Back in 2019, HEPI’s new policy officer raised the question of whether student representatives should be paid.
It highlighted growing concerns over fairness, diversity, and workload – and noted that while some institutions offer financial incentives or stipends, practices remain inconsistent, potentially limiting participation to those who can afford to volunteer.
The piece argued that clearer policy and compensation frameworks may be necessary to ensure that student voice mechanisms are inclusive and effective.
The debate goes on. RAISE (Researching, Advancing and Inspiring Student Engagement) Network is a community of academics, practitioners, and students focused on enhancing student engagement.
It supports research, shares best practice, and facilitates collaboration across institutions to improve how students are involved in their learning and academic communities. And on April 9th, RAISE ran a webinar on paying reps.
It noted that as engagement shifts from voluntary input to semi-formal labour, many institutions now pay students in these roles – to widen access, to reflect the work’s value, or both:
With student representation edging into part-time job territory, the webinar will explore a central tension: is payment a recognition of contribution – or a transactional shift that risks undermining the very ethos of student voice? In short: to pay, or not to pay?
It’s a difficult debate to have in the context of financial problems across the sector – and it’s difficult once you think about all the other roles that students undertake to help deliver and improve the student experience. Why just reps?
The debate
On one side, there’s the argument that payment professionalizes representation, recognizes labour, and makes participation accessible to students who cannot afford to volunteer. As one participant noted:
I think paying for student voice provides a more representative voice. Without payment some students are unable to participate in student voice.
On the other, concerns persist that payment might transform the relationship between students and institutions, potentially compromising authentic voice or creating competitive structures that exclude certain students.
One participant observed that volunteering provided:
…more accessible opportunity for students who don’t have high or advanced skills to engage
… noting that paid roles often involve “competitive processes” that can exclude developing voices.
Between these positions lies a growing recognition that the current economic climate has fundamentally changed the equation. The rising cost of living, widening participation, and increasing expectations placed on representatives have made purely voluntary models increasingly untenable for many students.
One of the compelling arguments for payment centred on equity. As higher education becomes more diverse, the traditional volunteering model privileges those with economic stability, creating representation gaps:
It’s one thing widening access to education, but widening participation is another thing altogether.
Participants highlighted how unpaid roles systematically exclude certain student demographics:
- Working students who cannot afford lost income
- Students with caring responsibilities
- Those covering costs like childcare, transport, or parking to attend meetings
As one participant pointedly asked:
Where else would you be asked to help develop an institution without payment of any form?
The voluntary model creates what some described as a “two-tiered system” where only privileged students can afford to contribute their voices. This undermines the very purpose of representation structures – to reflect diverse student experiences.
A persistent concern about payment was its potential impact on authenticity. Some feared that paid representatives might feel obligated to say “what the institution wants to hear” rather than offering genuine critique.
Yet several participants challenged this assumption, noting that professionalizing roles does not necessarily diminish passion or honesty. As one participant observed:
Sabbs would be surprised to learn that being paid reduced passion and honesty.
More nuanced perspectives emerged around how payment is framed:
- If seen as “buying” student opinions, concerns about authenticity might be valid
- If structured as recognizing labour and creating equitable access, payment can enhance authentic representation
The discussion revealed an underlying discomfort with transactional models of education. As one contributor noted, there’s a growing “transaction between the individual and institution” where students aren’t “bettering their student community, but instead paying for a service, and now want to be compensated in its quality assurance.”
Even for those committed to payment, practical implementation raises significant challenges:
- Administrative burden: “All of that HR paperwork, all of the time sheets, just to pay someone for 12 hours” – the administrative costs can be prohibitive, especially for systems with hundreds of representatives.
- Consistency issues: Many have developed inconsistent approaches where “some universities will pay 100 quid for a student to come to this meeting for two hours, but then we’ll ask another student to do something that’s more taxing for free.”
- Budget constraints: With 72 per cent of higher education institutions facing financial deficits (as of November 2024), finding sustainable funding models presents real challenges.
These practical concerns have led many institutions to explore alternatives:
- Vouchers rather than direct payment (with grocery vouchers proving more popular than Amazon vouchers)
- Academic credit for representation work
- Recognition through award ceremonies or formal accreditation
- Making participation “cost neutral” by covering expenses
- Reimagining Student Voice Systems
But maybe the payment question points to deeper issues with current representation models:
Just paying reps/volunteers/student leaders to do the stuff they’re already doing probably won’t be enough. The systems need to be re-considered and conceptualised differently.
Several participants suggested that rather than retrofitting payment onto outdated systems, institutions should fundamentally rethink their approach:
- Distinguishing between different types of engagement and compensating accordingly
- Making meetings more accessible (shorter, online, outside assessment periods)
- Developing clearer role descriptions with specific time commitments
- Creating institutional policies on student voice and payment
As one contributor noted, the payment question is really about “what problem is the goal of payment trying to solve?” If the aim is ensuring diverse representation, then bursary models might be more appropriate than hourly wages.
So what to do?
I think you can make a reasonable argument that in general, being a student should involve reflecting on your experiences and feeding back about them.
(On a related note in Sweden, where PGR students get a salary, within that there’s an expectation (codified into hours) that includes the actual being a PGR student, work of this sort for the university and other students, and delivering teaching to UGs. It’s a system that signals that being a PGR student involves multiple things, including doing things for other people.)
If we do require/need more of reflecting on and feeding back from some students (say in meetings), the question is then whether student finance systems (or expectations) support that, and if not then whether and who should top up.
And we then need to wonder about the extent to which voice systems require a lot from a small number and a little from a lot of them, or more from more of them and less from the wider group.
For example – if module evaluation is compulsory (as it is in some systems) and the role of the rep is to work with staff on analysing and problem solving, that requires less from the rep in “gathering” and more from students. There are great examples of that in Europe – especially in Estonia.
You can also argue that the student finance system(s) should support students having the time to do the “roles”, as well as other extracurricular activities that are generally considered to be important.
But will student finance system(s) change? Doubt it.
Crucially, I think you can argue that it’s a lack of time that is the key reason for considering paying students, and I think you can argue that students in formal representative roles learn a lot from undertaking them.
So given being a rep involves time, I think you can make a decent argument for academic credit being “attached” to rep work – this is common across Europe.
Of course, all of the above assumes that “reps” – in the volume, pattern and scaffolding we tend to see in the UK – is the right approach…
What we repeatedly see, in systems where student finance is often worse, is…
- Scaffodfing at school/dept/faculty level (ie people operating in coherent groups)
- More focus on module evaluation
- More focus on reps acting on and problem-solving over data from that and other data than expecting reps themselves to gather feedback
Ultimately this is about whether “partnership” with students is an unaffordable luxury for them and their university in an age of HE austerity and massified standardisation. More on that here – suffice to say that we probably need to examine whether our assumptions about how many reps there are, and what their role is, is as important as whether to pay them or not.
