This session focused on setting up a partners in learning scheme. There were concerns about the 9K fees and consumerism so the scheme was set up to explore some projects and students who were recruited were paid an hourly rate for getting engaged in projects. The focus was on dialogue and collaboration. John also mentioned the need to focus on staff engagement two as these initiatives are two way.

The SALTS project was set up which is student ambassadors for learning and teaching scheme and included both undergraduate and postgraduate students. The projects were student-led partnerships with an academic mentor assigned to support and sponsor the project.

In February 2013 there was a wide range of projects undertaken which included supporting students arrival at university, transition and induction, student led feedback and students as part of academic review panels. The students were creative, enthusiastic and committed but were not experienced project managers and needed support. There was a balancing act of tools and support for success.

Students found talking to staff difficult so one project in the faculty of education explored communication and why staff and students could not learn together. This project started with an online community which had a site for local news on education matters, current issues and they set up a society for staff and students to discuss issues but they found there was no environment that was good for this and so were able to influence some changes in a space to support this.  Three things were learnt from the projects which were that compromise, persistence and organisation was needed.

Three students then talked about their projects. The first having got to the third year of their undergraduate programme felt that there was a lack of career guidance in Arts for those with no obvious career path and so created a web page around possible careers with employability options and added alumni studies to this. The second worked on a peer mentoring project which was successful on a small scale but there are concerns about how to roll this out and sustainability issues. The project also included exploring personal tutoring and issues around this being variable and so teamed with the peer mentoring personal tutors were asked to arrange meetings with all their students once a term in a café and students from across all years of the undergraduate programmes came together with their tutor. This enabled students to link to those in years ahead and develop peer mentoring as well as all discussing issues with their personal tutor.  The last project explored what the inclusive curriculum is and undertook a survey to start this but the response was poor.  Many students did not know what this was.

There was a discussion with questions at the end and issues of whether to pay students did come up several times with mixed views in the audience. Those in favour felt that if we were asking students to undertake projects they should be paid for their time the same as we would pay teaching assistants who are often PhD students.