{"id":197,"date":"2025-06-08T15:32:09","date_gmt":"2025-06-08T14:32:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/access-and-participation\/?p=197"},"modified":"2025-06-08T15:32:09","modified_gmt":"2025-06-08T14:32:09","slug":"placement-students-and-student-voice-shaping-the-future-of-outreach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/access-and-participation\/placement-students-and-student-voice-shaping-the-future-of-outreach\/","title":{"rendered":"Placement Students and Student Voice: Shaping the Future of Outreach"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Outreach is about opening doors but to do that well, we have to understand where the barriers really are.<\/p>\n<p>At Bath, we\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n<p>This year, we welcomed two placement students. Next year, we\u2019ll have four, working across campus events, in-school outreach, long-term programmes, and evaluation.<\/p>\n<p>Their contribution goes far beyond extra hands on deck. It\u2019s about lived experience, insider perspective, and a real-time connection to the realities students are navigating.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Why Student Voice Matters<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>For many students, the journey to university isn\u2019t just about achieving grades, it\u2019s about overcoming invisible barriers:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Not knowing what university life is really like<\/li>\n<li>Feeling unsure about whether they belong<\/li>\n<li>Navigating systems built around unspoken rules and assumptions<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Placement students bring that lived reality into our work every day.<br \/>\nThey help us see what\u2019s working and where we might still be missing the mark.<\/p>\n<p>They help challenge the \u2018default settings\u2019 we might not even notice.<br \/>\nThey help ask better questions, spot overlooked issues, and make sure our outreach is genuinely welcoming, inclusive and realistic, not just well-meaning.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p><strong>A Win-Win-Win<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Bringing placement students into our teams creates value at every level:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>For the students<\/strong>: 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.<\/li>\n<li><strong>For our teams<\/strong>: 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\u2019t something we consult occasionally, it\u2019s something we build into our daily work.<\/li>\n<li><strong>For the University<\/strong>: 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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Building a Future with Students, Not Just for Them<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Expanding our placement opportunities next year is about more than growing capacity. It\u2019s about shifting culture:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Moving from student voice as occasional consultation to student voice as everyday practice.<\/li>\n<li>Moving from designing outreach <em>for<\/em> students to designing it <em>with<\/em> them.<\/li>\n<li>Moving from seeing students as recipients of outreach to seeing them as co-creators of change.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Because if we\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n<p>When we make space for those voices, we don\u2019t just improve our outreach.<br \/>\nWe make higher education itself more open, more navigable, and more human.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Outreach is about opening doors but to do that well, we have to understand where the barriers really are. At Bath, we\u2019re embedding student voice more deeply into how we design, deliver and evaluate our outreach. That includes working with...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":330,"featured_media":198,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-widening-access-activity"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/access-and-participation\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/175\/2025\/06\/placement-scaled.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pd4PBT-3b","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/access-and-participation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/access-and-participation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/access-and-participation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/access-and-participation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/330"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/access-and-participation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/access-and-participation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/access-and-participation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/access-and-participation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/access-and-participation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/access-and-participation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}