer training. Emotionally loaded questions and pressure to respond immediately created extra cognitive demand, which meant some students were being judged not on what they knew, but on how easily they could perform under a narrow communication model.
Interpretation changed once lived experience shaped the analysis. The team coded more than sixty themes linked to communication, stress, masking, and sensory experience. That mattered because behaviours often read institutionally as disengagement, such as pausing before answering or avoiding eye contact, were reinterpreted as valid responses within particular neurotypes. The paper argues that masking should be treated as an institutional equity issue, not simply as an individual coping strategy, because the process itself is what rewards concealment.
The project only became persuasive because it moved from diagnosis to redesign. Coldrick and Ly describe a workshop with 15 postgraduate staff, whose reflections were then incorporated into a guidance leaflet. The resulting recommendations were concrete: share questions in advance, clarify emotional language, allow notes or written responses, make expectations explicit, and reduce sensory stressors where possible. Staff reported that these insights applied beyond admissions, including to teaching and wider student-facing processes.
Practical implications
For UK universities, the first implication is to audit the participation norms inside student voice work itself. If your most valued channels depend on live discussion, quick verbal reasoning, and visible confidence, you may be hearing a narrowed version of the student experience. Teams should ask which students are least likely to join the committee, speak first in the room, or volunteer for a workshop, and what that means for the evidence base behind student experience decisions. The gain is a fuller picture of who is currently under-heard.
Second, institutions should treat written and asynchronous routes as core voice infrastructure, not as fallback options. Open-text prompts, structured written reflections, and flexible response formats can surface barriers that committee minutes or closed-question surveys miss. If universities are going to rely more on those routes, they also need a repeatable way to analyse open-text student comments systematically. This is where Student Voice Analytics fits naturally: it helps teams compare themes such as accessibility, unclear expectations, sensory pressure, and belonging across large volumes of written feedback. The benefit is that quieter patterns become usable evidence rather than anecdote.
Third, universities should move from consultation to co-authorship when redesigning systems that affect specific student groups. This paper is persuasive not because staff asked for feedback on a finished process, but because the student lead shaped the problem definition, the method, and the interpretation. That requires more careful design around power, privacy, and follow-through, especially when teams are working with students describing disability or neurodivergence. A student comment analysis governance checklist is useful here because better listening only helps if institutions also have a governed way to store, segment, interpret, and act on sensitive feedback. The payoff is change that feels more legitimate to the students most affected.
Finally, institutions should close the loop in a way that shows precisely what changed in the process, not only that students were heard. If students identify barriers in interviews, module evaluations, tutorials, or support routes, report back on the design decisions that followed. The lesson from this paper sits closely alongside our argument that student feedback only works when universities show what changed. Visible, specific follow-through is what turns participation into trust. That gives UK teams a stronger basis for sustained engagement next time they ask students to contribute.
FAQ
Q: How can a university make student voice more inclusive for neurodivergent students without building a separate process for every group?
A: Start by changing the default design of your existing processes. Share agendas or prompts in advance, allow written or asynchronous contributions, make expectations explicit, reduce avoidable sensory pressure, and avoid treating fast verbal response as the main sign of engagement. These changes help neurodivergent students, but they also improve clarity and fairness for many other students.
Q: What should universities keep in mind before generalising from this study?
A: This is a practice-based case study built around one institutional process, postgraduate interviews, at one university. It is strongest as mechanism-rich evidence about how exclusion can be designed into participation and how co-created redesign can work in practice. It is not a prevalence study, and it does not claim that every student or institution experiences the same barriers in the same way.
Q: What does this change about student voice work more broadly?
A: It shifts the question from "How many students responded?" to "Who could shape the agenda, in what format, and on whose terms?" That is a more useful question for UK higher education because student voice becomes more valuable when it captures different communication styles, not only the most institutionally comfortable ones. In practice, that means treating written comments, lived experience, and multimodal participation as part of mainstream quality work rather than side channels.
References
[Paper Source]: Kate Coldrick and Lili Ly "Beyond voice: Re-imagining student engagement through a co-created project led by an autistic student" DOI: 10.66561/sehej.v7i1.1399
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