This case study explores practice in four areas of student engagement activity which were developed in partnership between the University of Winchester and Winchester Student Union. The development, motivations, stakeholders, and challenges of activities built around the principles of representation, change, feedback, and research are discussed. Relationships between practices will be explored in the context of a proposal for how discrete practices can complement one another to create a community of partnership. The case study focuses on four key initiatives: Student Academic Representatives, Student Fellows Scheme, Student-Led Teaching Awards, and the Winchester Research Apprenticeship Programme. The four key initiatives are contextualised with a discussion of an ongoing project that seeks to provide greater coherence to student engagement through an institution-wide movement towards embedding partnership.

The construction of what students constitute to be “good” feedback often plagues the minds of academics, who seem to continuously search for the holy grail of what it is exactly students want from their feedback in Higher Education. This aspect of the student experience in assessment and feedback continues to elude institutions by the nationally lower average scores in the United Kingdom annual National Student Survey questions on timely/prompt feedback (NSS, 2017, Gartland et al 2016) which makes this a topical area for exploration and discussion. To investigate student perceptions of feedback in an alternative method, this article examines the qualitative data from three years of Student-Led Teaching Awards (STLA) nominations for the category “Best Lecturer for Constructive and Efficient Feedback” at the University of Winchester. From this study, new revelations in regards to the student perception of the ‘best’ lecturer(s) feedback practice have come to light including terminology, language and emphasis on email turnaround, rather than the actual format of the feedback itself (handwritten, e-submission etc.). In order to tease out the repetitive emerging themes for what students are perceiving to be “good” feedback, this paper will outline the findings of this study, including the methodology and nomination process of the SLTAs at Winchester.

This article reports upon the systematic literature review of ‘hard to reach’ students carried out as part of the REACT (Realising Engagement through Active Culture Transformation) project. The review has been undertaken in order to critically assess the concept of ‘hard to reach’ and attempt to bring some clarity to the use of the term, as well as to add empirical rigour and much-needed context to discussion in this area. The review also explores methods that have been used to explicitly engage the ‘hard to reach’, thereby providing a resource for policy makers, researchers and also practitioners who are working to increase inclusivity  or better engage their students. The article presents a summary of the initial findings of the review.

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