What feedback tells us, and whose voice is missing

Dr Stuart Grey asks two connected questions: what can student feedback tell us, and who had a workable opportunity to give it? Episode 29 brings together teaching ratings, housing insecurity and the practical costs of taking part in student voice.

In this episode

Matching the evidence to the decision a course team needs to make.
Keeping students' circumstances visible when comments move between teams.
Making preparation, dates, expenses and support clear before inviting students onto a committee.
Understanding what different participation routes can contribute.
Considering whose experiences a busy student committee may still be missing.
The OfS quality regulation survey for staff in England, closing on 12 October 2026.

Sources and further reading

Reading the evidence

The Edinburgh interviews concern experience at one institution in 2022/23. Stuart's observation about continuing housing difficulties is his own experience, rather than a current prevalence estimate from that study. QAA's report draws on 89 comments and committee members' experience; that is not a count of individual research participants. The practical examples and suggested responses are Stuart's interpretation. The OfS exercise is an evaluation in progress, with findings expected in spring 2027.

Practical takeaway

Ask what the feedback can tell you and who had a workable opportunity to give it. Keep those questions together when deciding what needs to change.

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Transcript

Hi, and welcome to episode 29 of Student Voice Weekly. I'm Dr Stuart Grey, founder of Student Voice AI, and today's theme is what feedback tells us and whose voice we might be missing.

So today I'd like to talk about the decisions we make once student feedback arrives. So we've got the survey results, we've got comments, perhaps we've had a meeting with student reps. Now somebody wants to know what needs to change.

So before answering, I'd want to check what that evidence can support, and I'd want to ask who had the time and the opportunity to contribute to it. Those questions run through this week's research on teaching ratings and housing insecurity, and as well as a new QAA report about the cost of taking part in student voice.

So students can tell us a great deal about how they experience teaching, but to understand what they learned or what got in the way, we may need to bring several kinds of evidence together. A judgement about students' experience needs evidence about that experience. A judgement about learning needs evidence that addresses learning.

So imagine a student who enjoyed a module and found the lecturer approachable but couldn't work out how the marking criteria applied to their assignment. A positive overall rating and a critical comment can both make sense. The course team needs to understand the assessment difficulty while recognising what the student valued. I'd also ask where the explanation broke down, look at the relevant guidance with students, and agree what to check after a revision.

The second research item brings in the conditions under which students are trying to learn. So Hannah Awcock's Edinburgh study draws on 24 interviews about housing insecurity during the 2022 to 2023 academic year. Students described housing searches, temporary accommodation and inadequate study space interrupting academic work. The paper was published last November, but from my own experience they are still very common. They give us a reason to pay attention to circumstances students mention alongside any academic concern.

So suppose a comment describes difficulty completing an assignment while living between temporary addresses. If we only code that as an assessment issue, somebody reading the report may never see the housing context. The academic team then has less information to work with when it considers a response. The same comment may need to reach accommodation or support colleagues. The useful thing is to keep the student's account understandable as it moves between teams.

And if we're inviting students to describe difficult circumstances, we need to make sure that they know where to seek individual help. We explain whether the feedback route is monitored and who can respond. We need that practical information in place before the comments arrive.

Now, there's a further question here. How easily could a student dealing with those circumstances take part in the discussion about improving university life?

QAA's Student Strategic Advisory Committee has published a report on the cost of engagement. It draws on 89 comments and committee members' experience. The accounts describe demands on students' time and money alongside personal costs. The report recommends flexible participation, advance notice, support and different forms of recognition.

So think about asking a student to join a quality committee. There is a meeting, but there may also be papers to read, travel to arrange, a shift to move or caring responsibilities to work around. Those are examples of commitments I'd want to discuss before somebody agrees to the role. If the invitation only gives the meeting time, the student has to discover the rest later. That makes it harder for them to decide whether they can contribute consistently.

So you would want to be explicit about the expected preparation, dates, expenses and support, and I would ask students whether those arrangements work for them, including students who decide not to take part, so we can try and learn from this whole process.

Offering another way to contribute needs some thought as well. An online meeting can remove a journey, but it still requires availability at a particular time. A written response allows a different type of response, but it may lose the opportunity to ask questions or hear another student's perspective. So again, we have to always balance these trade-offs.

To keep these differences visible, we have to give each route a clear purpose, explain how its contribution will be used, and bring the evidence together carefully. We don't want to assume that different routes collect interchangeable accounts of what is happening in students' lives.

This connects with the housing paper without us having to generalise too much. Students facing disruption may have important experiences to share. We should examine whether our participation arrangements give them a workable opportunity to do that.

It also changes how I'd read a report from a very active student committee. I'd value the contribution, then ask what we know about people who couldn't attend. Activity within a group doesn't settle the question of whose experience a group has heard.

For quality colleagues in England, there's a related evidence exercise underway at the OfS. It's a survey for relevant staff at registered providers. Closes on the 12th of October. Student representatives contributed to a separate case study strand, and findings on this are expected next spring, which should be exciting. If you are preparing a response, I'd keep the reason for each institutional change clear.

At Student Voice AI, the reason we organise feedback into themes and categories is to help people find and discuss the relevant evidence. We still need to know which questions students answered, how the feedback was collected, and what coverage it has. So comments can show us experiences that deserve attention. They can't recover contributions from students who never even had a chance to take part.

So my takeaway is to ask what the feedback can tell you and who had a workable opportunity to give it. Keep those questions together when deciding what needs to change.

The full research links and sector briefings are in this week's Student Voice Weekly. You can subscribe to the newsletter at studentvoice.ai for a written issue every Friday. And if this episode was useful, please share it with a colleague or leave a review. Thanks for listening, and I'll speak again with you next week. Bye.

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