LSE is advancing student voice and partnership across the School, with new activity to better coordinate and support how students shape their experience – including the introduction of a dedicated Student Voice and Partnership Coordinator role.
Led by the Student Communities team within Student Learning and Personal Development (SLPD), and working in collaboration with academic departments and professional services, this work is bringing greater coherence to student voice activity, making it more connected, effective and accessible for both staff and students.
Work is structured around three key priorities:
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Connecting: building a shared understanding of student voice and partnership across the School
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Empowering: supporting staff and students to engage confidently with existing mechanisms
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Building: developing and sharing tools, resources and approaches to strengthen delivery
Dialogue with departments
An early priority has been to carry out listening exercises with academic departments to understand current approaches to student voice and partnership.
These conversations have explored existing mechanisms, areas of strength, opportunities to share effective practice, and where additional guidance could better support colleagues. They have also helped connect staff with existing School-wide resources and are shaping the next phase of this work.
Emerging good practice across the School
The listening work has highlighted the significant time, consideration and commitment departments are already investing in student voice and partnership activity, with emerging examples of good practice include:
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valuing informal feedback through ongoing conversations with students
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clear expectation-setting with academic representatives, including pre-meeting briefings and supporting guidance. For example, some departments have eceloped tailored resources for representatives, such as FAQs (here’s an example from the Department of Philosophy)
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embedding student voice within wider community-building activity
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strong partnership work with students, including co-creating events, resources and communications
Student-led initiatives
In some departments, student-led initiatives such as co-created communications, large-scale events and collaborative projects have been bringing students and staff together to shape the student experience.
Examples of this include the Department of Management partnering with their students to organise and host a yearly EDI conference, while Law and Social Policy are working with their students to co-create student communications content.
This growing evidence of effective practice will be developed into shared resources to support colleagues across the School.
Common challenges facing departments
Alongside these strengths, the listening work has also identified a number of shared challenges across departments.
These include:
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variable student engagement and increasing survey fatigue
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difficulties in "closing the feedback loop", particularly where students are less engaged with traditional communications channels
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managing expectations where feedback cannot be acted on due to structural or regulatory constraints.
These challenges are widely recognised across the sector and reflect the complexity of delivering meaningful and sustainable student voice activity.
Despite this, departments continue to demonstrate creativity and commitment in developing new approaches – providing a strong foundation for further development.
Developing support and solutions for departments
Building on these insights, the Student Voice and Partnership team is now developing additional guidance and resources to support departments.
Current priorities include:
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strengthening support for communicating student voice activity, in partnership with Internal Communications and Social Media colleagues
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developing improved tools and guidance to support closing the feedback loop
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expanding and updating the ESE good practice resource, including a new submission form for sharing examples
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developing a School-wide Student Partnership Guide, to be progressed over the summer with support from a graduate intern
Other ways we've improving dialogue with our students
Student Education Panels
Reintroduced in 2025/26, Student Education Panels bring together students from a wide range of backgrounds, programmes, and levels of study to share and shape conversations about the educational and student experience at LSE.
Insights gathered through these panels help inform improvements to institutional processes. This unique partnership initiative also recognises and reimburses students for the time and insights they contribute.
Student Education Panels this term
SEP reports
Explore the reports below for a selection of insights gathered from recent Student Education Panels:
Student testimonials
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"I thought it was a really good way to get different views as we often disagreed respectfully with one another and/or built on each other’s points."
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"I really loved the structure, the method was really effective at engaging discussion among peers and facilitating a critical analysis as students found more to discuss from building on each other's points."
For further information or queries on any of the work outlined here, please contact the Student Voice and Partnership Coordinator J.ducker@lse.ac.uk.