Consultation with students must be undertaken for all new programmes and changes to programmes requiring University level approval. Please ensure that you allow enough time to carry out your student consultation. We advise that you start this process early on in developing your proposal in order to accommodate student feedback. When presenting proposals to students, please consider the likely effect of any changes on the student experience and specifically include this for students to comment and feedback on.
Student consultation can be done in a number of different ways, e.g. through Student-Staff Liaison Committees, focus groups supported by email or Blackboard, or the use of Microsoft forms. The method used may depend on the type of programme, the location of the students or timing of the proposed change and more than one method may be needed. We recommend that wherever possible focus groups are used as this gives students a better opportunity to engage and is likely to allow more representative feedback. Student representatives should be included in focus groups.
For changes to a programme which will require University level approval, we recommend that you consult with students across all years of a programme even if the changes don't affect them as, for example, final year students are likely to have a better understanding of the implications of changes to the first year of a programme.
For new programmes we recommend that you consult students on related/similar programmes to ask if they would have been or would be interested in applying for the proposed programmes or have any comments on the content, for example. If you were changing your programme title you could ask your current students if they would have applied for the new title. Please see below the suggested questions to include in a consultation for a new programme development:
Examples of well executed student consultations are available for information, please contact Sophie Billings (s.billings@bristol.ac.uk) to request this.
Please see the University's Student Agreement for terms and conditions relating to changing programmes of study.
For the purposes of programme approval, please use the Student Consultation Template (Office document, 93kB) to include with your academic case and upload into the Unit and Programme Management System.
