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I never thought that I would be involved with a university's teaching and learningpossibly sweeping the floor would have been the only way in.

Objective To develop and evaluate service user, carer and community involvement in health and social care education.Background Despite the high policy profile of involvement issues, there appear to be no published accounts of schemes that have used a systematic whole-faculty approach to community engagement in health and social care higher education.

This paper will attempt to both celebrate key developments and best practice involving the users of health and social care services in programmes of practitioner education in a UK context, and offer a critical appraisal of the extent to which such initiatives meet some of the more transformative objectives sought by service users activists for change. The approach is largely that of a discussion paper but we illustrate some of the themes relating to movement activism with selected data. These data relate to earlier research and two specially convened focus groups within the Comensus initiative at the University of Central Lancashire; itself constituted as piece of participatory action research. We conclude that universities represent paradoxical sites for the facilitation of debate and learning relevant to key issues of social justice and change. As such, they are places that can impede or support movement aims. Particular strategic responses might be more likely to engender progressive outcomes. These ought to include the presence of critically engaged academic staff operating within a scholarly culture that fosters forms of deliberative democratic decision making.

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