Conceptualising student voice in UK higher education: four theoretical lenses

ABSTRACT

The ‘student voice’ is highly profiled in UK higher education, yet highly under-theorised. Over the past 20 years UK universities have gone from a taxpayer-funded, free at the point of use model, to one supported through tuition fees via Government-backed loans. Subsequently, there is a growth of discourse about universities as businesses and students as paying customers/consumers whose opinions and demands must be considered. This article outlines four possible theoretical lenses (or frameworks) through which student voice can be analysed, enabling an exploration of the vested interests and power relations entailed. These lenses draw on (1) research on student voice and power in compulsory education; (2) regulatory capture from Economics; (3) the notion of students voice as part of an incomplete whole and (4) non-representational theory, developed in Human Geography by Nigel Thrift.

KEYWORDS:

• Student voice
• student engagement
• regulatory capture
• non-representational theory
• participation

Acknowledgements

I thank the anonymous referees and my colleagues Catherine McConnell, Vicky Johnson and Joel Roberts for valuable discussions and comments on previous versions of this paper.

Notes

1 http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk.

2 http://university.which.co.uk/.

3 The terms ‘students’ unions’ is used to here to make a distinction between (a) the NUS and the institution-based ‘local’ branches of the NUS and (b) to include institutional students’ unions which are not affiliated to the national NUS.

4 YouGov Available online at: http://yougov.co.uk/news/2010/10/15/tuition-fee-opposition/ (Accessed 18 May 2015).

5 https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/about/news/11128.