Every university claims to listen to students.
There are surveys, panels, and partnership charters. But the more we talk about “student voice,” the more it feels like a mirage — visible from afar, shining with good intentions, but evaporating when you try to reach for it.
As a design-thinking researcher and former student-engagement officer, I’ve spent years inside the machinery of voice work – consultations, focus groups, strategy meetings.
What I’ve learned is we are listening without shifting power. Student voice has become a ritual of responsiveness, not a practice of reciprocity.
In the past decade, universities have professionalised listening. We’ve built complex infrastructures for gathering feedback, but not for sharing authorship.
Voice work has become a compliance exercise — a measure of satisfaction rather than a method of transformation.
The problem isn’t silence – students are speaking all the time. The issue is translation: when their insights are filtered through layers of policy language and institutional defensiveness until they lose their edge. What began as dialogue becomes data.
In the process, we confuse being consulted with being heard.
Feeling Safe vs Seen
To make someone feel safe is to create ‘space’ for them. To make someone feel seen is to invest the time, patience, and trust to understand how they want to use that space and why.
I saw this difference clearly while working on a student–staff co-creation project. In the early stages, student researchers often waited for permission – Was their contribution valid enough? Were they saying the right thing?
But as trust deepened, something shifted. They began designing the process itself, suggesting new methods, reframing priorities, and challenging assumptions about what “impact” looked like.
That shift is where genuine belonging begins. When people feel seen, they stop performing inclusion and start practising it.
Much of voice work is framed around safety: creating inclusive spaces where students feel comfortable to speak. Safety is vital, but it’s a starting point, not the goal.
A culture of care must also create space for being seen; to be recognised, credited, and empowered to influence change. This is what a reimagined approach to student voice looks like: not just making room at the table, but re-designing the table itself.
Why the need? And why now?
Since the pandemic, the sector has experienced what I like to call survey fatigue — an exhaustion with being asked, again and again, to give feedback that rarely seems to matter.
The first time I realised this was when I was working on a project that required collecting feedback from students and staff across all faculties, asking them questions about how “seen” they currently feel in the curriculum of their chosen course at university.
I tried everything to get people to fill in forms and surveys, from emails and Teams messages to social media shout-outs, newsletter drop-ins, and society collaborations. Nothing worked.
This is when I realised that survey fatigue is real. Engagement today feels more transactional than ever, and trust is at an all-time low.
Across the sector, “partnership” frameworks sound progressive but often operate like consultation in disguise. Students are invited to advise on projects already designed, to validate choices already made. Participation without power becomes a performance of inclusion.
The challenge is not how to listen better, but how to design differently. Reimagining student voice means asking who sets the terms of engagement; whose definitions of value, tone, narrative and time frame dominate decision-making. Until those change, inclusion risks being aesthetic rather than structural.
Reimagining through friendship
In my work, I’ve turned to what I call friendship interviews — a methodology borrowed from participatory and feminist research traditions. Instead of formal interviews, these are conversations between peers who already share trust, care, or curiosity.
The format shifts the dynamic from extraction (“tell me your story so I can record it”) to reciprocity (“let’s reflect on what this means for both of us”).
I would like to acknowledge that this method that I draw on — friendship interviews — has existed for centuries in indigenous, Global Majority, and marginalised community contexts, often as storywork, collective reflection, and relational accountability.
Although these practices have recently sprung to the surface and gained legitimacy through Western research frameworks and white voices in HE, it is important to acknowledge that its roots lie in the relational storytelling practices of marginalised and indigenous communities, where reciprocity and care have always been forms of research.
When students interview each other this way, the knowledge that emerges is intimate, emotional, and often invisible to traditional evaluation frameworks. These are not side stories but actual indices of impact, evidence that relationships are changing the culture of learning.
Friendship interviews make visible what quantitative feedback flattens – the behavioural and relational changes that sustain inclusion.
From mirage to movement
The mirage of student voice will only fade when we stop chasing reflections and start building relationships. So what can we do?
For starters, stop using phrases like “giving students a voice”. Because you cannot give someone what they already have. Hence to make student voice meaningful again, you must start listening differently; stop treating voice as sound and start treating it as structure.
That means listening differently, through methods that centre care and reciprocity, such as friendship interviews. It means evaluating relationally, capturing change through stories and behaviours, not just metrics.
Understand the intersectionality of student journeys is important too. Who do your stories speak to and who do they isolate? And designing beyond the pilot is crucial, embedding co-creation into the everyday fabric of teaching and governance.
It’s also about getting comfortable with the uncomfortable. Voice work is all about embracing vulnerability. What worked? What didn’t work; what did you get wrong? Why? What are you doing about it? Trust is built in accountability; not in numeric displays of perfection.
Universities must realise that they are not Bob-the-Builders. They can’t just magically fix problems that students are facing through a one-off pilot project or a series of surveys.
But they can invest in understanding student journeys, not just through highlights but as whole, lived experiences.
Real voice work begins when you start moving beyond the safety of what you already know, and invest in the seen-ness and clarity that comes with embracing relationality, storytelling, and power-distribution.
