Outreach is about opening doors but to do that well, we have to understand where the barriers really are.
At Bath, we’re embedding student voice more deeply into how we design, deliver and evaluate our outreach. That includes working with placement students: Bath students who spend a full year embedded in our Access, Recruitment and Outreach teams, helping shape the very programmes that support others like them.
This year, we welcomed two placement students. Next year, we’ll have four, working across campus events, in-school outreach, long-term programmes, and evaluation.
Their contribution goes far beyond extra hands on deck. It’s about lived experience, insider perspective, and a real-time connection to the realities students are navigating.
Why Student Voice Matters
For many students, the journey to university isn’t just about achieving grades, it’s about overcoming invisible barriers:
- Not knowing what university life is really like
- Feeling unsure about whether they belong
- Navigating systems built around unspoken rules and assumptions
Placement students bring that lived reality into our work every day.
They help us see what’s working and where we might still be missing the mark.
They help challenge the ‘default settings’ we might not even notice.
They help ask better questions, spot overlooked issues, and make sure our outreach is genuinely welcoming, inclusive and realistic, not just well-meaning.
Embedding their voice strengthens everything we do: from how we design sessions for Year 10s, to how we talk about finance at Open Days, to how we measure the impact of our programmes.
A Win-Win-Win
Bringing placement students into our teams creates value at every level:
- For the students: Placement students gain real-world experience in a supportive environment, developing transferable skills in project management, communication, and evaluation. They leave with a deeper understanding of higher education, a strong CV, and often, a new sense of direction for their own future careers.
- For our teams: Placement students bring fresh perspectives, lived experience, and valuable insights into what students today actually want and need from outreach. They challenge assumptions, offer creative ideas, and help ensure that student voice isn’t something we consult occasionally, it’s something we build into our daily work.
- For the University: Offering meaningful placement opportunities on campus supports our wider commitment to student success and employability. Not every student can, or wants to, access placements in external organisations. By providing high-quality internal options, we widen access to placement experiences and strengthen our own work in the process.
Building a Future with Students, Not Just for Them
Expanding our placement opportunities next year is about more than growing capacity. It’s about shifting culture:
- Moving from student voice as occasional consultation to student voice as everyday practice.
- Moving from designing outreach for students to designing it with them.
- Moving from seeing students as recipients of outreach to seeing them as co-creators of change.
Because if we’re serious about widening access, we have to be serious about listening, not just to what students achieve, but to what they experience, what they notice, and what they imagine could be better.
When we make space for those voices, we don’t just improve our outreach.
We make higher education itself more open, more navigable, and more human.
