Antony Butcher: Continuing this debate without students is pointless

It’s good to get some insight into this debate from Course Reps themselves, next up we have Antony Butcher from Bangor (who are on a roll with guest contributors):

“So, nothing says relaxing Christmas holiday at home like neglecting my girlfriend’s birthday to throw my twopennies into the course rep payment debate. I’m not an expert (although I am a course rep), and there are lots of things that I have thoughts on but haven’t put down – for reasons that will become clear. Thanks to Dan Derricott for persuading me to put pixel to screen!

Before coming to University, I used to work for a National Organisation working with and for young people, as a “participation team trainer”. This involved travelling around the UK, advising youth organisations – youth services, voluntary organisations and commercial bodies – on why participation was a good thing, and how they could do it. Participation, for us, was based around Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the rights of the Child. This states that Young People have a right to an informed say on all decisions which affect them. Generally, organisations were very receptive to this idea, but the implementation often posed various challenges.

First amongst these was cost – chief executives and the like were often worried about the cost that getting young people involved could entail. This falls into two main categories – the cost of engaging young people, and the cost of implementing any suggested changes. Well, we would argue that if changes were suggested they were obviously what young people wanted – and wasn’t it was better to spend money on what they wanted, rather than what we thought they wanted? In fact, there was a fair whack of research done which showed that getting young people involved would save money, as silly ideas were shaped to what young people wanted, providing a service which was more efficient, and fit for purpose.

The next problem we faced was that the organisation would often then welcome participation, but not actually get young people involved beyond the “photo of an important person with young people”, and a consultation done by the intern, but no-one could tell you what the results were, let alone if anything changed. To measure how participative the actions taken by an organisation were, we utilised “The Participation Ladder”, by Roger Hart (adapted from a similar concept by Shelly Armstrong). The first few rungs aren’t actually participation – they are token gestures, designed to make an organisation look good (most often seen at Council level). Then there is consultation – a valid form of information gathering, but, by its nature, it normally limited the meaningful involvement of young people to giving feedback on ideas conceived by the. At the top of the ladder (it’s worth mentioning that rung 8 and rung 7 are pretty much interchangeable, neither being significantly better than the other) is a system where young people and adults work together to identify what needs to be changed, how it can be changed, and, when it has been changed, evaluating how it’s going. It puts young people at the centre of everything – you cannot profess to be placing young people at the heart of your organisation, and then not involve them across the board.

And now, we, fighting for student involvement, are already falling into the same trap. It appears that we all want students to be at the heart of the system, yet in the discussion around whether course reps should be paid, not once (although I admit, I observe from the fringe) have I heard anyone say “hmm. What do they think?” The irony is that we are discussing what is, in most Universities, the main element of student engagement, yet we are neglecting to engage with students.

When I tweeted about this earlier in the week, someone produced statistics to show that only 1 in 32 course reps wanted payment over resources. If this is accurate across the board… why are we even having this discussion?

So, if you believe, as I do, that every decision a University makes should be made in partnership with students, then continuing this debate without student is pointless. If you believe that student engagement is a lovely buzzword for pushing yourself up the greasy pole, then, by all means, carry on! I’ll be out the back, belatedly wrapping presents for my girlfriends birthday…”

[In his own words] Antony Butcher used to be an expert on participation, before heading to Bangor University to run a comedy society. These days he can be found in the Union, talking about historical governmental motorway policy. He tweets as @antonybutcher

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Don’t forget to comment with yours thoughts, tweet the links out to Course Reps at your university and vote in the poll. If you would like to offer your opinion in a guest post then just drop me an email: dderricott@lincoln.ac.uk