Written by Benjamin Blackman and Dr Stephen Ingram

Over the last year SoSS has piloted the role of ‘Student Voice Facilitator’ (SVF). SVFs are students hired to take a leading role in student voice on a given programme. It’s a paid role, and although there are ways it can improved, we think there is a lot to be said in favour of it. This blog post is a reflection on our experience of the SVF role within the PPE programme at Manchester, where Stephen is the Programme Director and Ben has been SVF this year (2025-26).

What We Did

Early on we realised that we were free the develop the role as we saw fit. We had the flexibility to decide which aspects of student experience we would focus on, and what kinds of activity we wanted to undertake. We’ve prioritised a few things as the year has unfolded (e.g. assessment/feedback, designing more attractive events to encourage attendance, and enhancing the feeling of community on the programme) but we chose to put particular emphasis on student voice itself. This is an area where the programme has been looking to improve for some time. Ben ran focus groups, led in meetings, and worked with the programme team throughout the year to ensure that feedback is enacted in more creative ways than it has been before.

Why an SVF?

Of course, there are already processes in place to facilitate student voice. The student union recruits reps, and those reps are asked to produce surveys and share feedback at Student Voice Committee (SVC) meetings. When the reps system operates at its best, it helps to ensure that students are heard and that feedback is acted on. The trouble is that it often doesn’t operate at its best. Reps are volunteers, so they don’t always have time to go above and beyond. The paid role of SVF helps here. For example, the hours that it takes to prepare, run, and draw lessons from focus group can be recognised as labour that should be compensated.

But there’s more to it than this. We think that the formalised nature of the reps system doesn’t lend itself to what student voice really ought to be. At its best, student voice should be an ongoing dialogue between staff and students, a cooperative endeavour to improve things for everyone. Too often it amounts to a formal cycle of surveys, committee meetings, and email updates to ‘close the feedback loop.’ And too often there is an ‘us vs. them’ mentality, where students feel that they aren’t really listened to, and staff feel as though efforts to make change are unappreciated. Part of what we have found valuable about the SVF role is that it is a microcosm of the kind of partnership that should be central to student voice. The two of us can talk, debate, and cooperate to find new ways forward. It’s a small thing, in some ways, but it’s also a model that we can carry with us in other student voice activities.

Challenges

The most persistent challenge of the role is engagement with reps and other PPE students. This has been difficult throughout the year, despite our efforts to include reps within projects that create meaningful change. Engaging with students directly is also hard—it’s difficult to generalise from surveys with low response rates, and in-person engagement is challenging on a multi-disciplinary programme like PPE, where it is rare for all students on the programme to be in the same class at the same time. Having the paid role of SVF has allowed us to trial informal community events this year, and we have used social media to highlight our student voice work. But this remains a challenge.

There are also structural and institutional barriers with which to contend. Some of this relates to quality assurance process, which are important but are structured in ways that can stifle or delay innovation—e.g. the QSDE timeline makes it hard to propose significant changes after a relatively early moment in the year, making student voice part of a yearly rush to complete proposals by a strict deadline, rather than part of an ongoing process of improvement. On top of this, student voice suffers from a perception issue, in that decisions often feel dictated to students rather than created with them. The SVF role has allowed us to go further than ever before to integrate co-creation into programme changes, meaning that students have someone who is consistently present and advocating for them.

Key Takeaways

The role of SVF creates an exciting opportunity to integrate co-creation into a degree programme. As a paid rather than a voluntary position, it allows for a wider range of student voice activities, and means that change is continually rather than only periodically a collaboration between staff and students. A consistent, recognisable, visible SVF who is known and trusted by their peers makes student voice more credible—it encourages students to see their feedback as a priority. There are often structural and institutional barriers to acting on feedback, and a more flexible approach that allows for greater autonomy at the level of programmes and schools would help. But even when changes are slow or impossible, communication is key. Students expect honesty and clarity, and our experience is that SVF role has allowed for more consistent and effective communication between staff and students. Ultimately, what this year has shown us is that, when students feel that change is made with them rather than being dictated to them, engagement and trust in the programme follows.