Introduction

The Solent Student Partner Programme aims to support students to work in partnership with staff to enhance their learning and teaching in line with our inclusive, real-world curriculum. It also supports to co-create and shape our academic practises at the university by valuing the diverse perspectives and voices of our students. And importantly, it enables our students to gain really good experiences, which develops their confidence and employability.

So in this course, some of the Solent student partners and myself will be sharing our views and experiences on the value and practise of partnership working. We will discuss what student-staff partnerships are, the benefits they bring, and also share some ideas with you how to implement an institutional student-staff partnership programme in practise. I’ve always been passionate about working in partnership with students, but I think that passion really accelerated during the Coronavirus Pandemic.

In 2020, COVID19 disrupted higher education across the sector, and really fast. At Southampton Solent University, like many others, we had to pivot really quickly, so we moved our practice-based courses online, making them accessible and engaging for our students. And it’s no coincidence that 2020 was also the year that we launched our Solent Student Partner programme. We knew that transformational change couldn’t happen without students at the heart of it so we recruited a team of Solent student partners to really help us co-create that inclusive online pedagogy. During the pandemic, our staff and students worked together on approximately 380 modules of learning, and that spanned all of our academic departments at the university.

The work was really valuable and it was really impactful, and honestly, we’ve never looked back from that point. Over the past five years, our partnership programme has evolved, we’ve grown our team of students, we’ve expanded our partnerships into professional service areas as well as our academic provision. And to date, we’ve had nearly a hundred student partners come through our programme working on a broad range of educational projects in terms of policy, practise and research. And it’s been really wonderful to lead this program’s growth. So when we talk about partnerships, we’re talking about the kind where staff and students genuinely work together to shape how higher education happens. These partnerships are really challenging traditional hierarchies that linger in higher education.

So instead of staff leading and students following, we’re completely rethinking that dynamic. We move away from students simply being the passive recipients of higher education to being the active agents within it. When students are empowered to be partners in their learning experience, something powerful happens – educators can better meet the needs of their learners. Partnerships come in all shapes and sizes. Some happen inside the curriculum in terms of things like co-creating, teaching materials, or assessment criteria, and others take place outside of the classroom. They might be in terms of building policies together, shaping charters, and the scale is entirely flexible too. It could be a one-off project or a long-term programme running over months or even several years. It might involve just a handful of students, but equally it could involve whole cohorts of learners. At the heart, partnership is all about trust, collaboration, and shared purpose. It’s about re-imagining higher education together.