Development Monthly | #42 April 2025 | Everyday Impact: Rethinking Engagement in HE
“I’ve spent most of my professional life in education. I’ve worked with learners from almost every age and background, in formal, non-formal and informal settings. Now, as Deputy Vice Chancellor Education at the University of Westminster, it is commonplace for me to hear talk of the challenges of being a student: of the fact that the cost-of-living bites hard, that more students than ever before commute, that most students combine work with their studies, that the pandemic has changed the ways students engage.”
And that all that has led to students taking a more transactional approach to learning with attendance and engagement falling. But that isn’t the whole story about student engagement.
My university, the University of Westminster, recently hosted the evasys Student Engagement Conference at which participants built on Helena Lim’s recent (2025) report Future Proofing Student Engagement. The report highlighted, for me, a bit of a gap between university staff and students, with staff talking about places on committees and student surveys, while students called for co-creation, person-to-person interaction, engaging teaching and a shared responsibility for managing engagement.
All this put me in mind of Ron Barnett’s book ‘A Will to Learn: Being a Student in an Age of Uncertainty’ (Barnett, 2007) published more than a decade and a half ago. In it he suggests that the surprising thing about student continuation is not that so many students drop out, but that so many continue. In a more recent (2018) talk to the Adelaide Education Academy he argues for pedagogies of/for confidence and risk: engagement, he suggests, is about ‘listening, action, being in the world’.
So how can we better work with students, engaging with risk, building confidence and giving them the relational work and shared responsibility they seem to be calling for?
At the evasys conference, my keynote focused on collaborative leadership as a lens through which to explore initiatives in staff-student partnership. Collaborative leadership (Walsh & de Sarandy, 2023) is more of an NHS thing than a Higher Education one but might nevertheless be useful. It is based on understanding how very different stakeholders (NHS providers, charities, local authorities) with very different aims, approaches and cultures, can work together effectively around a shared purpose. It offers six dimensions which, it suggests are needed for successful collaborative leadership.
They are an inclusive environment, strong relationships, shared purpose, clear direction, surfacing conflict and shared decision making. These dimensions, I believe, offer a way of working with students which can enable that listening, action and being in the world. For while the first three dimensions create a safe space within which to build confidence, the last two enable students to engage in the less safe activities of real challenge and commitment to action – an enactment, perhaps, of Barnett’s pedagogies of confidence and risk?
Intuitively, this looks like the right kind of framework, so I used it to review work that we have completed at Westminster and found that the presence or absence of these dimensions are quite good indicators of success or failure. For example, our (not much lamented) Student Experience Committee: co-chaired by the SU president and the DVC Education, with students and staff as members. Ostensibly about a shared aim to improve the student experience, in practice treated by colleagues as an opportunity to share (sometimes lengthily) reports on new initiatives, and by students as an opportunity to offer up problems.
Very few actions came out of it and no shared work. Its successor, Student Voice Forum, with a much stronger focus on that shared work on agreed challenges, is better, but not perfect – it has limited decision-making powers and meets too infrequently (and is perhaps too large) to enable the development of strong relationships or a real sense of shared purpose.
By contrast, the joint University/Student Union project which reshaped the committee was much stronger. It changed student representation and introduced several other new initiatives. From the outset the working group focused on shared aims that everyone cared about, and the group was responsible for recommendations that went to Academic Council. We borrowed Jim Dickinson from WonkHE to surface, if not conflict, then at least contention, and the co-ownership of the group supported an inclusive environment, where all felt heard. As I intimated at the start, the recommendations of the group led to lasting change in the way student representation/voice/partnership operates at Westminster.
So, my own – admittedly anecdotal- experience, suggests that these six dimensions can support effective, non-transactional, student engagement, and can build students’ confidence in engaging with risk. But if this is true, it poses questions for us all, because some of these dimensions are not easy to embed. So, I’ll leave you with a few challenges:
1. Are we up for shared decision-making? Not one or two students on a board, but real power, where recommendations are jointly agreed, and don’t go forward if they aren’t?
2. How do we develop strong relationships when staff are paid and students are giving time for free?
3. How do we enable conflict and embed inclusion when there is that power imbalance where students feel (wrongly, but genuinely) that being frank might lead to lower grades?
Answers on a postcard please!
References:
Barnett, R. ( 2007 ) A Will to Learn: Being a Student in an Age of Uncertainty . Maidenhead, Berkshire : SRHE and Open University
Barnett, R. (2018) Being a student in an age of uncertainty. London, UCL IoE
Lim, H. (2025) Futureproofing student engagement, Evasys
Walsh, N & de Sarandy, S. (2023) The practice of Collaborative leadership across health and care services. London The Kings Fund
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