Climbing the partnership staircase: from concept to practice across the sector
Authors
Stef Black, Senior Policy Officer & Outcome Manager, Scottish Funding Council, and formerly at sparqs. @SFC_Stef
Simon Varwell, Senior Development Consultant, Student Partnerships in Quality Scotland (sparqs). @sparqs_Simon
The view from Scotland
As Scotland’s national agency for student engagement, sparqs has always enjoyed strong relationships with other countries who are exploring student engagement and partnership, and with twenty years under our belt we hope we’ve got a few stories to share from both our achievements and the things we are still wrestling with.
That’s especially the case in Australia where we’ve followed with great interest the wonderful work of SVA and the many individuals and institutions who are doing exciting things on students as partners and contributed to various events and projects over the years.
As we look forward to contributing to 2023’s Student Voice Australasia Symposium, we are casting our mind back to the session we led at 2022’s event, where we shared some experiences of partnership from Scotland and a few tools we’ve found useful in thinking about the role of students in shaping their learning. The session helped shape our thinking over the past year, and provided lessons for what lies ahead for both Scotland and Australia.
Tools for exploring partnership
Many frameworks and diagrams have been developed over the years to help staff and students consider what partnership is and isn’t, and how to get there (Varwell, 2021). So to kick off our workshop last year, we got participants thinking about a few of these tools including sparqs’ long-standing student partnership staircase (Figure 1).
Figure 1: sparqs' student partnership staircase (sparqs, n.d)
Reflection was generated in a Google Slides presentation (see Figure 2, featuring Lowe and Bols’ model of engagement practice (2020)). We invited participants to play around with these diagrams, using stars to place themselves on each diagram and annotating with comments and observations. You can see access our slides, plus references for the tools we used.
The discussion was revealing, with a range of answers and a general sense that partnership is not quite fully achieved yet. One participant summed up the responses neatly: “Our institution is trying very hard, but not quite there yet. I have hope for the future!”
Figure 2: A screenshot of our Google Slides discussions
Embedding partnership in quality
Talking of the future, we then outlined the latest developments in quality in Scotland’s rapidly changing sector, where the pandemic has raised lots of fundamental questions and where our colleges and universities have begun a journey towards a more integrated tertiary sector.
Our strategic funding body the Scottish Funding Council (SFC)’s Review of Coherent Provision and Sustainability and subsequent findings report Coherence and Sustainability: A Review of Tertiary Education and Research (2021) has opened up space for Scotland to be (as far as we can ascertain) the first sector in the world to explicitly place partnership (and not just engagement) at the heart of quality arrangements. We in sparqs have been working with SFC and others to build on the kinds of models we shared in the 2022 symposium workshop to create something new that illustrates how staff and students can work in partnership in emerging quality arrangements.
At the time, the model was still in development, but we shared the latest draft in the workshop (Figure 3). We had been consulting widely on this in Scotland, and so we appreciated the chance to use our Google Slides to generate an outside perspective from our Australian participants.
Figure 3: sparqs' draft model for student partnership in quality
Feedback from attendees praised the adaptability of the model, in particular that the agreed shared language for each block (partner, collaborator etc) could be useful across a number of institutional processes and offers opportunity for a more coherent evaluation of student partnership. Attendees highlighted that the direction of travel that many of them were on at the time would be usefully supported by a model or framework similar to what we were developing, as a tool that explores best practice without assuming a single definition or approach.
What was particularly interesting from discussions at the workshop is that despite significant differences between the Australian and Scottish arrangements for monitoring quality, the approaches (both desired and realised) to student engagement and student partnership in quality were very aligned.
The aim of the model’s development is to provide a sector reference point and interactive evaluative tool for students and staff to use when exploring, reflecting on, and enhancing student partnership in quality arrangements, and is driven by a sector desire to further enhance the already recognised benefit of student engagement in quality processes.
Through the model we wish to promote and enable honest and open conversations around what effective partnership is and how institutions promote such partnership working between staff and students across the learning experience. The model will also support institutions and the sector to have a shared understanding of what student partnership is and the values and principles around partnership, without defining a single methodology.
As we develop new frameworks and arrangements for our sector that will define approaches for decades to come, the impact of the model means that student partnership and student engagement will always be a core component to the Scottish approach and never an optional extra. Developing effective ways to evaluate and evidence student partnerships in quality means staff and students will work together to enhance approaches and opportunities for engagement.
Next steps
The first, more immediate, outcome from our session manifested itself in terms of the mutual learning. The resources, models and ideas we shared with our Australian colleagues were hopefully of benefit, and in turn we appreciated the insight we received into latest thinking in Australia and appreciated the incisive and constructive feedback we gained about our emerging model’s applicability.
Secondly, in the medium to long term, we built on this feedback, and of course the input we received from our sector colleagues here in Scotland, to continue to progress and develop the partnership model. The model continues to be refined and the next step in the process will see a group of institutions pilot its use in our academic year 2023-24 as part of a new internal self-evaluation quality process.
Once fully developed, the model will be rooted in our new tertiary quality arrangements which will be in place across the Scottish sector from September 2024, providing a basis for conversations with staff and students that support and encourage them to explore partnership at all levels of quality – the programme, faculty, institution and indeed national spaces.
The new model will also help reflection on how that partnership works for all students. As we think ahead to the 2023 symposium’s focus on “quiet voices”, it’s worth asking ourselves whether and how our tools of engagement can be built for and with all students, regardless of background, mode of study, location or any other factor. The idea of true partnership prompts us to draw on the stories, insight and expertise of those students who might not be among those louder voices.
You can find out more about sparqs on our website, including our Resource Library, our contact details, latest news, and our various projects and training materials. You can also follow us on Twitter. We look forward to keeping in touch with Australian colleagues, not least through our close working relationship with SVA, to continue this ongoing and mutually beneficial sharing.
Bibliography
Lowe, T and Bols, A. (2020). Higher education institutions and policy makers: the future of student engagement. In: Lowe, T. and El Hakim, Y. A Handbook for Student Engagement in Higher Education: Theory into Practice. (pp. 267-284) Oxford: Routledge.
Scottish Funding Council for Further and Higher Education. (2021) Coherence and Sustainability: A Review of Tertiary Education and Research. http://www.sfc.ac.uk/web/FILES/Review/coherence-and-sustainability.pdf
Student Partnerships in Quality Scotland (n.d). Student partnership staircase. https://www.sparqs.ac.uk/resource-item.php?item=254
Varwell, S. (2021). Models for exploring partnership: Introducing sparqs’ student partnership staircase as a reflective tool for staff and students. International Journal for Students as Partners, 5(1), 107-123.