It’s been about a month since I last wrote one of these. Here’s what’s happened, and what’s coming up.
The survey
1,481 of you have filled in our survey, against a target of 1,000. A month ago we were on 400, and I was refreshing the response page so often that my laptop started offering it to me whenever I typed a single letter. It’s stopped doing that now. I think it’s relieved for both of us.
Most of that jump wasn’t us. It was you telling each other. One of our School Reps stood up at the start of her own lecture and asked her course to fill it in, and I'm told several of you dropped the link into group chats that were, I assume, mostly about something else. Thank you. The survey closes today, Friday the 23rd of October, so if you’ve been meaning to do it, this is the bit where you stop meaning to and do it - https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/KPBHYRK
Another 97 of you signed up for focus groups this week. Most of those sessions were aimed at the students the Students’ Union has historically been worst at reaching: commuter students, students on placement, disabled students, and students who work or care for someone.
The full findings come back in mid November, but I can tell you what’s coming through early. Most of you are broadly positive about the Students’ Union. Lovely. I’ll take it. And when you don’t get involved, it’s mostly for practical reasons, like where things are held and when.
There’s an assumption, and I’ve heard it said out loud in actual meetings, that commuter students just aren’t that interested and too busy. The findings so far say otherwise. Picture it. You’ve been up since six. You’ve done an hour on a train where the heating is either off or set to 'kiln', you’ve sat through three hours of teaching, you’ve got a shift at half five, and somewhere on campus a poster is cheerfully inviting you to a social at 7pm. Not tonight, lads.
So rather than trying to persuade you to care more, we need to find a way to make it easier for you to take part.
We’ve started on the practical stuff already. Commuter students can now use the shower in our building. Hand your student card in at reception and you’ll be given the key. I know a shower isn’t a manifesto. But if you’ve ever done a placement shift, then a train, then a lecture, quietly aware of yourself gently humming the whole way through, you’ll know it isn’t nothing, either. Some of you may know the union has a kitchen on the bottom floor of Student Central with an oven; I will be doing my best to work out how we can make that accessible to any student who'd like to use it, without the health and safety implications of a tray of fish fingers forgotten in there over Christmas and found in January, by me. It will always be me.
General meetings
Elections give you people to speak for you, but they come round once a year. What matters just as much is what students do together for the rest of it. With no elections this year, general meetings are where that’s supposed to happen.
Supposed to. So far, they haven’t worked. Nine people came to the last one and about half of them were being paid to be there! That’s not on anyone who stayed away. That’s on us. We were asking you to turn up to a meeting with no obvious reason to be in the room, and expecting you to arrive with a motion already written. Nobody wakes up wanting to do that.
So we’re changing it. From now on, every general meeting will be about one issue students already care about, and you’ll decide in the room what the Students’ Union does about it.
What changes when students organise
Here’s a story about students at another university, which I’ve been telling anyone who stands still long enough.
International students there were living in accommodation with mould in the rooms and nowhere to socialise. They’d complained about it for years, and the university knew. Then a group of residents got together and agreed on two specific things they wanted:
- The mould sorted
- Somewhere to sit outside
That’s it. Two things. They asked to meet the Vice-Chancellor, told him their stories, showed him the photos, and he agreed to both on the spot. The benches went in, the mould was fixed, and the students held a party on the benches to celebrate, which I think is the single most correct way to celebrate getting benches.
Two things stood out for me. First, nobody uncovered anything new. The university already knew about the mould. What changed was that a pile of separate complaints became one group asking for two clear things. Second, at the next Students’ Union elections, far more international students stood and voted, because they’d seen it work.
That’s the bit I keep coming back to. When something goes wrong with your housing, it’s easy to feel it’s just your bad luck, or even your fault. You’re on your own in a cold room, wiping the black bit above the window with a sock (always a sock), wondering whether you should have looked at more places. Now put yourself in a room with twenty other students who’ve had the same problem. It looks completely different. It isn’t bad luck. It’s something that needs fixing, and something you can push to fix together.
The housing general meeting
The housing general meeting is on Thursday the 5th of November at 5pm, in SC0.51. We’ll finish by 7pm, because it’s Bonfire Night and I have no intention of standing between anyone and a sparkler. We’re hoping Unipol (a student housing charity) will open with a short factual briefing on housing in Bradford, covering who’s responsible for what, and what the Students’ Union can and can’t do. Then you’ll work in small groups to come up with ideas, and keep merging groups until the whole room has agreed its top three. We’ll turn those into motions over the break, and you’ll vote on them in the second half.
You don’t need to know what a motion is. You don’t need to have been to a meeting in your life. You just need to have lived somewhere, which, statistically, you have.
I can’t promise we’ll fix everything. Some of what’s wrong with housing in Bradford is bigger than any Students’ Union. What I can promise is that what you decide becomes what we campaign on. We won’t take your issue away and deal with it somewhere you can’t see, because change sticks when the people affected are the ones leading it. We’ll do the work alongside you, and we’ll fix it together.
The December general meeting is on the 3rd of December, on AI, and the Vice-Chancellor will also be attending for a question and answer session with students. If you’ve ever written something entirely by yourself, at two in the morning, with your own tired little brain, and then had a piece of software suggest otherwise, come along.
What happens next
Coole Insight, who are conducting our insight work, report back in mid November. Nick Smith, a governance consultant who has done this work for other Students’ Unions, will be drafting a new constitution, which is the document that sets out how the Students’ Union works. He’s also drafting the rules that sit underneath it, including new election rules. I appreciate “a man is drafting a constitution” is not the most thrilling sentence you’ll read this week. But it is for me!
On the 10th of December, the Trustee Board will likely agree the new constitution to put to you, along with the options for how you’ll be represented in future which you will then vote on. Before Christmas we’ll publish a plain English guide to what it all means, so you don’t have to read the constitution itself unless you really, really want to.
In early February there’ll be a general meeting where you vote on the new constitution, alongside an all student vote where you choose how you want to be represented. These are two separate decisions, so you could back one and not the other. The general meeting only counts if at least 100 students take part and we can only change our articles if two thirds agree, so coming to the general meetings in November and December is the best way to understand what you’ll be voting on.
Elections, if that's the model of representation that you choose, follow in March or April. Decisions about candidates and complaints will be made by someone independent, and voting will be in person on campus.
Before February, here’s something to chew on. Any way of organising student representation has to choose between two approaches. One is to set aside roles or seats so that particular groups of students always have someone working on their issues. The other is to leave it open, so whoever wins the vote decides what gets worked on. Take a single education officer, elected by everyone. Now be a nursing student. You spend much of the year on placement, on a ward, nowhere near the bit of campus where people are handing out leaflets. How often does someone like you win that election? Rarely. So how often do your issues get picked up? I suspect also rarely. Neither approach is wrong, and most systems use a bit of both. In February, you'll decide where the balance sits.
Course and school reps
There are now 302 programme reps (up from 58 at the start of October, so most of you have been doing this for under a month, which, as someone with “interim” in his job title, I can only respect). Thank you to every one of you. If your course still hasn’t got one, ask your programme director or e-mail us and we’ll help.
Your School Reps are sitting on University committees and working with academic staff on what students said in last year’s National Student Survey. We’ve interviewed for the two School Rep places in the School of Nursing, Public Health and Healthcare Leadership, and we expect to appoint next week.
If you want to talk to me about anything, e-mail me at a.morwood@bradford.ac.uk. Or come to the housing meeting on the 5th and tell me in person. I’ll be the one by the door, counting heads, hoping very much to get past nine.
Andy Morwood
Interim CEO and Change Director