 Wonderful, really good to come and speak to you all and it's been just wonderful hearing about all the activities going on at this conference but also by the Student Voice Australia project. My name's Tom, I'm from the University of Portsmouth as Belinda highlighted and this is a session that I put together really inspired by an article that came out from one of your keynote speakers Molly Dollinger and her colleague Kelly Matthews where they made an argument to think actually we need to start connecting our Student Voice activities and partnership work. So in this presentation I'm going to make a bit of a case, I haven't got necessarily the answer but I'll be making a case for us to be thinking about all this wonderful activities we are doing under the Student Voice banner and ensuring we're connected with what we do. A little about me first my name's Tom, I work at the University of Portsmouth and I've really spent my entire career across the last 10 years working in all realms of Student Voice from working as an institutional lead for Student Voice and employability at the University of Winchester, conducting a lot of research on the topic and being part of being the chair of a network which is all about Student Voice, the RAISE network. But a lot of my reflections too in Student Voice come from being a student rep myself as an undergraduate student representative and then a student union vice president for two years quite a long time ago now but many of my reflections come from being on the other side of the coin as well and being a student representative myself so I'm really looking forward to sharing my reflections with you today. So the wider context as I'm sure you've been speaking about across this conference is actually Student Voice is not a new idea, the idea that students can have a say or should be part of enhancing their education is not new at all. Actually scholars such as Dewey or Paulo Freire spoke about this a long time ago or over a hundred years ago in fact and actually there's wider bodies around the world that actually say students have a right to have a say in their education whether that's the UN Pre-Education Charter in 2011 or the Prague Communique which where a load of European universities came together and said that students are competent and active and constructive partners in how we shape higher education. For any of you that have worked at other levels of education as well you will know that Student Voice is a very prominent area of research maybe referred to as learner voice or pupil voice in primary and secondary education so the Student Voice context that higher education is now fantastically part of is definitely not alone and not the newest of ideas but perhaps it's still a field that we're experimenting in and it's still a field in very complex institutions that are modern universities where we still need to innovate and we still need to explore. Looking at Student Voice within the wider student engagement discourse I think Student Voice offers the opportunity for us to join our theories of how we think students are learning with actual practice and only through that dialogue will we be able to truly understand the learner experience and I think we need to continuously do this. Our student body is ever-changing because we have a new set of students every year and also the world is changing very very quickly as well not just in regards to technology in regards to generational change social change and progress let alone the kind of cataclysmic and gigantic impact that the COVID-19 pandemic held where now every student who is entering higher education will have witnessed some form of distance learning. Student Voice is very much reliant on relationships between students and staff and that's something I'll pick up during this presentation that's not just students to staff but also the organization to students or the student union and also how students interact with their fellow student representatives as well and I can see from the hashtag you've been talking about across this last couple of days the role of the student representative or the role of the student partner and what does that role mean for the wider student body. I've already highlighted that there's other search terms out there you may want to explore like learner voice or pupil voice but Alison Cooke-Saver and Kathy Bovell and Peter Felton highlight student voice actually really the missing perspective and I think we should all reflect sometimes that actually staff make up about 10% of our university population yes on the majority of our dishes and making bodies and committees staff make up 95% plus and actually there's a real skew really towards staff being in charge and empowering organizations when actually those organizations wouldn't exist without the students and I think including that missing perspective and increasing the percentage of that missing perspective is really important. So I'm sure over the last two days as I've seen from on Twitter there's two key areas of student engagement activity which you have been speaking about and actually when I speak about these topics I split them one is student voice and one is student representation and I know nation by nation university by university these activities can differ. Student voice I separate from student representation being any student and every student has a voice and I would argue that a student voice conversation about education is anything from an informal chat to a set of emails there's lots of models out there to look at how we can make those informal chats and conversations about education more meaningful and there's lots of different ways that we go beyond our elected student course reps by having feedback forums or running university surveys but this conversation with students when we say hey how's it going or how you find it so far has been expanded and built upon in many nations around the world to create democratic representation systems of student voice in many HGIs and I know this area of activity is going on the way you all are on the inside the world to me right now and it's where students are probably represented at a course level but they can also be on higher committees and sometimes you may have like a student president represent on those higher committees as well these two areas of activities together though I feel build the foundation for wider student voice activities such as student staff partnership research projects student surveys feedback forums and I think if you get these two areas right you can then build some fantastic opportunities upon them I think if these two areas are neglected then things can start going wrong I'm obviously from the UK as you can tell from my accent and we are actually in a sector that heavily prioritized student voice for many years particularly across the 2010s our equivalent to Texas our quality assurance agency highlights that every university must take deliberate steps to engage all students individually and collectively which is hard in the partners of quality assurance and also in our equivalent to your student experience survey in Australia our national student survey actually has three questions and there's only 27 questions on this survey that ask these points around that students have the opportunities to give feedback that staff value that feedback and it's clear where that feedback was acted upon the feedback you we often speak about whenever I talk about student voice I love highlighting this fantastic book it's by a scholar called Adam Fletcher in the USA who writes about student voice from kindergarten to phd and uses the same lessons throughout which I think is just wonderful and Adam quite simply defines student voices any expression oh sorry student voice as an expression of any student in any form about learning essentially student voice is any conversation about their education as soon as we use such a definition it's far more inclusive and I'm going to come on start later on he goes on to use lots of fantastic frameworks but does say this that actually his goal is to about meaningful student voice or meaningful student involvement and that's not just about listening that's not just about having lots of gimmicks and schemes where students can give some feedback but it's about acknowledging that feedback it's about being committed to that feedback it's promoting it it's empowering both students and staff and expanding conversations I think it's important to reflect on our student rep activities where most of the foundation of this activity goes on I don't know all the the ins and outs of your individual institutions but largely student representatives are it's an informal role it's actually a role that you may exist in all the time where you are elected to be the class rep you may sit on only nine hours a committee's a year maybe even less and but you're all often there is a volunteer and perhaps supported by a central staff member or a student union but many have argued as I've already highlighted that student representation structures form the foundation for wider student engagement activities and if you refer to Alex Buckley at Edinburgh Napier who says that student engagement can occur in two zones the political and the pedagogical I would probably argue that student representation straddles to those both and when I talk to student unions about student voice and representation I always make a really important point that these activities rely on as meeting in the middle so I think student engagement and student voice is about students and staff meeting halfway I think a traditional non-student voice focus higher education indicated on the left of my slides there is where both students and staff aren't coming into those student voice spaces to talk about their education I think students can become customers if students aren't being invited to meet halfway and perhaps they're sitting back and the staff feel like they're bending over backwards for those students actually on the flip side if I know there's a session earlier today on student activism if staff aren't listening then students are more likely to turn to activists measures to get their message across but really we want to see our student engagement practices and student representation meetings of students and staff meeting halfway perhaps in mutual spaces and shared spaces to talk about their education certainly an example of both students engaging and staff engaging there's challenges out there though and this brings me around to my argument there's a big challenge going on at the moment in regards to all of these fantastic activities we have and a word called representativeness just because you have one student rep in the room or one student voice in the room does their voice represent their fellow 30 classmates or their fellow 300 classmates or their fellow 30 000 students it is not necessarily clear and so there's a real concern around the representativeness of our student representatives Alex Bowles writes about this very very well and are those students truly representing themselves or reflecting the wider student body I think when we become over reliant on student union presidents course reps that sometimes actually these roles could be inaccessible for some students because they require a lot of time sometimes they could require a lot of volunteering some students don't have the ability to volunteer excessively and so we've got to reflect on how excessive and accessible these roles are so there's a lot going on that is clear there's lots of in-person activities going on in university there's lots of online activities going on and we're now researching with students too I'm not going to go through these individually but I think all of these come from a wonderful place and by no means I am critiquing any of these activities because they are all coming from a place of let's enhance education for our students my argument perhaps is that there's a lot going on in our institution so let's go on to talk about my argument because we're resourcing other things as well we have student surveys student reps research projects students as partners student engagement and decision making on quality assurance committees so and actually I would argue we now have at many institutions student voice en masse where student voice going on everywhere the concern is there's a lot going on and what about representativeness what about accessibility as Sarah Shea highlights what about connectiveness which was really the paper that inspired me where Matthews and Dolling had talked about the differences between student representatives and students as partners how equitable are all these opportunities to students who maybe face barriers already to their higher education and then I've seen somebody tweet about it already at this conference the age old age old discussion do we pay for these student opportunities or do we not well right now we're paying for some and we're not paying for others so I think that question is still worthy of tabling I worry that we've got lots going on in the expanding universe of student voice and actually if we include things even like emails and discussions and research we have got so many different things going on in this space as student voice and I worry that they're all going off in wonderful directions alone and they're unconnected but the only thing that unites all of these areas of activity is the student because we are asking the student to engage in all of these activities I'm I've gone to lots of universities around the UK and help them audit their student voice opportunities and some universities are conducting 60 surveys during a three year undergraduate degree that's 20 surveys a year that's just too many you know so are we asking too much and are we being a bit chaotic with our good intentions in our student voice activities so I take a broad definitions of student voice as Adam Fletcher highlighted so absolutely probably the most the most basic form of student voice we think of at some point in their hand up and saying I didn't understand that or the deadline you just highlighted is different in the module handbook to what you've just said in class it's those discussions it's also emails to everybody and I've done research on the feedback loop and a lot of students refer to the feedback loop as responding times to emails it's your student reps as I've already highlighted your national surveys your student union it's also complaints as well everybody and complaints official university complaints are often hidden in institutions very private they're a form of student voice they're a negative form of student voice but they're an important form of student voice they've often said that we need to be welcoming to all forms of feedback positive or not and as soon as we ignore and say no no no we can't include that in the student voice dichotomy actually to the students that is part of that picture but we need to ensure that it's something we welcome and talk about as well all of these count as student voice too and I think if the other barrier pathways are closed students will move towards these areas of student voice and these are absolutely forms of student voice perhaps ones that some universities wouldn't like to talk about and what every student has the right to protest and to share their views in that way but also every student now has the ability to just post on social media what they think if we're not open in our feedback pathways then students will go to those lengths and where they might not even need the press anymore because social media offers them far more instantaneous noise than any going to the press word but of course going to the press to count as that so we have all these activities and for all of them we've got to try and create some form of feedback loop here's a feedback loop that I've used in student rep trainings in the past and I think the feedback loop is an ideal but in reality it's very very difficult it's perhaps easy in some structured means very difficult in others and what's really happening on the ground well here's a picture I'm actually in this picture in 2013 of a bit of student rep publicity we did at the University of Winchester when I was a vice president education but what's really happening is off this shows that you're together as student reps but often that student rep is alone in the meetings often that student rep is alone in that email chain and often that student rep although they are supported by their fellow students is alone and often sometimes the lecturer looks like this and I've done a lot of work over many years around trying to calm down those student voice meetings where people go in very defensive I'm defencing my course I'm defencing my teaching I'm defencing my curriculum and sometimes that student voice meeting can become a bit of a battle what's also potentially really happening is we have endless means of students to give feedback and we shout and give us voice give us feedback give us voice and it can feel like you're throwing a paper airplane off a off a cliff edge really that yes you can submit that feedback but where's it gone what's happening with that feedback we don't really know and I'm very concerned that we have higher education institutions where our student voice exchanges look a bit like the flight trader app where you there's just thousands and thousands of little bits of student voice going around the organization and we're not really clear what's going on where so I think there's an argue as I come towards the end of my presentation there's an argument to connect our opportunities for student voice and I've just used a really small example here which is by no means conclusive to highlight how we could do this in some form of framework this has been inspired by looking at first at complaints at the University of Winchester where there is four phases to students to make a complaint so I actually started with the perhaps deemed more negative area of student voice where students can do a local complaint where they just it's resolved at a local level a local formal which is a written complaint at a faculty level a university complaint and the OIA is the UK sector body for complaints and then actually saying well actually if this is a framework of student voice and as you go up you have to put more effort in more time what's the what's the lowest contact time version of student voice well that's open dialogue about education and what's the next that we're filling in a survey speaking to your student rep taking part in a student staff partnership project engaging in quality assurance and then working with your SQ by mapping it out like this you can start saying actually what is our student voice menu perhaps and what are we doing and how does this connect I think you can go further and audit all your opportunities and this is an activity I've done this is hypothetically based on the UK University and I've categorized them as institutional feedback thing options these are things we put serious time and money into and actually I think my conclusion from looking at your institutional opportunities is saying that actually every department and staff member should be have the responsibility for closing the feedback loop it's not just the student voice lead the student rep officer the vice president educations dean of students actually every staff member has to be on board in responding and connecting student feedback I think there's bigger activities that we've created all from a good place student experience committee students engage on quality assurance panels co-designed students as partnership we're engaging students to have ownership and this activity is also worthy of reflecting upon but in these activities you could also engage our students in closing the feedback loop and connecting our activities too because if the feedback doors are shut or if this is messy then there can be less ownership and that's what we want from our student voice activities but I also think if we get some of all of these wonderful activities wrong we could be falling into that student as customer mindset so that's my presentation for you all my name's Tom I just wanted to share that idea with you I don't have the answers at all my email's on the screen there it's Tom at it's Tom low at port not Tom low at poor and and I wrote a book on the topic a couple of years ago and called a handbook for student engagement in higher education where I talk about many of these ideas as well as scholars from around the world and the raise network is also a fantastic network to look at but I'll stop showing my screen and open to questions thank you so much Tom and you're welcome to share that link in the chat afterwards if you like on the floor did anyone have any questions if you just want to use the raise hand feature yeah I really enjoyed your presentation thank you so much Tom and there is yeah there is so much so I think you explained it really well for your institutions example and I'm sure we've all got a better understanding of the different layers at our own institutions I think it's about just drawing things out as well so there's one nice activity there's many activities you can do one is where you get you know flip chart paper and you stick about six of them together so it's a really long line and you make a really long table for a classroom you draw a line along it and then you go along as a group of staff and write every time along the student journey where you ask for students feedback and that can be quite revolutionary I mean in a sense universities are quite siloed in what they do sometimes because we're just massive you know it's no one's guilty of this and as I said it all comes from the best intentions but the one common person who's engaged in all of that is the student selves so there's a lot going on in the UK right now where people are saying oh we need to we're just emailing students too much we're just surveying students too much we're just asking and we need to be a bit more strategic because even though we think we're very organized maybe as the library service or as a course team where we say well we're engaging students three times a year that's great if every department's engaging students three times a year it comes like 29 times a year you can and I've met students and they said Greg you're me university you just keep asking me how to run with it because you know and I think it's interesting to be a balance I think it's a challenge finding that balance isn't it but yeah you're a sample of 60 surveys across an undergraduate degree it's yeah I'm sure once you count it up it's pretty outstanding yeah a survey audit it's really healthy to do I think yeah well thank you so much Tom if there's no other final questions we really appreciate your time and your presentation today thank you no thank you thank you all for coming along and thank you for the kind words on the right that's lovely really good to be here