This article presents a case study illustrating the potential value of enhanced student participation in higher education (HE) curriculum development, in response to an absence of research in this area. Lecturers and students had divergent views of the effectiveness of a staff-led redesign of a module curriculum. Focus groups were used to investigate reasons for the opposing views informing a second, more successful, redesign evidenced by improved feedback, attendance and marks. We discuss how a closer alignment with the 'student voice' facilitated the emergence of perceptions not revealed by usual feedback routes. We suggest potential reasons why this occurred including how student views challenged staff assumptions about the learning and teaching process and our initial interpretation of literature. We discuss how our findings might enhance the development of the student voice in HE, and their relevance to continuing debate about the purpose of HE curricula.

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vehemently against the use of political power by secularists to impose norms and practices upon religious communities that conflict with their faiths. He cites the case a Catholic school that was compelled by the Canadian courts to allow a homosexual student to take his gay lover to the schools' prom as an example of the kind of external intrusion that is the principal contemporary threat to religious liberty. The right to religious liberty violated by that intrusion is not only anterior to the authority of the state but also he claims, rather implausibly, the only right that enjoys that ontologically prior status. In another chapter he argues that state provision for same-sex marriage is an assault upon religious liberty, since it obliges churches and other religious communities either to participate in a contaminated matrimonial system or to withdraw from the institution of civil marriage altogether. Even from this brief summary of Novak's argument, it will be evident that, from its premises to its conclusions, it contains little that is not open to dispute and also that he is unlikely to persuade any who do not already share his cast of mind. He is also sometimes given to sweeping assertions that will make the analytical philosopher wince; eg 'the concept of human rights is endemic to democracy'. But his philosophical incaution is a price worth paying for the robustness with which he presents his case. There is no temporising or embarrassed obfuscation here; Novak delivers straight from the shoulder. Even those who stand opposed to his position have reason to welcome such a clear, forceful and uncompromising statement of the case for grounding politics, including secular democratic politics, in religion.

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