Perceptions and perspectives on effective student representation

Students have been increasingly involved in university governance since the late 1960s. Since that time there have been competing paradigms about how students are seen, whether as consumers, service-users, stakeholders, democratic participants or as partners. Each of these paradigms has been used to justify increased involvement of students but with quite different expectations of how and why they are involving students. This study explores the factors of what makes effective student involvement in university governance. Student involvement in university governance has been widely researched but in most cases student involvement is considered in relation to one, or possibly two, of these paradigms but not all of them. This study identifies key gaps in the literature around the important role of university staff as gatekeepers; the extent to which committee structures consider how they engage students including how they address power differentials; as well as considering the perceptions of the effectiveness of the representatives themselves and the activities that they undertake. The study argues that the way in which students are seen in relation to key paradigms identified in the literature review impacts on how effective the processes are seen to be. The study is based primarily on perceptions of key stakeholders gathered through a national survey of university quality managers and students’ union course-rep co-ordinators. The study contributes to knowledge by conceptualising a theoretical framework within which to consider effective student involvement in university governance. The study develops a new theoretical framework on effective student involvement in university governance placing the key factors of effective student representatives, staff engagement and university committees within Ashraf and Kadir’s (2012) effectiveness model. This is then situated within a wider set of paradigms that emerge from the literature which highlighted the impact of how students are seen