Co-producing the new NMC curriculum: Students as full partners

Co-production has an ethos that the student is a full partner in their own education, which McCulloch (2009) described as ‘being engaged in a cooperative enterprise focused on the production, dissemination and application of knowledge’. Co-production is defined as placing service users (the students) at the same level as the service providers (Farelly, 2014) with the power balance shifting away from the traditional lecturer and student relationship. In 2020, nursing will have a new curriculum (NMC, 2018). Although students have always been involved in curriculum design in previous iterations, their role has been largely passive. The planning team gearing for validation of the 2020 curriculum wanted to ensure students were not just a token participatory group. Students who were involved in the planning of the new curriculum were encouraged to examine the current curriculum, looking at the flaws and strengths of each module, and between them as a group and the module leaders, initiate ideas to be taken to the wider planning team in order to radically overhaul module delivery for the 2020 curriculum. Some of the ideas already being prepared for validation of modules include the use of more debates, flipped classroom approaches and more use of interactive technology in the classroom so students are actively contributing to the session. Likewise, with assessment strategies students were keen to develop more self-peer marking across modules, with less emphasis on traditional ‘essay and exam formats’. 12 students from all fields of nursing were involved in the planning process, and all valued the experience as being useful, and as one student commented ‘I feel that working with the lecturers to create something different, makes me feel genuinely valued as a student, and that we are helping to shape the nursing students of the future’. This view resonates with Kotzé & du Plessis (2003) research in that students appreciate how co-production can contribute directly to their own satisfaction, value and quality perceptions. This poster will explore how we used co-production in our curriculum design, the strengths of this approach and some of the pitfalls.