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The term ‘student engagement’ (and disengagement) in higher education was conceptualised in the 1980s as a way to understand and reduce student boredom, alienation, and dropping out (Finn and Zimmer, 2012 ). It has also been described to represent both the time and energy students invest in educationally purposeful activities and the effort institutions devote to using effective educational practices (Kuh and Hu, 2001 ). However, in the past 15 years ‘student engagement’ has become a term used to refer to practices, opportunities and extra-curricular activities, which students become involved in to improve the student educational experience (NUS, 2012 ; Healey, Flint, and Harrington, 2014 ). This development of practice has been heavily influenced by theory and practice around working with ‘students as partners’ and student engagement in regards to co-creating curricula, enhancing learning and the wider student experience (Neary and Winn, 2009 ; Wait and Bols, 2015 , Dunne, 2016 ). Notably, the term student engagement has already had impact through its adoption in the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE, 2019 ). However this chapter gives an overview and focuses on practice where students have been active in student engagement educational development practices, projects or activities additionally or alongside the curriculum to contribute to HE educational development. This chapter will introduce many of the key areas of practice of student engagement in educational developments and will offer considerations for HE professionals embarking on new enhancements, research projects and initiatives.

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.

This paper provides an introduction to the two-year programme REACT (Realising Engagement through Active Culture Transformation), funded by HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) from July 2015 to July 2017. REACT has at its core three institutional student-engagement initiatives and these are described in order to give a background context to the joint foci of the programme: ‘student engagement’ and ‘hard-to-reach’ students, both of which terms are considered as complex and problematic. The paper lays out the aims and ambitions of REACT, considers the many challenges of interpreting them in practice and highlights how this multi-streamed programme has developed across three core Universities, in collaboration of twelve further Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) from across England. It also describes the three core strands of the programme: the ‘Collaborative Development Programme’, the’ REACT Research Project’, and ‘Dissemination’, each of which was of importance to planning and heavily influenced programme outcomes.

As outlined in the funding application to the Higher Education Funding Council for Engagement (HEFCE), the REACT programme was designed to “support the expansion of context-appropriate interventions to at least ten further universities through consultancy, workshops, mentoring of Student Unions and academic staff in other institutions, and working with students and student engagement practitioners to spread the interventions” (REACT, 2015). This aligned with other aims of the bid, including that REACT would: disseminate best practice in relation to the challenge of engaging those outside the usual ambit of Student Engagement (SE) activities; build communities of practice based on strong evidence; and provide consultancy support and proven approaches amongst at least ten UK universities. This paper highlights how the ‘REACT Collaborative Development Programme’ was designed to facilitate these aims, to build momentum and spread practice beyond the core of Winchester, Exeter and London Metropolitan universities. All aspects of the programme are outlined, from the initial ‘Expression of Interest’ to the collaborative process of putting together this issue of JEIPC as a final output of REACT.

The REACT programme was designed to make a significant impact on student engagement and the student experience in the Higher Education (HE) sector in England and Wales over a two-year period, from July 2015 to July 2017. The focus, in particular, was on the engagement of so-called ‘hard to reach’ students, and the programme included: investigation into the term ‘hard to reach’ and a consideration of which students are characterised in this way; a formal research project looking at links between student engagement, retention and attainment; and a development programme as a collaboration between fifteen UK universities. Outcomes from each of these were disseminated at a final conference at the University of Winchester in May 2017, where practice and findings from the programme as a whole were shared. The programme also included the creation of a website of case studies and tools for use by the sector. The programme was funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and was formally evaluated by an external team from GuildHE.

This article analyses the outputs of an institutional approach to student engagement that created sixty staff-student partnership opportunities aiming to enhance the learning experience. The Student Fellows Scheme awarded bursaries to students in return for co-leading a project in the broad area of educational development. The projects could be evaluations, research projects or interventions. This paper describes a systematic review of the final outputs of the Student Fellow projects and depicts the extent of staff-student partnerships and the impact of the scheme, demonstrating that the majority of projects are programme-focused, with students as the main beneficiaries. Whilst a key motivation of this review was to analyse the extent of staff-student partnerships, the lack of reference to partnership in many reports illustrated the limitations of the methodology. This review has facilitated a reorganisation of the scheme and developed a structure for continuing analysis of it into the future.