To ensure that all students can fully participate, we will:

• Acknowledge and celebrate diversity: Recognise the wide range of backgrounds within our student populations and leverage this range of perspectives, opinions, preferences and experiences for future success.
• Seek diverse representation: Actively invite participation from students across various levels and modes of study, disciplines, locations, life experiences, demographics and cultures.
• Analyse opportunities: Review how opportunities, activities, and programs might unintentionally favour some individuals while excluding others and work to counteract this – such as by actively reaching out to specific groups to offer opportunities.
• Be mindful of bias: Be aware of selection bias in employment and create systems and processes that are inclusive and fair for everyone. Bias can be mitigated through training, awareness building, and making a conscious effort to suppress it.
• Building capabilities in staff: Library staff will be trained and provided with resources and communications to support and develop capabilities so that key principles of accessibility and equity are incorporated into student partnership and employment opportunities.

We recognise that student partners/employees bring lived experiences that contribute valuable insights and are a form of expertise. When partnering with students, we will:

• Acknowledge lived experience: Understand that students’ personal experiences are a significant form of expertise and should be valued in collaborative efforts, alongside the expertise of other partners/ stakeholders, such as professional or academic staff with subject matter or technical expertise.
• Recognise diverse expertise: Appreciate the different types of expertise that partners and stakeholders bring based on their unique experiences, positions, and perspectives.
• Avoid assumptions: Not to expect all students to have the same expertise or make assumptions about their level of background knowledge in a particular area.

When creating employment and partnership opportunities we will focus on providing valuable learning aspects for all partners and stakeholders. We will:

• Highlight learning opportunities: Ensure that the potential for learning, whether it’s skills, knowledge, or new perspectives, is central to all opportunities.
• Embrace reciprocity: Recognise that learning and teaching should be a reciprocal process. Staff will encourage two-way feedback and engage in open dialogue so that all partners benefit from teaching and learning from each other.
• Discuss motivations: Explicitly discuss each partner’s or stakeholder’s motivations, expectations, and desired outcomes from the opportunity.
• Evolve the process: Use these discussions to guide and shape the development of the opportunity, making adjustments based on feedback to enhance the learning experience for everyone involved.

The level of agency and power-sharing between partners should be carefully considered. In this context to have ‘agency’ is to be able to exert power or affect change. We will:

• Promote student agency: Create environments where students can exert influence and contribute meaningfully to partnerships or employment roles.
• Foster skill development: Recognise that higher agency enhances crucial employability skills, such as leadership, project management, negotiation, communication, and stakeholder engagement skills.
• Aligning with students’ interests: Ensure that opportunities align with students' needs and interests, improving their overall experience and life-readiness.

Recognition, reward and remuneration of the student contribution adds value for both parties:

• Value of contributions: Student contributions are not be considered of less value or as an opportunity to gain free labour. Student expertise and experience are recognised and therefore remunerated as per the level of the role or activity.
• Acknowledgement of informal activities: All student employment opportunities will be remunerated, with the exception of brief, informal, ad-hoc engagements such as participating in User Experience research. Where students are engaged in such informal activities, we will acknowledge and appreciate the time and consideration they invest.
• Commit to implementation: Project deliverables and research produced by students will be used and implemented, and with the student contribution recognised.

Any partnership activity or employment opportunity needs to have value for and be of benefit to both the Library and to the student(s):

• Value of output: The activity’s objective and the value of the output should be clearly defined, linked to who benefits from it and how.
• Reciprocity: The opportunity should not only address the needs of the Library but also provide the student(s) an opportunity to develop new skills, knowledge and/or ways of knowing.
• Support existing roles: Rather than replacing existing positions or roles, student employment and partnership opportunities must support and enhance the work done by current staff in achieving the Library’s objectives.

When engaging with students for employment and partnership opportunities, we will ensure that they are appropriately supported to contribute what they are able. We will:

• Understand student commitments: Acknowledge and value that student partners are taking on new, and often complex, roles while understanding that they are also balancing study, work and other commitments.
• Manage expectations: It is important to have realistic expectations about students’ capacity and capability to engage, and to ensure students are appropriately supported in their role to contribute what they are able.
• Clarify roles and responsibilities: For employment opportunities, the expectations and level of responsibility needs to be clearly articulated in the position description and/or project proposal and be appropriate to the level of employment.

When evaluating a project or activity, we will consider the reach of its impact:

• Scale of impact: Expected impact on the student experience as a result of the partnership may be direct (e.g. partnering with students to provide peer support in the library) or indirect (e.g. inviting students to provide feedback on a student-related policy). The impact may be significant or minor, for a small or large number of students. This is the ‘reach’ of the partnership.
• Enhancing reach: It is worthwhile considering whether there are ways an opportunity or activity can be adjusted to amplify its reach and impact, where appropriate.

We will consider the students whose voices are heard when employing a particular mode of engagement, offering an opportunity, or undertaking an activity. We will take into consideration the:

• Variety of perspectives: As far as possible, the Library will draw on a plurality and diversity of perspectives so that value or impact of the activity is maximised.
• Student perspectives: The Library will actively seek the student perspective to inform decision-making, through effective and relevant User Experience activities. It is vital that staff designing and conducting such activities avoid assumptions and be open-minded, so that the data gathered is an accurate representation of student opinions and requirements

Transparency and accountability will underpin all collaborative engagement work and be fundamental to all student partnership and employment opportunities provided by the Library. We will be:

• Equitable: All decision making and processes relating to access, selection, recruitment, remuneration etc. are conducted with fairness and transparency.
• Emphasise clarity: Communications and procedures will be clear and unambiguous, to reinforce trust and establish a clear responsibility matrix.