After enough university committee meetings, a pattern becomes familiar.
A rep raises something real – an unclear assessment policy, a missing resource, a scheduling clash – and the response is well-meaning but predictable.
We’ll raise it at the next committee. Which is next month. Or next term.
The tools haven’t kept up either. Feedback arrives through Google Forms nobody wants to fill in, and reps come to meetings without much to bring – not because students lack opinions, but because passive channels don’t capture them.
Committee papers land dense and late, giving reps hours to form views on decisions affecting thousands. We ask people to represent, then make representing genuinely hard.
None of this is a criticism of individuals – many work hard within structures they’ve inherited. It’s a criticism of the structures themselves.
And it’s not a verdict on the sector – good practice exists, and plenty of SUs and universities are doing serious work here.
But the students arriving on campus today have grown up with instant feedback and co-creation as defaults, and the gap between how they live and how we represent them is widening. That gap has a cost.
What I’ve tried to do at Brookes, imperfectly and with a lot of learning along the way, is start closing it.
From next term to today
The biggest barrier in traditional representation isn’t bad intentions – it’s delay, alongside the shame of the Google Form purporting to “listen to students”. Delay, I’ve come to believe, is one of the most discouraging things you can do to a student who has taken the risk of speaking up.
So we tried something different. We created a live digital feedback channel – what we called the Reps Wall – where student representatives could flag issues in real time, and where university staff can see them directly, or where I as VP can route the comments to the correct team and get a quick answer.
The idea was simple – stop treating every piece of feedback as an agenda item requiring weeks of preparation, and start treating more of it as a conversation that could happen now.
What surprised me was how quickly this shifted the dynamic. Two examples stand out.
The first involves postgraduate students, many of them international, who had been struggling to find affordable, halal food options near the main building. Within a week of it appearing on the Reps Wall, the catering team had added halal options to the menu and promoted them on the café screens. A problem flagged, and a response given.
The second came from a rep who raised concerns about how the rep role could boost employability, and about not feeling supported during the job application season – specifically, that there wasn’t enough space in the timetable for careers-related activity.
That one took longer to resolve, but we ended up launching two certified sessions where reps learned how to tailor their CV and cover letter, build their network, and use LinkedIn well.
Having a real-time channel sitting alongside the formal processes changes what students believe is possible. When they see their input create change – not in six months, but this week – they don’t just feel heard. They feel like partners.
Recognition that means something
I arrived at Brookes with a particular way of seeing problems, shaped by contexts where you don’t always have the resources or the perfect conditions, so you find a way through with what you have.
What struck me quite quickly in my role as VP Education was how much student reps were doing – attending meetings, writing reports, advocating on behalf of their peers – and how little of that was formally acknowledged while it was happening.
The traditional model of recognition – a certificate at the end of the year – tells students that their contribution matters in retrospect. Which is kind, but it’s not the same as telling them it matters now.
At Brookes, we changed that. We introduced Rep of the Month, nominated and voted on by fellow reps and students, with the winner announced across our union’s channels and shared with the university.
We introduced a rep checklist with an award for those who completed it, alongside certified sessions that could be added to CVs and LinkedIn profiles immediately. And we worked to get Union Rep Awards formally acknowledged at students’ graduation.
What I noticed – and I say this carefully, because the data is qualitative and I’m working from observation rather than a controlled study – is that the profile of who came forward as a rep began to shift.
Students who might previously have assumed that representation was “for” a particular kind of student – confident, well-networked, already comfortable in formal settings – started seeing it as something they could do too. Students from international backgrounds, mature students, students who were working part-time. The recognition wasn’t the only factor in that shift, but I don’t think it was incidental either.
If a student is shaping university policy, sitting in meetings, writing up issues, and liaising between their peers and the institution, they are doing real professional work. Our systems should reflect that, and recognise it at the moment it is happening, not only at the finish line.
A challenge to the sector
There are three concrete things a pro vice chancellor for education could act on now.
The first is to create a student experience forum with real authority – a standing body of student officers, reps, trustees, and senior staff, with a clear mandate to surface and respond to issues throughout the year. Sussex’s Student Experience Forum, chaired by the SU Education Officer, and Exeter’s Academic Governance, Education and Student Experience Committee, which includes union presidents as full members, are both worth studying. When students chair these bodies, the dynamic changes – it becomes accountability rather than consultation.
The second is to build a real-time channel for reps to flag issues. It doesn’t have to be complicated – a shared digital board, a monthly drop-in with someone who has authority to act, a tracking system that shows students what happened to their input. The Reps Wall at Brookes is one version, and the principle matters more than the mechanism – students should be able to raise something and see it move.
The third is to make recognition formal, in-year, and visible – not just union awards at the end of the year, but rep contributions on transcripts, in-year acknowledgement, and institutional visibility.
And the honest question to ask alongside that is whether your current framework is reaching first-generation students, international students, and students from underrepresented backgrounds – the ones for whom that recognition might matter most.
None of this requires a major restructure. It needs institutional willingness to share power in small, daily ways, and to treat reps not as consultees, but as collaborators.
The question isn’t whether students have ideas worth acting on – they do. The question is whether we move fast enough to catch them.
