You know how this goes.
A decision lands on your desk that’s already been made. The “consultation” turns out to be a couple of officers in a meeting room being asked to validate something already drafted, costed, and lined up for committee.
By the time you’ve read it properly, the window for real input has closed.
That’s the gap I wanted to close at Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU). Not because anyone in the institution was acting in bad faith – the appetite for partnership here is genuine – but because consultation without structure is consultation by accident.
And students shouldn’t have to rely on the right person remembering us at the right moment.
What I expected, and what happened
I started with an ambitious draft – a formal Student Consultation Policy, fully formed, written from the SA side, ready to go through governance. The plan was to take it in, get it endorsed, and come out the other side with a policy in place.
That is not what happened. And looking back, I’m glad it didn’t.
What actually happened is that the draft got – politely but firmly – taken apart. Quality Assurance & Enhancement had questions about how it would interact with existing review cycles. Governance & Legal Services wanted to understand where it sat in the committee architecture. Student Life pushed on what consultation actually meant in practice across very different kinds of decisions.
By the time the paper went to Senate in March, it had been through something like fifteen versions. The original SA-authored policy doesn’t really exist anymore.
What replaced it is a co-authored institutional commitment that I think is actually stronger – partly because it secured Senate’s buy-in to build the framework together, rather than asking Senate to ratify something written without them.
What Senate agreed to
Two things. And the second one is the bit I’d encourage other SUs to pay special attention to.
A commitment to co-develop a Student Consultation Policy/Framework
The university and the SA will now jointly develop the actual policy, framework and accompanying guidance, with the aim of having it in place for 2026/27.
This is the bit that looks like the original ambition – a written framework setting out when and how students are consulted on decisions that affect them.
An amendment to the committee coversheet
This is the smaller change, but it might be the one with more day-to-day teeth.
Every paper that goes to a university committee has a coversheet, and ours is being changed so that staff bringing papers have to evidence and reflect on how they’ve consulted the SA and students, and how they’ve responded to concerns or recommendations raised.
That’s a small administrative tweak, but it’s also a structural intervention. It means that at the point a paper is being prepared for committee, somebody has to ask the consultation question early enough to do something about the answer.
A coversheet that asks “how have you consulted students?” is one that makes a “we haven’t” answer visible to chairs and members. The policy is the principle. The coversheet is the enforcement mechanism.
Why it took seven months
There’s a tendency in SU comms to compress the work and present a clean arc. The truth is that for most of those seven months it wasn’t obvious whether this would land at all.
The conversations that took longest were about what consultation actually is. There’s a sector tendency to use “consultation,” “partnership,” and “co-creation” as if they’re interchangeable – they aren’t.
Scotland’s tertiary quality enhancement framework is reasonably clear that the bar is co-creation rather than retrofitted endorsement, and getting institutional language to align with that took careful negotiation.
The other thing that took time was deciding what not to put in the policy. Every iteration faced pressure to include more – more types of decisions, more thresholds, more processes.
The framework that ended up at Senate is deliberately enabling rather than prescriptive. It sets the expectation and the accountability, and the detail gets built in the policy phase with the SA in the room.
What other SUs should know
A few things I wish someone had told me at the start.
Don’t write the finished policy first. I get why we did – it felt like demonstrating seriousness – but it set up a dynamic where the institution had to either accept or reject something, rather than build something with us. Going in with a clear problem statement and a proposed direction would have got us to the same place faster.
Find the unglamorous lever. The coversheet change is, in governance terms, almost trivial – and it’s also the thing that will actually reshape behaviour, because it changes what staff have to do before a paper is finished. SUs spend a lot of time trying to get into rooms.
Sometimes the better play is changing what has to happen before anyone gets to the room.
Accept that you’ll hand it over. Sabbatical cycles are what they are. Senate approval was the foundation, not the finished building, and the incoming officer team will be the ones writing the actual policy and seeing it through to implementation.
That’s fine. The work is the work, regardless of whose name is on the cover sheet – literally.
What happens next
The policy and guidance get written over the coming months, in partnership with the incoming officer team. The coversheet change goes into the committee architecture, and staff bringing papers will start, from 2026/27, having to show their working on student consultation.
None of this guarantees that students get listened to. Frameworks don’t replace culture. But what they do is make absence visible – and an absence of consultation is much harder to ignore when there’s a blank box on a coversheet asking about it.
For me, that’s the bit that matters. Not that we got a policy through, but that we shifted the default. The question on the table is no longer “did anyone think to ask the students?” It’s “what does the evidence of consultation look like?” – and that’s a different question. Different questions are how cultures change.
None of this would have happened without our staff, who held the line through every redraft, or the fellow officers and student-led committees who kept the work grounded in what students actually need from this.
The framing also benefited from external challenge from Wonkhe and sparqs, which helped pressure-test the proposal against wider sector practice. The credit for what comes next belongs to the team that picks it up.
