Listening, Learning, Leading: Championing the Student Voice in Engineering

As Faculty Director of Education for Engineering, Professor Matt Carré oversaw everything from curriculum design and student recruitment to, crucially, the student experience. Before he stepped down from the role, he took time to reflect on the many achievements and ideas he has championed. 

“Put simply, I’m the Faculty’s academic lead for everything related to education,” he explained, a role that spans collaboration with four schools, the Multidisciplinary Engineering Education team, and colleagues across the University of Sheffield.  

At the heart of his work is a simple but powerful belief: listening to students drives better education. Matt reflects on how the faculty has evolved its use of student voice, particularly through the National Student Survey and the University’s own ‘TellUS’ Survey, to shape meaningful change. From improving feedback to embedding new marking criteria, the focus is clear: supporting students to thrive in a fast-changing world.

The Power of Feedback: TellUS Survey

Student feedback has long been a cornerstone of teaching development in Engineering, but the TellUs Survey has helped consolidate that input in more structured and scalable ways. Matt was part of the early working group that helped shape  the first University student  voice survey, which became known as TellUS. Before TellUS, Engineering had already developed its own faculty-wide survey.

The aim of TellUS, he explains, has always been to strike a balance between consistency and relevance. “All our programmes across the University are different and our cohorts have different characteristics,” he says. “An Engineering student might approach a survey differently than someone in Arts and Humanities.” In Engineering, the decision was made early on to take a faculty approach using the same survey questions across all programmes to enable meaningful comparison and tracking.

One of the biggest challenges has been student engagement. “If you’re only getting 10% of the students filling in the survey, chances are that’s not a representative group,” he notes. “You’re probably only hearing from either end of the bell curve, not the majority in the middle.” That’s led to faculty-wide efforts to shift the culture, particularly among first-year undergraduates. The introduction of Student Experience leads in each school has helped coordinate efforts, allowing the faculty to act cohesively while staying connected to local student communities.

Still, feedback is only valuable if it’s useful. Part of that means helping students understand the purpose of these tools. “We need to communicate to students that doing a survey is part of being professional,” he says. “We don’t mind negative feedback. If it’s clear and specific, it’s helpful.”

The TellUs Survey has also become more analytically robust over time. Comments are now processed using text analysis tools that surface key positive and negative themes–such as lab experience and assessments—that regularly appear across modules and programmes When the system works as intended, this feedback is passed to the relevant module leader, who is expected to share it with the teaching team and reflect on what’s working well and where improvements could be made.

Closing the Loop

While large-scale surveys like TellUS help surface common themes, meaningful change often

starts with the small, specific shifts that happen at module level. In some cases, this has meant adding extra support where students needed it, whether through tailored resources or drop-in sessions. In the  module that Matt taught on this semester, he explains, “We put on extra office surgery sessions so that people who had questions about the assessment could come and see us, and this change came about because of what students told us via TellUS.”

Assessment and feedback have consistently been a focal point for student comments. These concerns range from the clarity of marking criteria to how feedback is communicated, particularly in the transition from school to university. Many students arrive expecting highly prescriptive feedback, the kind that spells out exactly what they need to do to score higher. But university feedback is designed to develop independent learning, not to offer a formula for gaining extra marks. Bridging this gap means not only improving feedback quality but helping students understand how feedback works in a university context–and why.

One concrete change already underway is a new faculty approach to marking criteria. From 2026/27, Engineering will implement a consistent framework across all schools and modules. The move reflects both student feedback and the need for clarity in assessment design.

Ultimately, the goal is to create a more transparent and supportive learning environment. One where students can clearly see how learning outcomes, assessment descriptions, and marking criteria fit together. As Matt puts it, “If we can be more consistent in pulling together those three things and explain to students, this is the pedagogy of what we do… that can help them to understand.”

Engineering Education, Reimagined

Looking to the future, the faculty is focusing on how to deliver great education while evolving with the world around it. That includes better integration of digital and sustainability themes—not as add-ons, but as named pillars of the curriculum. These areas are essential, Matt says, because “engineers have a real part to play” in addressing challenges that matter across society.

Tools like Blackboard Ultra are already helping with this shift. The Faculty is exploring how to “badge” modules with key Sheffield Graduate Attributes and UN Sustainable Development Goals, so students can more clearly see what skills and values they’re building, whether it’s teamwork, ethics, or sustainable design. Over time, this could develop into a full programme-level view that lets students and prospective applicants understand the shape of their academic journey from start to finish. “We’re not really there yet,” Matt notes, “but that is the aim.”