HREC Project ID: ETH2024-0501
Student Voice Australasia is conducting a nationwide survey to explore how higher education institutions in Australia reward and recognise the time, effort, and contribution students make to enhance the quality of education and the student experience.
This survey seeks to better understand how student voice is recognised across different institutions and inform a nationwide conversation about appropriate forms of recognition for student contributions across the sector. The summary results of this survey will be published on the SVA website, shared in reports and presentations, and used in future projects relevant to student reward and recognition.
Institutions who participate in completing the survey will have access to a detailed report of survey results and will be invited to a workshop discussing good practice for reward and recognition. The summary report will be published publicly on SVA’s website.
Background
Since 2019, SVA has aimed to foster meaningful discussion and collaboration among member institutions guided by the STEPUP Principles (Varnam, 2017). In particular, Principle Six ‘Valuing student voice – recognition of formal and informal engagement’ emphasises the importance of recognising all forms of engagement and representation, urging institutions to implement coherent recognition schemes for student engagement.
Recognising that ‘Student Voice’ can be interpreted in many different ways, for the purposes of this survey we will be using the following definition:
Student voice entails the engagement of students in shaping their studies and study contexts through expressing their views, needs and concerns. It puts students into working relationships (including, but not limited to, partnership) with policy makers, providers, practitioners and other agencies, and challenges organisations to respond appropriately to the issues student voices raise (Trowler et al., 2018).
Survey Closes: 8 June, 2025
This survey has been designed by a working group of student and staff members, read more about the SVA working group on the SVA Website.
Please contact sva@unisq.edu.au for any queries.
Instructions
Please refer to the participant information sheet here.
Who should fill this out
Preference where possible is for one response per institution.
Coordinator or Manager who overlooks the initiatives that engage student voice in institutional decision-making.
We understand that student voice initiatives may fall under various institutional portfolios and student bodies. If you are unable to provide information about certain programs but believe they are essential for a comprehensive understanding of student voice recognition at your institution, please reach out to the relevant departments for aggregated responses before completing the survey, otherwise please share the survey link with them to submit the responses separately.
Completion time
The estimated completion time may vary from institution to institution based on what student voice practices are included in the response and should not take over 45 minutes.
Anonymity of your responses
SVA will collate responses for each institution before removing the identifying information and sharing the data with the working group. Please refrain from using identifying titles in your text responses.
There are 37 questions in this survey.
