In this seminar, Prof Amanda Millmore outlined how involving students as genuine collaborators—rather than simply consulting them—can enhance engagement, employability, and curriculum quality.
She described a six-step framework: determining the scope of partnership, recruiting diverse student partners, building rapport and generating ideas, conducting student-led research (e.g., focus groups), collating and actioning recommendations, and disseminating outcomes. Central to her approach is Bovill and Bulley’s “ladder of participation,” which encourages meaningful but manageable levels of shared control. Prof Millmore stressed practical considerations such as timing, funding, student workload, power dynamics, and paying students for their time.
A detailed case study illustrated how student partners co-designed a final-year law module. Students helped create assessment optionality (written or oral formats), embed employability skills, and redesign group work to ensure individual assessment for fairness. The resulting module, featuring a mock legal case and negotiation exercise, has grown in popularity and sustained strong engagement.
Prof Millmore concluded that partnership fosters confidence, ownership, and authentic learning, while acknowledging challenges. Dissemination—through conferences, publications, and peer advocacy—was highlighted as crucial for sustaining a culture of collaboration.
[This summary was generated by AI and checked for accuracy and edited by a human.]
Abstract
This session will focus upon sharing the process of partnership-working, highlighting the benefits and pitfalls and providing insight into how to work effectively in partnership with students, moving beyond mere consultation to co-creation. Using the example of a student-staff partnership project for a new level 6 elective law module, where students took control of the design of module assessments, Amanda will demonstrate her six steps of partnership working: Determining the ambit of your partnership Recruiting the partnership Ice breaking & idea generation Student-led research and investigations Collating and actioning recommendations Dissemination In the case study example, students researched and investigated assessments, then focusing on the key feedback from their peers on assessment type, weighting and timing they created assessments for a new module, including optionality within assessment. Crucially, they mapped key employability attributes to the assessments, ensuring that they were incorporated squarely within the module from the design stage. The module is now in its seventh year, with outstanding student module evaluations, and demonstrates a real positive impact on the employability of the students, retaining the student-favoured optionality in assessment and the core of the original student-designed assessments. This toolkit approach will provide you with a six-step method of partnership working that is flexible and easy to translate into a range of student-staff partnership projects.
About the speaker
Amanda Millmore is a Professor of Law at the University of Reading, a National Teaching Fellow (2022) and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She is a teaching intensive academic blending pedagogy with her legal knowledge and practical experience as a barrister. Alongside teaching Criminal law, Family law and the Law of Evidence, Amanda’s work focuses upon student-staff partnerships, employability and student support. She has a history of leading student-staff partnerships ranging from assessment co-design, curriculum design, evaluating tutoring, building a community and student support to working with students to liaise with alumni to explore research skills. Her model of partnership-working has been adopted by colleagues in their work within the University of Reading and shared sector-wide. Find her on Bluesky: https://www.reading.ac.uk/law/our-staff/amanda-millmore
