![Undergraduate Radiography class with Julie Dickson Teaching Fellow in Veterinary Anatomy and Physiology Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies [Paul Dodds]](https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/teaching-matters/wp-content/uploads/sites/7480/2025/04/Radiography21-930x450.jpg)
![Undergraduate Radiography class with Julie Dickson Teaching Fellow in Veterinary Anatomy and Physiology Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies [Paul Dodds]](https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/teaching-matters/wp-content/uploads/sites/7480/2025/04/Radiography21.jpg)
Vets are a weird bunch. We’re known for being cliquey and for our unsavoury interests in a diverse range of bodily fluids (and solids for that matter). Furthermore, the vet school is somewhat atypical in that all 800 undergraduate students on the Easter Bush campus are essentially enrolled on a single programme. This has certain advantages with respect to building community identity and timetabling, but comes with challenges given the distance of the campus from local amenities and the city centre. Given these peculiarities in our community and infrastructure, we’ve had to feel our way through a different approach to the (undergraduate) Student Voice on campus.
Student Voice activities during and after the pandemic
We were fortunate that during government-mandated pandemic restrictions, much of our in person teaching in the clinical phase of the programme continued. However, like everyone else, we saw significant disruption to in-person teaching in the earlier years of the programme, which impacted on our sense of campus community. Nowhere was this more obvious than with engagement with our Student Voice activities. As we emerged from pandemic restrictions, survey responses were poor and dominated by the ‘lovers’ and ‘haters’, whilst Town Hall meetings were moribund.
It quickly became apparent that what worked before the pandemic was no longer effective, and a new approach was needed. Exploring this further identified that students were not short of opportunities to provide feedback, but that they had little confidence that they were being listened to or that their opinions were valued. Furthermore, our programme reps raised concerns that they felt over-committed.
An audit of our existing feedback processes identified that students were being over-surveyed, with programme rep surveys, mid-course surveys, end-of-course surveys, end-of-rotation surveys, central university surveys, the National Student Survey and research project surveys all adding to a discordant cacophony of survey-overload. Whilst course organisers were doing their best to ‘close the loop’ with approaches such as ‘You said, We did’, it was clear that there was scope for a more dynamic dialogue between faculty and students.
Introducing programme-level Staff-Student Liaison Committees
In academic year 2023/24, we took the decision to launch a new approach. Course level Staff-Student Liaison Committees (SSLCs) and programme-level Town Halls were abolished and replaced with programme-level SSLCs. The new programme-level SSLCs were designed to ensure that students and faculty were empowered to co-design actions in response to aggregated feedback. Critically, the SSLCs were tasked with agreeing actions that could be presented to the Head of School who would attend for the last third of each meeting.
The programme reps were charged with designing survey questions and activities were coordinated to reduce the number of surveys. Course organisers were encouraged to run course enhancement questionnaires during timetabled classes to improve response rates. The programme reps were supported by the teaching office to hold an agenda setting meeting prior to each SSLC that reviewed feedback received from a range of sources. This feedback is now hosted on a redesigned Student Hub on SharePoint and includes local, university and national survey results, themes identified from external examiner reports, and SSLC papers.
The first programme-level SSLC in Spring 2024 was a disaster. It’s a tough day when only one final year student turns up to a meeting with over 15 faculty. To be fair to the student, they worked through the agreed agenda and, despite everyone’s palpable disappointment with the poor engagement, hurt egos were kept under-wraps and a plan put in place to improve engagement.
Over the past 12 months, we have tweaked which year groups are invited to each SSLC, and have settled on two SSLCs in Semester 1 and three SSLCS in Semester 2. Whilst this represents a significant time commitment for faculty who teach across multiple years of the programme, we now have 20-30 students attending each meeting and an active discussion where students and faculty co-design actions in response to feedback from both parties. Unfortunately, we have been unable to find timetable space where SSLCs across multiple years can be organised, but we’ve compromised on a Wednesday lunchtime, with food provided for students who pre-book attendance.
It would be disingenuous to pretend that we have solved all aspects of Student Voice engagement with a collaborative co-design approach. In the final year of our programme, we have had to mandate that students provide feedback on at least half of their clinical rotations. That said, this has provided rich and extremely valuable feedback that we are now using ELM (Edinburgh (access to) Language Models) to thematically analyse.
Working with DVSU, the local student union
More recently, we have been working with the local student union (DVSU) to further empower their voice on campus. This has included them chairing the SSLC agenda setting meetings and attending the school’s Senior Executive Team meetings. Looking to the future, we hope to support DVSU to build stronger links with EUSA, as the student union is a longstanding area of dissatisfaction in the National Student Survey (NSS).
On the subject of NSS, if you’re looking for a fantastic response rate, then listen to your students. At the time of writing (early April) the vets are sitting at a 97% NSS response rate. This was achieved almost entirely by our final year club who were looking for a modest contribution to the venue hire for their graduation ball, which we agreed to provide in return for a 95% NSS response rate.
Alex Corbishley
Alex is a Senior Lecturer in Farm Animal Practice at the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies. His disciplinary home is farm animal veterinary medicine and infectious diseases. He first moved to Edinburgh in 2012 to complete a PhD at the Roslin and Moredun Research Institutes and joined the faculty in 2015. Since 2023 has been the BVM&S (vet degree) Programme Director, where he maintains oversight of the curriculum and ensures that the programme keeps up with the requirements of its international accreditors.
