Back in April, I wrote this about the Students' Union's elections:
"There is currently no timeframe for how long the investigation will take, and we won't know what the next steps for elections look like until it is finished and the position is clearer. We'll update you as soon as we have more information."
That was five months ago. Five months! You've started a whole new academic year since then. Some of you have moved house twice. So yes: you're owed an update, and here it is.
I'm not going to go through the detail of what specifically went wrong with last year's elections here. Some of it involves other people, and a blog post isn't a fair place to talk about people who can't reply to it. What I can tell you is that we've learned enough to know the next elections can't be run the way the last ones were, so this post is about what's changing.
The union was not innocent here either. Our record keeping has been poor and how elections were run was in the heads of a few staff who left the union years ago. If you asked me right now how elections were run in, say 2024, I couldn't tell you. Not properly. Nobody wrote down the decisions, or the processes, or the planning. There's no binder. Not even a Word document called "elections_final_FINAL_V3". That's part of a wider problem the union has had for a long time. We don't write down how we do things.
It's my job to fix it, to make sure elections happen in the new year, and to get the union working as well as it possibly can.
I have a list of twenty nine things for elections that I need to do before elections can happen. I know this because I've counted them several times hoping it'd come out lower. Two of them are big, though, and you should know about them.
First - Rulings on elections will be made by someone genuinely independent. In the past, decisions about candidates and complaints were made by a committee drawn from inside the Students' Union membership. In a community as close as ours, that's a lot to ask of anyone. From now on it'll be a body or a person with no connection to anyone standing.
Second - Next year's elections will be in person, at polling stations on campus, not online. When you vote, we need to be sure it's your choice and nobody else's, and that nobody's leaning over your shoulder, literally or otherwise. Right now, voting in person is the only way we can guarantee that.
There's a risk here, which is that turnout will probably be lower than it would be online. Voting on your phone in bed is easier than walking to a building. I'll be working on ways to make up for that, like spreading voting over more days and putting more polling stations around campus. But I think you'll understand why we can't have another election where the University has to step in.
Turnaround
Between now and December we're also going to be working flat out on a new way of doing things at the Students' Union.
After a competitive tender process, the Students' Union's Turnaround Board picked Coole Insight to work with us on two questions:
What is the Students' Union for? And how do you, our members, want the Students' Union to represent you?
The Students' Union doesn't currently have a strategy. That means I can't tell you what we're working towards, and I can't tell the University either.
The University is our main funder. If you can't tell the people funding you what you're trying to do, or how you'll know when you've done it, it gets very difficult to argue you should be funded to do it. It's like walking into Dragons' Den, being asked what your business actually does, saying "loads of stuff, really" and then asking for two hundred grand. Nobody's investing. Not even Deborah Meaden, and she's lovely.
Now, just to reassure you, stuff is happening. There are loads of clubs and societies you can join right now, or start yourself. If you're facing an academic misconduct case, or you think the University isn't treating you fairly, our advice service can help. You can sign up to volunteer in the community through our volunteering service today. This second. Put the kettle on and do it while it boils.
All of that is going on because it's what we've always done. Nobody sat down and decided that's what we should be doing, or worked out how we'd know it was working.
That's what Coole Insight is going to help us with. Over the next few weeks you'll see them around campus. You'll get e-mails. You might see a poster with a QR code on it in a corridor, next to a poster for a pub quiz and another poster for a different pub quiz. All of it is trying to find out one thing: what do you *actually* want from your Students' Union?
We're not asking for your time for nothing. If you give us your thoughts you'll be entered into prize draws, and if you take part in a focus group you'll be paid for your time. No good deed goes unrewarded.
So… who's representing me right now?
Because we couldn't hold elections, we don't have sabbatical officers. Those are the people who'd normally sit on University committees and make sure the union is doing right by students.
This is unusual. I've worked in Students' Unions for twenty years (I'm old enough to say that sentence, which is its own kind of news) and I have never once worked in one without sabbs.
We need something in their place, though, and those same twenty years are exactly why it can't just be me. There are experiences and cultural happenings in your lives that I simply don't understand. I don't know what the good app is. I don't know what the phrase is this month. Put me in charge of deciding What Students Want and you'd get a strongly worded paper about how Franz Ferdinand are criminally underrated.
Handily, we've recruited students to do this work for the interim year.
We've got 10 School Reps (with two more still to be filled in the School of Nursing) and 2 Postgraduate Research Reps. They'll make sure you're still represented on the University's committees. They'll also support programme reps, pick up issues that cut across programmes and schools, and raise things when they need raising.
Here's who they are:
School of Allied Health Professions, Midwifery and Social Work: Louise Walker (undergraduate) and Rimsha Jalil (postgraduate taught)
School of Pharmacy, Optometry and Medical Sciences: Khushbukht Sajid (undergraduate) and Mehwish Mehreen (postgraduate taught)
School of Management: Khrystyna Neimeti (undergraduate) and Ali Hariri (postgraduate taught)
School of Computing and Engineering: Imtasal Nawaz (undergraduate) and Ali Abbas (postgraduate taught)
School of Law and Social Sciences: Wajiha Tahir (undergraduate) and Nicholas Mwansa Kamponge (postgraduate taught)
School of Nursing, Public Health and Healthcare Leadership: Both places still open, so this could be you
Postgraduate Research: Geraldine Ilevbabor and Eman Ali, working across the whole University rather than in one school
Instead of Union Council, we'll hold general meetings that *any* student can come to. You can debate motions there if we receive any, and hear updates on what the Students' Union is doing.
Mustafa Khurram, last year's Deputy Union Council Chair, has been appointed as our Student Voice Chair for this year following an appointment process.
This isn't a replacement for having sabbs this year, and it's not meant to be. But the School Reps, the Student Voice Chair, our other student staff and our career staff are going to do everything we can to make sure you're seen and heard.
We know this is going to be an odd year at the Students' Union, so we've tried to find ways to make it easier on you. One of those is money. We've put £30,000 into our clubs and societies, shared out according to what each of them raised in membership fees last year, so they can charge you less to join.
Think about the society you walked past at the freshers' fair. You picked up the leaflet. You took a free lolly. You thought about it for a bit on the bus home, did some maths involving your overdraft, and quietly decided against it. Cost shouldn't be the reason you don't join something this year. Go back and join it.
There's a lot to do. As you can see from my tracker, a start has been made, but August 2027 is a long way off. I'll aim to post an update on the website every two to four weeks so you know what's going on.
If you want to talk to me about anything, e-mail me at a.morwood@bradford.ac.uk I do read them. I read all of them. Reading them is about half my job. Typing, as you can tell, is the other half.
Andy Morwood
Interim CEO and Change Director