While you’ve been queuing for hours on end at the UK border with your duty free allowance and your nasty stomach bug, we’ve been sat on the floor in the vestibule on the country’s ramshackle rail network with a suitcase of scented markers, Wonkhe stickers and multiple shapes of post-it notes – meeting, briefing, training and listening to this year’s crop of students’ union officers.
So as a piece of public service, we thought we’d share our top ten observations and conclusions arising from these encounters here as the term gets going.
Every year meeting students’ chosen leaders is always a fascinating experience – the priorities and manifesto objectives shift subtly, the language and the lingo morph in ways that Jim finds it increasingly hard to keep up with, and even the way of thinking about higher education feels like it’s shifting under our feet.
All the usual caveats apply here – not all students’ unions are the same, not all student leaders share the same priorities and opinions, and student officers are in many ways the very opposite of “ordinary” students.
Nevertheless, listening carefully to the popular pick of the litter for coalmine canaries has generated some interesting themes to think about again this year – and so hopefully at least some of the below is of use to people working in and around higher education.
One thing to say before we get into this (let’s call this the tenth) – vanishingly few student leaders we meet have ever reflected on their journey through HE before we speak to them.
The ones we meet know that the sector surveys the hell out of students, but does little to understand their lives – student leaders (who will be drawing on their personal experiences to drive contributions to decision making) report spending most of the summer being asked to learn about their university’s “world” with seemingly little reciprocal interest in learning about students’ worlds.
The new normal
If there’s one dominant theme from the pictures of post-it notes this year, it’s the juggle. Students are leading extraordinarily complex and busy lives – and it’s not so much that the mismatch between their costs and the financial support for them is causing drop-out, it’s that they’re having to find ever-more creative ways to fit in “having it all” – even if some of the tactics represent hacks, short-cuts or even (whisper it quietly) cheating.
It’s a symptom of the various agendas being discrete – but add up painfully inadequate (and expensive, and distant) living conditions, the cost of catering on campus, public transport woes and the demands of multiple shifts a week in often exhausting service or factory jobs, and the result is anything like the immersion they craved.
Redoubling efforts to make the timetable work, and to consider the ways that universities can help reduce costs on campus, seems especially important.
Bring and buy
On that cost of living thing, there’s an impressive array of practical solutions on the to-do list of today’s student leaders – swap schemes, budgeting workshops, charity shops, uniform exchanges and recipe cards are all on the manifesto-to-action flipcharts. This is a generation of student leaders that are keen to help manage a new normal – although that does crowd out effort over pointing out to decision makers that the normal they’re coping with should be anything but.
What we would say is that early efforts a couple of years ago to relieve the problem don’t seem to have morphed into strategy, with vanishingly few officers telling us that their university really understands cost pressures – by cost type, subject area or student characteristic. And too many tell us that their university regards the crisis as being something in the past – misreading signals like a reduction in demand for hardship funds as students somehow swimming in money.
A long journey
This is a tricky thing to say – but as between 3 and 4 in 10 of the full-time elected student officers in SUs this year are international (most having been postgraduate students), it’s impossible not to highlight what they’re telling us. And we’re afraid that the main thing that comes through in those conversations is the sense that they’re being milked.
We won’t rehearse the ways in which the immigration system or the accommodation market has more acute impacts for international PGTs here – suffice to say that anyone who thinks that agents are basically well-regulated, that the cost of living information on the university’s webpages is “fine” or that few of their students are working over the legally-OK 20 hours a week really should sit in on some of our sessions.
There’s a whole raft of deep problems with the experience that students face that are under-discussed, barely admitted and therefore never tackled – in systems and structures that were never designed for this many PGTs, let alone this many international PGTs. The gaslighting we hear they face when, for example, they ask to be able to pay fees in instalments (“well you did have to prove you had the funds”) or want some academic support (“you are supposed to be at postgraduate level”) is shocking – and dependent on their lack of cultural capital and precarity in the immigration system. Blind eyes are being turned here – solutions require proper example-setting leadership.
Gizza job
As we noted when we looked at manifestos earlier the summer, the days of SU officers being precious about “education for education’s sake” feel long gone. The student leaders we’ve met expect universities to play a more active role in facilitating their transition from academic life to the labour market – in the form of placements, internships, and credits for volunteering or committee roles. The integration of AI into the job market is also a growing concern. Several conversations this summer have also highlighted how important it feels to undergraduates to get “good honours”, only for them to find that their job-hunting mates say said scores are increasingly irrelevant at interviews.
And few are craving more of those “put some employability into the modules” bodges – they want space in the academic structure for real experience. The UK’s insistence on its degree classification system – with associated academic transcripts that tell the world little about what a graduate knows, understands or can do – also really does feel ripe for reform.
Spaced out
Probably the second biggest campus concern that has plagued the post-its this year is campuses. We’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve discussed a lack of space – quiet areas that feel like a Cross-Country train on Bank Holiday monday, queues in coffee shops that don’t go down fast enough, social learning spaces that are impossible to access, and entire buildings with classrooms that can’t even be dived-into when vacant.
There’s a particular irony in most of the new buildings being ones that their fees are still paying for when they have those obligatory huge atriums and almost nowhere to sit. The lack of anywhere to heat up food remains an astonishing mystery, and given the rise in neurodivergent students, the inability to access quiet space is almost certainly morphing from “ideal world” to “legal issue”. The lack of meaningful engagement between SUs and estates comes up again and again – and is surely a set of encounters that could be fixed up quickly.
Disabled students
More and more this year we’ve met disabled students who’ve become student leaders – a reflection of the growing numbers they represent. It’s really positive – save that so many seem to have stories that surround a failure to reasonably adjust to enable them to access their education.
There’s the ones that spent months on a waiting list to get adjustments when it was one of their own tutors who suggested they get screened in the first place. There’s the ones who are still resitting because of the deadlines multi-car piled up. There’s the ones who got a diagnosis and a plan from the disability staff, only to have it repeatedly questioned by academic colleagues. And so on.
Probably most revealing is just how inaccessible disabled student leaders find their interactions with university governance. It can’t be beyond the sector to ensure that the bodies that make decisions about things deliver the same adjustments that they go on to mandate in provision. Can it?
Cleaning up after poverty
One more thing is about us visiting campuses than it is about what we do when we get there. Universities are often quite difficult to get into during the day – but surprisingly easy to access early in the morning, when we both tend to “tailgate in with the cleaners” so we can get set up. What’s interesting when we’re talking to both them and their catering colleagues is that neither of us have met a single student in either of those roles all summer.
We don’t want to see the good people of location X out of a job – but we are reminded of the US Community College anecdote that “those of us that employ students as cleaners find that the campus is cleaner” – not because they’re better cleaners, but because students are pretty unforgiving of others that cause them more or more difficult work. As the cost of living crisis morphs into a “new normal”, we’ll hear no more excuses about this – universities need to employ more students. Period.
Drilling down
The final thing for us is that many of them tell us about the times over the summer that they’ve met managers in universities – who seem to have been at pains to explain how tough things are in university budgets, with the discussion eventually getting on other things via a surface level chat about SU “priorities”.
For us, it’s crucial to interrogate what they’re actually saying when asking for something like flexible timetabling. Students want to be in lecture theatres but with a housing and cost of living crisis where more are living further away from campus and working more hours part time, they need flexible timetabling to earn and learn.
Many are lobbying for more study and prayer spaces so that when they do afford to come onto campus, they want to feel like that space is theirs and that, ultimately, they belong.
A lot of their ideas around extracurriculars, democracy and representation were about making this credit bearing. Yes, for the benefits of articulating and receiving credit for the extra things they do outside of their course – but mainly to be able to afford the cost of participation.
In other words, when doing workshops with student leaders on reimagining their university and students’ union, a lot of the solutions they envisaged were about making the student experience work for students now.
The focus for the sector right now is its own funding and fees crisis. But it’s a pointless one without thinking that needs to be done on the impact of cuts to the student experience. Their teaching and learning, career and employability opportunities, social and civic extracurriculars – it all needs time. The lack of it feels dangerously normalised – they’re full time – but they’re not full-time students.
For us there’s three crucial takeaways from that. The first is that it’s vital to interrogate the “why” question – rather than to just spend time talking student leaders out of an idea because of a lack of strategic capacity or money – because underlying issues often offer up solutions that otherwise feel irrelevant or impossible.
The second is that the idea that a partnership is in place really is for the birds if student leaders are kept at arm’s length from tough decisions about spending reductions. That’s less a principle point, more that higher education is something that needs time and money to participate in properly – and it increasingly feels like that’s not even being discussed, let alone factored in.
But the third is that both inside universities and SUs, it feels like there’s not a lot of vision around on the student experience. There’s some coping (on both sides), and some nostalgia, but not lots on what the experience should be like, and what everyone would like it to be in the future, beyond how it’s painted in prospectuses.
UUK will soon publish a blueprint, and some day soon we might imagine that a big review of fees and funding will attempt to sort out some of the longer term issues in HE. We suspect both the blueprint and said review will be full of “ambition”. But if understanding how students do and should participate in HE are afterthoughts, those visions will be doomed on day one. If a vision for participation is front and centre, they have a chance of success.
