Words by Aisha Qadi, PhD student in Governance in Higher Education, Imperial College
I’m a PhD researcher at Imperial College London, and earlier in July I gave a talk at the Council for the Defence of British Universities (CDBU) AGM on the early findings of my research. This post is a version of that talk, updated to reflect where the research question now stands, since the framing has moved on considerably since then.
A quick note before getting into it. This is ongoing doctoral research. Data collection is still underway, ideas are still being tested against new interviews, and the themes below are patterns emerging so far rather than settled conclusions. Some of this may well shift as the research develops further, and new themes are likely to emerge as it does.
Why this research exists
Higher education governance keeps changing. New codes, new regulatory frameworks, and repeated calls for reform arrive one after another, each trying to reshape what good governance looks like on paper. What tends to get far less attention is not the structure itself, but how the people actually inside these systems describe and make sense of it. Codes can mandate that a student sits on a board. They say much less about how that student’s presence is understood, justified, or explained by the people around them, or under what conditions it is felt to actually count.
That gap, between reform aimed at structures and the accounts people give of what those structures mean in practice, is where this research sits. A student governor is also an odd fit for how organisations usually think about who gets listened to. Normally, the people whose views count most are the ones with power, with legitimacy, or something urgent at stake, and a student governor can score fairly low on most of that even while sitting in the room with a seat and a vote. That mismatch, being formally inside governance while still not carrying much weight, is a lot of what this research is trying to understand.
Where the research question stands now
The original framing asked what conditions shape or constrain student voice in governance. That question hasn’t disappeared, but it has sharpened considerably as the study has progressed and continues to evolve as more interviews are completed.
The overarching question now looks at how stakeholder voice, and in particular student voice, is understood and justified within university governance, and how do governance actors account for the difference between voice that is present and voice that carries weight? Put differently, under what conditions do they describe that voice as carrying real weight, rather than simply being present.
This is a deliberate shift. The aim isn’t to establish some objective, single truth about whether student voice “works.” It’s to look at how the people inside governance, students, governance professionals, senior leaders, elected academic members, lay governors, and professional service staff understand and justify that gap between presence and weight in their own terms. Where their accounts agree tells you something and where they pull apart tells you something else entirely, and that divergence is often where the more interesting story sits.
What’s emerging so far
The study is a two-stage qualitative design across London universities. Stage 1 speaks to people who already run or sit inside governance, deliberately excluding students at this point, to understand how the institution itself accounts for this problem before comparing that against students’ own experience. Stage 2, coming next, goes directly to students, both those with formal governance roles and those without.
A few patterns are starting to form from the interviews conducted so far, alongside analysis of governance documents such as meeting minutes and terms of reference:
Where decisions actually get shaped isn’t always where they get approved:
More than one participant described decisions arriving at board meetings already largely settled elsewhere, with the board’s role becoming more about signing off than shaping the outcome. This isn’t universal. One participant was clear that in their experience, real debate does happen in the room.
Being noted and being heard aren’t the same thing:
Several participants described a gap between a concern being recorded and it actually changing anything. One put it plainly: a concern being noted often just means it’s been filed away, unless it sits within that body’s actual power to act. Another drew a useful distinction between a concern being noted, simply written down, and a concern being considered, actually discussed and explored. This isn’t only an interview impression. A preliminary look at publicly available governance documents found the same pattern: minutes commonly record the outcome, agreed, noted, approved, deferred, while rarely recording the reasoning behind it or that anyone disagreed at all.
A lot depends on who’s in the chair:
Most participants described being able to challenge things comfortably under the current chair, while being equally clear that hadn’t always been the case, with no guarantee it would stay the same once the chair changed. One participant pushed back on relying on this at all, arguing that a good culture resting on one person can be a risk rather than something secure.
A year may not be long enough to learn how to be heard:
A student governor typically has around a year before their term ends, often just as they’ve learned enough to be effective. Elected academic members, who stay longer, still described real difficulty getting their voice to land. This raises a question about whether the structure itself gives anyone enough time, and whether that learning simply disappears once they leave.
Governance can be a mystery even to people inside it:
More than one participant suggested most students have little idea how governance actually works, and, more surprisingly, that the same is often true of academic staff, and sometimes of people who sit on the boards themselves. Not everyone agreed with this framing. One participant argued the information is there for anyone who wants to find it, and most people simply don’t look until it affects them directly.
Sometimes it works exactly as it should:
Not every account was about difficulty. One participant described a situation where pressure from both students and staff, on an issue that mattered to both groups, eventually led the institution to set up a dedicated working group to properly work through it, with outside expertise brought in and real change coming out of the process. I like this example because it shows that when the right conditions come together, voice really can shape a decision, and it’s a useful reminder that the patterns above are patterns, not a verdict on governance as a whole.
What this might mean
Some limits on how much weight any voice carries are entirely fair. Boards deal with confidential, financial, and regulatory matters that come with real constraints, and several participants made that point themselves. The question this research is asking isn’t whether those limits should exist, but how they’re drawn, explained, and experienced by the people they affect.
Some of the changes participants suggested themselves are simple, such as recording the reasoning behind a decision or recording when someone disagreed. If governance leans this heavily on individual chairs however, and on a model of representation that doesn’t fit every stakeholder the same way, then codes and regulation alone may struggle to reach everything that shapes whether voice lands. It’s possible that some of these seats exist to signal that an institution is properly inclusive, while the practical work of weighing a contribution happens somewhere less visible. That’s not the same as saying the seats themselves are pointless, as some of the accounts above shows how voice genuinely shapes outcomes. It’s more a reason to look closely at what happens to a contribution once someone is actually in the room, which is precisely the space this research is trying to speak to: not another framework for what governance should look like, but an account of how the people living inside it explain when voice does and doesn’t carry weight.
Three questions worth sitting with
First, if a concern is genuinely heard but the body hearing it has no power to act, has that person been heard without being helped?
Second, if elected academic members, who take on a broadly similar kind of role, also describe real barriers to influence, is a year ever enough for a student governor to achieve anything meaningful?
Third, if governance can feel like a mystery even to people inside it, is that something better communication can fix, or a structural choice that’s simply stopped being noticed?
None of these have settled answers yet, and they may not by the time this research concludes. There’s more sitting in the data than I’ve had room to cover here, including a few things that genuinely surprised me and a couple I’m still working out how to interpret properly. I’ll be writing up the fuller picture as the analysis develops and Stage 2 begins, so treat this as an early sketch of where things stand, not the finished story.
Recruitment is still open
I’m still scheduling interviews for this stage of the research, and I’ll be recruiting through to the end of the year. I’m looking to speak with people from a London university other than Imperial who currently sit, or have sat in the last few years, on a governing body or board, whether that’s as a registrar or governance professional, a lay governor or chair, a senior executive like a Vice-Chancellor or Provost, an elected academic member of Council, Senate or Academic Board, or a senior professional services lead such as a director of student experience or head of quality.
A real spread of institutions matters a lot to this study, so if that sounds like you, I’d love to hear from you, and if you know someone it might fit better, I’d really appreciate you passing this along. Interviews are confidential, take 60 to 90 minutes, and this isn’t an audit or evaluation of anyone’s institution. You can reach me at aisha.qadi24@imperial.ac.uk.