“Partnership” is everywhere – on strategy documents, policy slides, and student engagement plans.
It promises a new way of working – students not just as recipients of education, but as co-creators of it.
The idea is compelling, collaborative, progressive, even transformative. But beneath the surface, big questions remain.
Are we truly sharing power, or just inviting students into pre-defined spaces? Can a culture of partnership flourish without diluting the purpose of SUs? And is partnership something we actively practice, or simply something we perform?
Student partnership is easy to talk about, harder to define, and harder still to embed in a meaningful, sustained way.
At its best, it has the potential to rewire how we think about student voice, ownership, and decision-making in higher education.
At its most superficial, it risks becoming just another tick-box term in a sector already fluent in the language of inclusion without always delivering its reality.
What could partnership could look like if we took it seriously, as a lived culture, not a gesture confined to a glossy document co-signed by a university and its students’ union?
Drawing on inspiration from international practices, academic research, and a range of perspectives, as well as the opportunity to work collaboratively with multiple students’ unions, universities, and through completing my own research, I would be in favour of a model that is more ambitious than consolation, more equal than collaboration, and more durable than selective goodwill alone.
Because if universities get this right, student partnership could reshape the very idea of who higher actuation is for, and with.
From protest to partnership
Student engagement has long evolved in tension with institutional structures. In the UK and Ireland, the late 1960s and 70s were marked by student uprisings that demanded participation in governance and curriculum.
From the 1980s onwards, marketisation reframed students as “customers,” leading to a more transactional understanding of engagement. Student satisfaction surveys and quality assurance mechanisms became the dominant tools.
It was not until the 2010s that the concept of students as partners gained real traction, catalysed by the work of impressive professionals such as Mick Healey, Earle Abrahamson, and Kelly Matthews, and initiatives such as the Higher Education Academy’s Student Engagement Framework. Healey’s (2014) widely cited typology of partnership-learning and teaching, research, curriculum design, and governance provided the scaffolding for practice.
Meanwhile, SUs were transforming too. No longer solely protest organisations, they were becoming strategic partners, delivering services, training reps, co-authoring policies, and influencing national direction.
And yet, tensions remained. Partnership risked becoming a euphemism for collaboration on institutional terms, a veneer of equality on an unequal structure.
Partnership, not paternalism
What does genuine partnership look like? It is not a set of projects. It is not a task-and-finish group. It is a sustained, values-led culture of mutual trust, power-sharing, and accountability.
In my own work across different universities and SUs, and from visiting various universities and student-led representative bodies in Eastern Europe, the Baltics and Scandinavia, I’ve observed the paradox – institutions welcoming “student partnership” while simultaneously resisting the redistribution of power it entails.
Co-creation in one department, but marginalisation in strategic planning. Praise for student voice, yet hesitation to invest in the infrastructure that sustains meaningful student representation.
Genuine partnership is possible, but it requires more than goodwill or one-off gestures. It demands a sustained cultural shift in how universities and students relate to one another.
Student Partnership Agreements (SPAs) offer a promising foundation. These are formal, collaboratively developed documents, typically co-authored by the university, students’ union, and students, that outline shared values, priorities, and expectations.
Widely adopted across Scottish institutions and gaining traction in Ireland, SPAs help clarify roles, strengthen mutual accountability, and preserve the independence of student representation.
But for SPAs to truly matter, they must be more than symbolic statements. They must be embedded in everyday practice, backed by trust, and underpinned by a genuine commitment to power-sharing.
They must protect the students ability to campaign, critique, and advocate for their peers, while establishing clearer structures for collaboration on issues of shared concern.
Global learning
Internationally, the most innovative models of student partnership often emerge from systems that embed students structurally.
In Finland, students are represented by law in all decision-making bodies, and students’ unions are seen as public interest bodies with formal co-governance roles.
In New Zealand, the concept of Te Tiriti o Waitangi-informed partnership has reframed power between students, Indigenous communities, and universities.
In Australia, some universities now pay student partners to co-design assessments, lead pedagogical change, or conduct research alongside faculty.
In Latvia, student bodies are legally empowered to be co-drivers of university governance and policy creation.
These models do not collapse the SU into the university. Rather, they respect the union’s distinctiveness while recognising that some issues, mental health, cost of living, belonging, curriculum reform – can only be tackled in deep partnership.
We should be bold enough to learn from these systems. In Ireland and some of the UK, we need to move from a model of consultation to one of co-production. From ad hoc working groups to long-term investment in capacity-building. From power over to power with.
The cultural shift
No structure or document alone will deliver a culture of partnership. That requires leadership, not just from university management, vice-chancellors, and SU officers, but from middle managers, class reps, professional services staff, lecturers, and students.
Culture is shaped through the decisions made in meeting rooms, in hallway conversations, and in how we respond to disagreement.
It is also emotional work. Authentic partnership demands discomfort. It challenges authority and asks institutions to accept critique without defensiveness.
It asks student representatives to engage with complexity and compromise without co-option. In practice, this might mean a head of department responding constructively when students challenge curriculum design or timetabling – or a students’ union choosing to sit at the table on a contentious issue like academic misconduct or tuition fees, knowing that collaboration doesn’t mean agreement.
It could look like a student services manager listening to lived experience that contradicts KPIs, or a class rep bravely representing a minority view in a faculty meeting.
Partnership requires vulnerability on all sides. For institutions, it means being open to the idea that students may see flaws in long-established systems. For unions and student representatives, it means engaging in slow, sometimes frustrating co-creation processes where wins are shared, not claimed.
And for students, it means trusting that their contributions matter, even if the system wasn’t built with them in mind.
This isn’t easy work, but it’s the work that builds trust. Without it, partnership remains a strategy. With it, it becomes culture.
Not just service providers
There’s often an instinctive framing of the students’ union and the university as opposites, one challenging, the other defending; one pushing forward, the other holding back.
And while this oppositional model has historically served a purpose, particularly in moments of protest or when institutional decisions genuinely undermine student wellbeing, it doesn’t always reflect the complexity of today’s landscape.
Nor does it always serve students effectively.
A more constructive relationship doesn’t mean losing the ability to challenge. It means recognising when issues are best tackled together – without collapsing the values or independence of either side.
For example, during the pandemic, some unions worked closely with universities to redesign hardship funding and digital access schemes, responding rapidly to emerging needs. In other settings, SU-led campaigns on mental health have helped shape university-wide wellbeing strategies that reached far beyond the student membership.
Similarly, joint submissions to government consultations, on accommodation reform, cost-of-living supports, or student grants, can carry more weight when underpinned by a shared evidence base.
But we’ve also seen what happens when collaboration is transactional, or when trust breaks down. Instances where institutions invite SU involvement late in the process, simply to legitimise a decision already made.
Or when unions are so wary of co-option that they miss opportunities to influence early, at the point when agendas are being shaped. This dynamic doesn’t benefit anyone, least of all students, who are left watching two disconnected structures try to solve the same problem in isolation.
Reimagining the relationship means moving beyond the outdated “us vs them” mindset and building partnerships that are principled, not performative. That means embracing shared work where it makes sense, like co-producing academic integrity policies, shaping inclusive teaching practices, or tackling food insecurity.
And it means preserving space for difference and dissent, because challenge, when grounded in respect and mutual accountability, can make partnership stronger, not weaker.
Done well, this isn’t about SUs becoming more like institutions or institutions taking over student voice. It’s about recognising where collaboration can amplify impact, and where independence gives voice to those who might otherwise go unheard. The balance won’t always be perfect, but the effort to get it right is itself a mark of progress.
Where next?
If we are serious about enhancing student success, retention, and belonging, then partnership must be more than a buzzword. It must be resourced, radical, and reciprocal.
That means:
- Embedding partnership as a core institutional value, not a project strand.
- Investing in capacity-building for students and staff.
- Creating formal Partnership Agreements that recognise both trust and collaboration.
- Recognising student co-creators beyond committees; striving for authentic co-design culture.
- Reimagining SU-institutional relationships around shared challenges, not separate silos.
Most importantly, it means believing that students are not just future citizens or consumers, but active contributors to the present and future of higher education. Not voices to be heard, but participants to be trusted.
Ultimately, partnership is not a destination, it’s a practice, a mindset, and a relationship built over time. It challenges us to rethink power, reimagine roles, and resist the temptation to settle for surface-level inclusion.
If we are brave enough to move beyond symbolic gestures and truly commit to shared leadership, we can build a higher education sector that is not only more inclusive, but more effective, relevant, and just.
The question isn’t whether partnership is possible or if it works, the question is whether we are willing to do the work it demands.
