What is preventing you from designing inclusively with students?

In a short podcast conversation, we reflect on the barriers faed by staff when trying to co-design change with students.

Barriers faced by Universities

What are the main barriers that prevent you from co-designing change with students who are typically excluded at your institution?

This critical question was at the centre of our session on 'Designing with, not just for: Inclusive and design-led student engagement’ at the RAISE Conference 2023 (RAISE Network (Researching, Advancing & Inspiring Student Engagement).

With over 60 attendees representing diverse roles and institutions, as well as private, public, and third-sector organisations, we explored these barriers head-on. Once identified, we challenged our attendees on how to overcome them, deliberately excluding the usual suspects like more money, time, or staff.

Writing up our workshop

As promised, we're excited to share the final write-up with everyone who attended. To kick things off, this first in a series of posts includes a short podcast reflecting on the barriers identified and discussing practical solutions to inclusive co-design, including the 'We are Chemistry' project I run at the University of Warwick in the University of Warwick - Department of Chemistry.

You can listen to the podcast by searching for 'Inclusive Co-Design in Higher Education' on Spotify or using the following link: link to podcast.

A transcript of our conversation has been included at the end of this post.

Continuing the conversation

We will be publishing more content over the next couple of weeks, including more sketches and an in-depth write-up on the session itself.

We’d love to hear what you think. What barriers do you face within your institution? Have you seen any innovate examples of inclusive co-design that you’d like to share?

Please share your thoughts in the comments to help us keep this important conversation going.

Podcast transcript

This is a transcript of a podcast conversation recorded between Tom Ritchie and Tom Baines.

00:00 – Tom Ritchie: Hello, and welcome to this podcast on inclusive co-design with students. This discussion is part of a conference paper that I helped to deliver in September 2023 at the RAISE conference, where we focused on inclusive, and design-led student engagement principles. My name is Dr Tom Ritchie. Im an assistant professor and director of student experience at the University of Warwick, and I'm joined today by my colleague and co-presenter at the conference, Tom Baines. Hi Tom.

00:24 – Tom Baines: Hi Tom. I'm co-founder of a service design agency called Social Origin. We work with organisations across the public sector and higher education to help them create simple and inclusive services. 

00:37 – Tom Ritchie: Fantastic, thanks Tom. So, for anyone who isn't familiar with RAISE, it's an acronym for Researching, Advancing and Inspiring Student Engagement. It's a worldwide network of staff and students within higher education. who work in the research and promotion of student engagement. If you haven't come across RAISE before, I will link it in the podcast description so that you can have a read to get a little bit more context on the conference that we presented at.

The conference took place on September 6th to 7th 2023 at the University of Leeds with a focus on a sense of belonging. So, Tom and I ran a session together with the title, ‘Designing with, not just for, Inclusive and Design-led Student Engagement’. We were lucky to have over 60 people representing a range of roles and universities attend the session, as well as those from private, public, and third sector organisations too.

As part of the session, we said that we'd share the final write up with everyone who attended. This podcast is one way that we're sharing our findings, and it's designed to complement some images that Tom has developed from the content that we received from our participants. In this episode, we're going to summarise the main workshop findings, as well as share our reflections, and have a bit of a general chat about co design.

So, Tom, to start this conversation off, why were you interested in presenting at RAISE in the first place? 

01:53 – Tom Baines: Yeah, seems like a good place to start on. So again, I think this is something you and I discussed a lot in the build up to the session itself, but for me, I think I'm approach this from a standpoint of believing that a lot of change in higher education, specifically if we're thinking about students, tends to be designed for them.

Even less change is then designed with students, and then even less change again tends to be designed with a genuinely diverse range of students, that actively tries to include those who are excluded from university life or disengaged. We might be talking about those who might be disabled, neurodivergent, marginalised backgrounds, et cetera.

So, I think fundamentally, it was about creating a conversation that helped people take a new perspective and reflect on their own work to see what they could do differently. What about you? 

02:43 – Tom Ritchie: I think for me, it was a number of different things. So, you mentioned the idea of designing with and not at students, and that's something that I'm really keen to do in my kind of day-today role at the University of Warwick.

As well as that, there's a program that I've been working on called We are Chemistry, which is... for all intents and purposes, a project based around inclusive co design principles where we work with students to design new projects and new initiatives that help to support them through all aspects of their student experience.

And I think for me, one of the things I was interested in was understanding my thinking on what the barriers are. And I think also the opportunity to explore new solutions, make new connections, and actually probably slightly more selfishly share what we've done as part of the We Are Chemistry project and get feedback from peers and colleagues.

03:28 – Tom Baines: Yeah, I totally agree, Tom. I think we approached this with a lot of, um, similar intentions in mind. And I think ultimately, we ended up going some way to exploring the things we've mentioned there, uh, which I know we'll cover next. 

03:40 – Tom Ritchie: So, we spent a lot of time, Tom, when preparing for the session discussing what did we mean by co design and how would we define it? And I know that we spent a lot of time trying to make it as simple as possible for the participants in the session, even up to and including the night before the conference where we met and we're talking through, you know, what did we exactly mean by this? And what did that mean? And what's the implication of using certain terms?

And I think it's probably important that we acknowledge early on in this podcast that. We could have spent the entire session at RAISE, and we could spend this entire podcast talking just about how do we define what co design means. I think it's worth saying that for the purpose of the conference, we define co design as working with students to collaboratively improve their student experience.

And I think one of the things that we were really interested in with this session was to explore the range of students who are excluded for other reasons, whether it's because they're a carer or just because they can't afford to give their time. You know, recent data shows that nearly 60 percent of students are now having to look for part time work to support their studies and so Where are students meant to find this time if we're expecting them to do it for free?

And I think all of these things were kind of in our minds when we got to the conference to understand these barriers and to really help our participants unpick these things. 

04:57 – Tom Baines: Yeah, all great points, Tom. I think specifically the language is something that you've mentioned we had dwelled on for some time and I think it's made more difficult often by the fact that we have a range of terms that people tend to use to describe this type of activity, including, but I'm sure not limited to, co design, co creation, co production, that's probably co in front of many other words, and I think often people use this language interchangeably, and sometimes more than one of those terms in the same sentence.

So, I think the, the use of the language is in itself is not helping to, um, create a common understanding of what this means in practice. So, our definition perhaps is an oversimplification and does leave out certain elements, but I think it was important to almost intentionally oversimplify as a starting point to ensure that we could all have hopefully what felt like a good conversation.

05:51 – Tom Ritchie: Yeah, I think so. And I think that it's probably worth sharing with the audience, listening to this now that even before we recorded this, we had the conversation of, do we use co design? Do we use co creation? Because actually these things are, as you say, used relatively interchangeably. 

06:06 – Tom Baines: Yeah. And we actually had another conversation in advance of the discussion where we were initially creating the agenda for the workshop and we're setting the scene around language and so on was this idea of designing kind of almost to or at people, designing for them, designing with, and separate out the different layers to try and draw a boundary between what is consultation. And then where you start to feel like it, it dips into something that is inherently more collaborative that feels a little bit more like co design, but for the purposes of the session, we ultimately decided not to, but I feel like at this point, we were about to open the box on the discussion that we're trying not to, so perhaps let's, uh, let's go back and focus on the session itself and what we did, but I think, yeah, there's lots more to say on this.

06:51 – Tom Ritchie: So, in terms of the activities that we did on the day, we asked our participants to initially share what had prevented them from co designing change with students who are typically excluded at their institutions. We then ask them how they might overcome the barriers that exist and stop students from engaging in this process of co design.

We then ask the groups to speak amongst themselves and then feedback on the biggest barrier that they'd identified and to share that with the room. And with that in mind, Tom, can you give us a summary perhaps of the main barriers that people were sharing? 

07:20 – Tom Baines: Yeah, happy to. So, I think there's, there's probably two or three categories of things that came out, but the first and largest one I know is one we've talked about a few times already.

It was this idea of generally not having enough time, enough money or enough people, you know, either, either in my team or in others being, being short of what we, what we needed to do this. Um, and I think not only was this kind of the largest barrier that people mentioned But it was also one that we kind of expected to come out in advance and I think this is primarily because Well, I mean, you know, it's a sector wide issue, isn't it?

Frankly, wherever you look and wherever you talk about everybody feels constrained. They feel like they haven't got enough, and this is very much true here again. So again, perhaps not surprised to see this coming out as the strongest theme. Um, alongside this, there was a couple of interesting institutional level barriers, um, which we split into, um, working practices and, um, and then mindsets as well.

So, working practices is a sort of way of describing all of the things that are done the approaches and how people work within the institution and this covered things like communication being ineffective or poor between teams or sometimes within them administrative processes that just made things difficult are sometimes actually prevented people working in this way I think often where that was problematic was where that was coupled with a lack of senior engagement and support meaning those barriers just felt even harder. And a really interesting one, which I'm quite glad came out, actually, is about this idea of this sort of power imbalance that's inherent within university environments between, let's say, the student and the teacher, between this, uh, the kind of student and the university as a whole, and others, and this, this power imbalance, especially where you have a hierarchical environment, just these things all coming together to make it very, very difficult for people to be willing to engage, let alone able to.

On the mindsets front, this was probably two things mainly. There was this idea of a level of cynicism that cracked in, in some areas. So, I think this mainly related to the idea that, well, You know, I've seen things like this before or Uh, why should we even bother doing this because ultimately nothing's going to be done with the results of it. We're going to create this environment. We're going to ask people to give us their time build trust with them And then you're not going to allow us to make the changes afterwards There is also a little bit of the classic kind of resistance to change and new ideas in there as well And I think this can feel very new for some institutions.

So again, possibly not hugely surprising that that uh was reflected in the feedback as well. The final kind of main category. I think we saw was around finding ways to meaningfully engage excluded students, those who are disengaged is hard. And yes, it is hard. Ultimately, it does take more time. It does take more effort.

There was an interesting point here mentioned on the confidence of students and their ability to participate, which I thought was quite interesting. Made me reflect on a few, few points. I wonder to what extent this links in with the idea of the power imbalance we've been talking about. Maybe that gives rise to this lack of confidence potentially, but at least they're related.

And, and then the final sort of thing within this, this part really is around, some people felt they had kind of quite fixed ways of engaging students. So, I will be in this room at 10 o'clock on Monday. For an hour and that's your opportunity to come speak to me now I'm obviously being a little bit unfair there But it's this the idea that we're going to have quite a quite a sort of standard way of engaging which is instantly going to mean that a bunch of people cannot Participate because you've created one way of doing things and it's not going to work for others For example, as you mentioned those who might have caring responsibilities and other commitments So on reflection, I don't know if you'd agree with this But I was surprised that we didn't get more around sort of the idea of like understanding and awareness I, I have to say going into this session, I was expecting a bit more of people saying it sounds great, but I've really no idea what it means in practice.

I've really no idea of how to do it. I, you know, I'm lacking the confidence or the understanding of which to do it, but there was a little bit of that, but, but not so much. And I suppose it could have been because of the people who were in the room and obviously people who've come to the session because it was interesting and maybe they were more likely to have a level of understanding. Uh, I suppose it could be reflective or broader. A level of awareness in the sector, which would be amazing. But I don't know, it's, I was just, I was expecting something different. It's, it's not a good or a bad thing. I was just expecting something different. 

11:47 – Tom Ritchie: Yeah, I think so. And I think it's probably worth acknowledging that the people who will sign up to go to the RAISE conference and then sign up to come to see our paper are probably, as you say, people who are more in the know around these ideas of co design anyway, and I think that's something that we need to acknowledge with all of these types of papers and sessions that people do is.

We unintentionally did the thing that we're saying not to do, which is. Probably the people who needed to be in that room weren't there for various reasons. And I think, in a way, that maybe links back to the institutional mindsets part that you mentioned as well. And for me, it's interesting when looking at those barriers.

So, taking them as four that I've got of institutional working practices, institutional mindsets, awareness and understanding of co creation that you mentioned, and then student engagement. These are all challenges that we've seen at Warwick as part of the We Are Chemistry project. But I'd never verbalised them in that way before.

And I don't think I'd ever separated them out in that way. And I think having looked at the comments that people left in the session and how we've collated those since, I find that actually the work that we're doing at Warwick involves us working backwards through that list. So, we almost started very small with our co design, which was just how do we engage students in a slightly better way?

And you said about the. We're going to be there Monday morning, 10 o'clock, you know, room 534, whatever it is. And actually, that was such an important thing for us. And it links into the thing that we opened the session with, which is this desire to not design at students, but to design with them. And I think that's where the real challenge of, of co design comes in is that we are basing it on our own experiences.

And for me, my experience of university was that was where the space was to engage. And. That isn't the case for students anymore. And we've learned that a lot through our project of we have to go to where students are a lot, a lot more than we perhaps do for other things, because you're right, students don't have the confidence to engage with this.

They probably don't know what it means. You know, they co design, okay. I have no idea. And something I find in my kind of day-to-day practice is that students are terrified of failing. And so, if you're trying to get them involved with something that they don't understand, or they don't completely grasp, what's the benefit for them?

Why would they do it if they're not getting paid and it's a voluntary thing? And I think we need to be really, really mindful of students are terrified of failing. You know, we live in a culture where social media is defined by what you're doing and how well you're doing it. There was a real piece of work that we did again at Warwick, but I think as part of this broader discussion around co design of building trust and allowing students to have a space where they can be vulnerable with ideas, I think as well, something that I

found from the session, and I think it links to your point on this idea of the word of co design and the various kind of synonyms that come with it, but I think within universities, this, this co dash, um, whatever, has become a bit of a buzzword and it is something that I see thrown around in university groups and meetings and I'm sure you see it elsewhere as well, Tom, that It's a, oh, we'll just do co creation on that, or we'll just do co design on that.

We'll get some students and that's co creation. And you think, not really. I had a great comment earlier from a colleague who actually used the term co-creation washing. And I think it's such a nice way of thinking about the way that sometimes projects are undertaken at universities as well. And something we, we need to be really careful to kind of guard against to make sure that we're not just attributing co creation or co design.

To something that is consultation and consultation itself is great, but it has a place, and it has a role, and we need to be careful not to. 

15:17 – Tom Baines: Yeah, I'd agree. I think what we're probably, what we're not doing here is we're not knocking any form of engagement. I think, as you say, they're all, they will have valid applications, but it is inherently problematic where this language being misused.

It does mean when you are generally trying to do some co design, people may already approach it with, we've talked about cynicism already and, you know, other attitudes. And that, that just, it kind of makes everything more difficult for everybody because, you know, people engaging in a, what I think is codesigner are actually being consulted.

So, they're, um, what they're getting out of it is not what they expected. It's not the environment in which they are expected to be part of. So yeah, I agree with all of that stuff. And again, it's probably a, probably a topic we could explore at great length, but I'm going to, I'm going to pause for the, for the sake of everyone listening.

Um, I think just. Kind of related to many of the points you're mentioning. I think there was this thing that stood out for me that I think a good chunk of the barriers we've used the word institutional. So, some of them are quite big, some of them are quite difficult to overcome. And I think it's fair to say that some of these are not going to go away overnight.

Um, having said that. Um, I think there are, there's a wealth of opportunity for people to make changes the here and now, you know, today, tomorrow, you've mentioned already the idea of starting small and building from there, and I think possibly we'll come back to this idea a bit later in the conversation, but, um, the, the question I ended up landing on in my head in the, in the kind of days that followed the session was around not only how can I, let's say as a member of staff, how can I co-design change in an inclusive way with my students, but how can I do it that fits in a way that sort of fits within the constraints of my university? Um, and it’s kind of, in some ways, it's sort of stating the obvious, but obviously every, every university is going to have different constraints. It's going to have different processes and other such things that mean those conditions locally are going to feel different.

And so, one of the things I think we can probably explore later and maybe beyond this is the idea of not only how do I do this, but how do I take this ideal way of working and make it fit within my constraints? Because that's ultimately what we're going to have to be doing until, you know, there is, there is definitely a need to tackle some of the institutional barriers.

I don't think we're saying that that shouldn't be done, but recognising that it's going to take time and money and people, and sometimes these other things, the, the sort of timescales involved in shifting those barriers is going to agree a lot longer. So, I think what we're both keen on, again, you know, going into the session, we're really keen to make it an action orientated sort of practical session that people would do something with. So yeah, I just think, I think people shouldn't lose hope and give up and it's not, there's a wealth of things that can be done. 

18:05 – Tom Ritchie: And I think what the session kind of showed me and what my own experience are showing me week to week is that actually there's, you mentioned about that difference between the kind of the challenges of fitting it within your institution.

And I think. We need to do a job of separating that because you can on the one hand have really clear practical kind of operational for one of the better term steps that you can take to support co design within institutions and support inclusive co design. And then I think on the other hand, you have the institutional level. And actually, I think sometimes people focus on the institutional level things as a reason for why they can't do the practical things. But actually, the practical steps to engaging students to undertake co design, I think, should work almost anywhere. Because ultimately, yes, students are different. They have different expectations and focuses. But students are that. They are students. They are inquisitive. They're there to learn. And I think the, the, the discussion of the institutional level thing, perhaps that's, we need to separate that out. I haven't worded that point very well, but…

19:08 – Tom Baines: Yeah, I, yeah, I, I know, I know what you mean. I know what you are, you are driving at there and I, yeah, I agree.

I think there's, recognising these different things is important because it helps us, um, invest our time in, in the right things. Um, but perhaps this is, maybe this is a good point now to change and start thinking about some of the solutions that came out. So, um, I wonder if you'd like to, Give a quick summary of, um, I

suppose the solutions that really stood out to you.

What are the things that, that you felt were particularly interesting? 

19:38 – Tom Ritchie: Yeah, I think what I found interesting initially is that the, the number of barriers actually was outweigh the number of solutions by say three or four times. And I don't know why I found that interesting, but I think I was hoping for groups to have just these outpourings of solutions.

And perhaps the fact that there were fewer solutions tells us that this is a very challenging thing and that actually greater thought needs to be put into it. In terms of the solutions I think that stood out to me and those that I have been thinking about since, I think one of them is this idea of incorporating co design within a module and actually almost going beyond just incorporating it but making the module about it and actually making it part of the credits for students because I think a number of the barriers that came up were student confidence to try new things, how do you make students come to that space and engage with it, how Do you get them to engage if you can't pay them?

Well, actually, if you can make it part of the degree offering and make it a module that's credit bearing, then you're ticking a lot of boxes at once, because you're not adding something new in for students to go to outside of their already busy timetables. You're making it part of their learning process, and through that, you're perhaps getting into uncomfortable ground of the academic and extracurricular, you know, you're kind of dissolving the line there slightly between those two things, because you're trying to bring this co design element that I think you're trying to do.

Whilst we apply it to a lot of academic issues, it's very much seen as an extracurricular thing that's probably done by people who focus on student experience rather than academics. Uh, and I, yeah, I think that for me was the one that really got me, and I've been thinking about since in terms of. My own practice and kind of module design is how do we get co design out of that kind of, uh, extracurricular aspect into something that is useful for students and then academic staff as a result as well.

21:22 – Tom Baines: Yeah, I agree, Tom. It's something that I don't think either of us had thought about before the session. So, it's one of the great things about running. You know, sessions like this is you get the benefit of everybody's experience, and we get new ideas. So, I think there's definitely something in that, um, to explore further.

A couple of other things for me that kind of stood out was around, I mean, we've mentioned this a few times, this idea of starting small, but I think it was actually referenced as an explicit idea. That one group came up with, so we've mentioned about things like attitudes and mindsets We've mentioned things about lack of engagement in senior staff and all these other things.

So, the benefit of starting small with something low risk something Within the scope of your control that you can do really well, you can engage students in a really great way, um, create the right environment, start to build that trust and demonstrate that there's been something that's come from it, something positive that's come from it.

Starts that cycle of building confidence, both within the institution, within, you know, demonstrating that this is actually something that's worth doing. It does give positive outcomes and, and also helps with some of that idea of, as you were mentioning, building trust with, with students themselves. And it's.

That's not something that again happens overnight. You have to invest in that, um, over time. But again, it's the sort of starting small. Um, so I think for a lot of people, if they feel, uh, you know, lost in these institutional barriers, as we've mentioned before, sometimes you're starting really small and it might not feel like you're changing the world, but it's a starting point to, to build from.

22:59 – Tom Ritchie: I think one of the real things I've noticed is the benefit of taking co design to a lot of different areas that perhaps. People aren't used to taking it and, and for want of a better term, almost like an insurgent form of co design where when you're working with a group of students who are keen and engaged with the process, actually supporting them to apply that approach to different parts of their experience, whether it's academic, pastoral, extracurricular, and as I say, I've been in sessions with staff where I, they've said to me, you know, why are there students in the room for this discussion?

Why we, you know, why, why are they here? And it's like, okay, come on. But this is, we're talking about designing the curriculum and it's really important that they're part of that if we want to create something that's useful and meaningful and actually helps prepare them for the challenges that they'll face after graduation.

23:49 – Tom Baines: Yeah, yeah, I think we're going back to some of those ideas of boundaries and kind of power dynamics that we were, we were mentioning there earlier. Some interesting stuff, um, I think kind of related to that, but I think there was also this idea of, um, the need to show that students have been heard. So, there's one thing asking them to be part of a process and, you know, making sure they're, they're adequately kind of compensated for that and all these other things.

But then it's actually, it's the result of it demonstrating they've been heard. A colleague of mine usually actually differentiates between being listened to and being heard. Um, and they describe being listened to as a kind of passive thing, whereas I'm just kind of receiving information. Um, but I might not do anything with it necessarily.

Whereas being heard is a much more active thing, so I will listen, I will take in the information, and then I will come back and we'll show and share how that has been used, what changes have been taken from it, or where in fact we haven't been able to do anything with it because of, you know, some constraints that we're under, but being open and honest about the way in which people's involvement, um, has led to change, uh, I think is really, really important.

Yeah, that's, I think that's probably all I'll say. on those points. But are there any final reflections, Tom, that you want to, you want to share? 

25:08 – Tom Ritchie: I think from the discussions in the room, the discussions we had at the rest of the conference, the biggest one that came out for me is this point about trust and vulnerability, and actually in any space where we want to get students to join us and co design things, particularly if we want it to be kind of inclusive, we need to create spaces and ways of working that promote that trust.

Between ourselves and students and also encourage them to be vulnerable about the challenges that they're facing and also with ideas that they have for solving things. There's also really useful discussion that needs to be had, I think, as well about the merits of top down co design. There's a number of education strategies, I'm sure, being written as we speak that have got the words co design plugged into them at various different points and really understanding what that means.

And again, interrogating how is this going to work in practice? And I think on the other side, you've got this much more bottom-up approach to kind of. Solutions to getting students to engage in co design and, and, and I think that's probably a big discussion that will be coming up in the sector and we see elsewhere.

I've heard it in other podcasts. I've seen colleagues talking about it as well. Two more things. I think the first one is, is that whilst we have some clarity on what the barriers are, and I think that the broad agreement across the group tells us that probably we have a good grasp on what they are. I think there is still a lot of uncertainty about what the solutions are and where these blocks are.

And I think. Without tying everything back to the COVID 19 pandemic, as people tend to, I think we have to be so mindful of that kind of post COVID effect that that's had on students and how they engage with teaching and learning and, and the impact that the, the, Uh, the lockdowns had on how these students engage with different ideas and the kind of the culture of students, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.

And I think the final thing I want to really think about is how do we start to increase the kind of academic and educational status that co design has within institutions beyond just being something that's applied to certain things or used as a buzzword or featuring in strategies. And I don't know what the answer is, but I wonder if it's something linked to this idea, we talk a lot about. You know, the teaching element of academic work, the research element. There's this concept of scholarship, which is relatively nebulous. And maybe co design sits within this idea of scholarship, but I think ultimately to really get it to be part of that fabric of. You know, the work of academic staff and professional services staff, and to make sure it's something that's incorporated into their day-to-day ways of working, there probably needs to be a discussion around, how do we incentivise this?

How is it part of promotion criteria? And actually, that's how you create that change, because people will realise, ah, This is where I can go to now. And this is something that I have to be able to do or be better at. Um, which sounds quite mercenary and it's not, that's not the intent behind bringing that point up.

But I just think from my experience, unless it's linked to a work allocation model or work to a criteria for promotion, it's very, very difficult for people to create the space they need to do these things. 

28:04 – Tom Baines: Yeah. Well, I totally share your ambition. We, I think we both talked about this again at length before, but I think the idea of this becoming the norm is something that we absolutely believe in.

Um, and if we can be one small part of that, that journey for the sector, then, then fantastic. Um, I think the, the idea of sharing this more generally, I think is really good. I, I would really love to hear from people as well who both attended the workshop and those who haven't, maybe, who are looking at this, listening to this, um, looking at our write up, that is, and, and see, like, are there barriers?

That you're facing that you haven't seen represented. Um, I guarantee that there are barriers we've not captured because we had one group of people for an hour together. So, there's absolutely loads in there, but I'd really like to hear from people, the challenges that they're facing. And I, I'd really love to hear from people who have themselves done something they feel has felt has been particularly successful, where they have seen another team and their institution use kind of an inclusive approach really effectively.

Or you've seen it elsewhere in the sector. I'd love to encourage some. Broad sharing of those, those case studies almost. Um, it'd be, it'd be great to see that and continue the discussion. It's probably also worth mentioning just before we wrap up, about the fact that we're also going to be launching a, a new workshop off the back of the feedback.

Ultimately, we have received, not, not in terms of the writeup, but the, the feedback about how people's people found the session, their experience of doing it, and how, how some people found it really valuable. We're going to be launching a new workshop that's going help staff understand how they can inclusively co-design change.

Kind of going back to what we were saying earlier, not only co design change, but co design within the constraints of their university. So, we have started to form something that I think will help be both practical and give people actionable things they can take away to start putting this into practice.

So, we'll share more details in the next couple of weeks of, of this session. Um, but, uh, if anyone would like to find out more in the meantime, then obviously please do get in touch. 

30:08 – Tom Ritchie: I think that's a really good point. And when this podcast is published on our

LinkedIn's, uh, there will be, uh, obviously our contact details will be there so people can get in touch with us if they have things to add.

I think if it's something that you found useful, this is new for us. We've not recorded anything like this before, and we've tried to make it. Accessible and just two colleagues talking rather than getting into very deep theory. I think ultimately, it's worth saying thank you to the RAISE conference organisers for giving us that space.

I think we've, we found it a really useful experience, but uh, yeah, have a look at, have a look at the other content that goes alongside this podcast with the images and the image from the write up and from the session itself. Um, but yeah, thank you for listening and please feel free to get in touch.

Thanks so much. 

30:55 – Tom Baines: Thank you, Tom.