The binary between staff and students is outdated, and often harmful.
At a time when we often frame the student experience in terms of value for money, it’s worth admitting that there isn’t a tick-box list that clearly covers what’s expected from one or the other,
Humans are complex, and relationships, even at work or in education, are always shaped by context and identity.
Siloing roles is an industrial way of simplifying what’s far more complex – actions, relations, and responsibilities. It helps make sense of the world, but it shouldn’t constrain.
The labels “staff” and “students” are tools for moving through the educational system, not a licence to reduce what those people can be or do.
When universities rely on these categories too heavily, they risk flattening the relationships that make learning possible.
How the binary holds
Several dichotomies have kept staff and students in opposite corners –
- Paid vs fee-paying
- Permanent vs temporary
- Policy makers vs compliers
- Knowledge givers vs knowledge receivers
That last opposition echoes what Paulo Freire famously described as the “banking” model of education, in which knowledge is treated as something deposited by those in authority and passively received by learners.
Historically, these dichotomies have sustained a tidy institutional structure with clear boundaries, while also determining who holds power, access, and authority over knowledge.
Universities often shape teaching and services around research evidence, policy frameworks, and institutional precedent, but these can lag behind the changing conditions under which students actually learn and access support.
Without student involvement at the design stage, the system defaults to assumptions rather than lived experience – and misses key opportunities.
As students adapt and comply with their teachers’ authoritative voices, they lose the chance to treat university as a space for experimentation, dialogue, and exposure to others’ ideas.
This tension is particularly visible in the international student experience – in some cultures, challenging a teacher is seen as disrespectful, while in others it’s expected. Universities often fail to acknowledge these differences, leaving students unsure of what’s permitted and staff unsure of how to read silence or enthusiastic participation.
Differences in permanency shape things too. Student feedback is often sought to inform service design, yet implementing change takes time, meaning the students who contribute may never see the outcomes of their input.
That can make participation feel conditional or extractive, particularly when students give time and insight without clear pathways to influence.
The structure reinforces a vertical power relationship, with clear hierarchies shaping how both staff and students behave. Is learning just compliance and adaptation? Are staff reduced to service providers, pressured to perform productivity or authority?
I’d argue that this binary undermines the creation of spaces where students’ identities and staff’s care can genuinely meet. But there are new models that blur the boundaries between these oppositional roles – models that let students and staff co-create environments where real learning can happen.
Enter the Changemakers
A strong example is LCC Changemakers, a students-as-partners initiative at the University of the Arts London (UAL) focused on advancing social and racial justice at the London College of Communication (LCC). Each academic year, LCC hires nine students and recent graduates into paid partnership roles where they act as consultants, project leaders, and communities and events facilitators.
More specifically, Changemakers take part in handbook reapproval processes, advise on inclusive engagement, pilot and review student-facing initiatives, sit on course committees, co-create activities that complement assignments, and conduct research into inclusion and accessibility. Since its origins in April 2020, the model has been influential across UAL, inspiring other colleges to set up their own Changemakers programmes.
Over the past two years, Kevin J. Brazant, the programme’s coordinator and senior educational developer at LCC, has built on the foundations of his predecessors – Lucy Panesar and Amita Nijhawan – and developed a strategy to amplify its reach, giving visibility both to the projects themselves and to the wider impact this format creates.
The programme now draws on Brazant’s Disrupting the Discourse model, which positions students, academics, and anti-racism specialists within a shared activity system, and through reflection, critical dialogue, and co-creation, shows how partnership can reshape how learning and teaching actually work.
The most visible shift since the strategy’s implementation has been cultural. Collaboration between departments and students has increased and is settling into more structured working practices, with Changemakers regularly consulted or included on projects that would once have been entirely staff-led. Their input has challenged non-inclusive practices and prompted new conversations about how decisions get made.
The programme’s success shows in growing participation – more than a hundred students applied this year alone – and in professional recognition for those involved. Several Changemakers have been awarded fellowships by Advance HE, a sign that this kind of collaborative work is increasingly valued as pedagogical expertise rather than “student volunteering”.
Changemakers have also expanded what counts as evidence of impact. They developed a self-evaluative framework grounded in feminist and non-Eurocentric methods, placing emotional labour and identity at its core – a framework that didn’t just help them reflect on their own work but encouraged the institution to think differently about student voice and care. Alongside this, creative outputs – podcasts, exhibitions, and open-access archives – have given visibility to student experience beyond the classroom and college walls.
The risk with initiatives like Changemakers is that they get treated as evidence of student engagement rather than as sites of shared ownership and change. Without care, time, and commitment to their underlying values, the work risks being absorbed by the very transactional logic it’s trying to disrupt.
Beyond one programme
Changemakers aren’t an isolated example – they’re developing side by side with roles such as Climate Advocates or Peer Mentors, and their presence is increasingly sought to diversify feedback panels and influence decision-making boards.
All these roles share:
- a hybrid student–staff positionality
- a purposely temporary duration
- the centring of lived experience in their work
- a strategic placement within real processes of curriculum, feedback, policy, and access design
By changing every year, these roles continually feed the institution with insights drawn from current and diverse student experiences. Forms of knowledge shaped by lived experience – including present cultural contexts, emerging exclusions, and shifting expectations of learning – can only be generated by those who are learning now, and can only be put to work through collaboration with staff who hold longer-term institutional knowledge.
In doing so, they create better conditions for understanding and addressing the systemic factors behind unequal outcomes, including awarding gaps.
These renewal mechanisms point towards a more organic university – one that moves away from industrial logic and is instead designed to stay responsive to its context and the people it serves.
Universities that learn
Some educational structures were built around a more industrial model of learning. We may have moved beyond the long “rows of ugly desks” that John Dewey described in The School and Society in 1907, but many of the assumptions underpinning those structures remain embedded in how power and relationships work. Tackling these legacies takes more than surface-level reform.
By intentionally embedding temporary, hybrid roles within institutional processes, universities can introduce mechanisms that mediate between historically opposing positions and keep the system accountable to those experiencing it right now. These roles let learning environments evolve in ways that are more inclusive and more responsive to their communities.
Initiatives like the Changemakers show how this approach can work in practice. Their value lies not in being exceptional, but in the way they work strategically within the institution – continually refreshing understandings of the learning experience as contexts, expectations, and student cohorts change.
An organic university, then, isn’t one without structure, but one whose systems support the continuous production of new knowledge about itself. Through roles and processes that connect lived experience with longer-term institutional expertise, the university stays capable of learning about its own workings.
In this context, ideas of stability, expertise, and ownership in higher education may need rethinking. Relevance and care aren’t sustained through fixed roles alone – they depend on structures deliberately designed to renew themselves alongside the people they serve.