Things happen all the time in universities – and our wider localities – that prompt the question “what do students think about that”?
Sometimes we’re able to offer an answer because we have some research or polling on the issue. Sometimes we don’t. Even when we do, different groups of students might have different priorities – or even opposed views.
Sometimes officers are asked to answer the question without any underpinning at all. And the tradition of debating “motions” to set a position on an issue or aspect of student life is not one that remains especially popular across UK students’ unions.
There are also issues we’ve been working on for a long time. At Salford, we’ve long believed that raising awareness about mental health issues, prevention measures, and available solutions is crucial. We’ve actively promoted mental health awareness through various campaigns and programs, moving beyond awareness and seeking to address any aggravating factors which drive poor mental health.
But we don’t say anywhere that that’s what we think about mental health. And so when new reps, officers or staff get involved, we have to pass on those long-standing beliefs like whispers and legends, rather than having something solid to rely on.
And while like many unions we’re good at describing the process of representing students, what we often don’t do is set out to students what we’re saying on their behalf – or what we would say if asked.
To help address all of that, we wanted to create a single point of truth, beyond the union’s constitution and charitable objects, that would explain what the union did, what it thought and what it believed.
Rather than a collection of approved motions, research reports or manifesto objectives, we saw it as a fourth leg of the union’s constitution beyond the articles, the byelaws and the law itself.
Through it, any student, staff member or other stakeholder could quickly see what Salford SU thought about a given topic. This would provide a solid answer to any emerging issues – or at least a starting point, make us more transparent, cement the idea that we are a representative body and would mean that student and union energies could be spent on deciding what to do because of these beliefs.
It’s an approach we’d seen in Europe on the Wonkhe SUs study tours – where it seemed to have real benefits in everything from university meetings to officer inductions, from elections to SU marketing efforts.
We wanted to do this in a way that respected the democratic will of the membership, but in such a way that wouldn’t mean it would take forever to develop. We also wanted to get the bulk of this policy into draft as quickly as possible.
A short yet winding road
Lauren Beckett (Director of Advocacy): We’d been going through a Democracy Review where we were fundamentally changing a lot of our governance and democratic processes. Part of that was deleting our Student Council from our structures; we needed another way to capture what students thought about their student experience, and what they wanted to change.
Ed Moloney (CEO): We also wanted to empower our student leaders, and help them to feel that they could go and campaign on things. Part of that is ensuring they know what they think about things, and also that those positions are shared by students, because students have had a chance to shape and change those positions.
This seemed like a really good way to do this, and to ensure that the officers didn’t feel that they were out of their depth all the time. It also felt like a good way to identify and discuss areas where the Officer team might disagree, and to have those conversations nice and early in the officer year.
We asked Alan to come in and take a look at this because we had been on the Wonkhe European tours together and I knew he understood what we were after, and we’d had the chance to discuss it at various points over those trips.
Alan Roberts (CounterCulture): The union commissioned me to pull together, effectively the first draft. I call it a first draft (what I gave the Union was, in fact, the eleventh draft) because what I presented was the raw material which they could the appropriately edit and adopt. I am not Salford SU, but I was able to save the Union a lot of time with something that would hit the pareto principle and be 80% correct.
We benefitted from seeing this approach adopted in a number of mainland European countries throughout Estonia, Finland and Sweden in particular. We also benefitted from the fact that any book of law (the name given to these collections of policy in the places we visited) would have a predicable and reasonably finite framework: there exists an easily assembled list of policy areas and what they might contain – the real trick was tuning them into Salford, its membership and its context.
So my approach was to review all of the policy books I could find, create a super-list and edit it down, attempting to re-organise it in a way that made sense for Salford.
The old way of doing an SU “motion” was a list of notes, beliefs, and resolutions – the first containing pertinent facts about an issue, the second setting out what the SU (on behalf of students) thought about an issue, and the third making clear what the proposer wanted their SU officers to do about it.
What became apparent in this exercise was that if the union took the route of putting together a full list of old-fashioned “NOTES-BELIEVES-RESOLVES” policies, such a list would be a huge document, would necessarily be too of its time and need to be constantly and heavily edited too often.
As such, whilst I was discussing this project with colleagues at ACUI Conference in Denver, one communications colleague from the US saw this exercise as creating a rebuttal list. Possibly because the American tradition of students’ unionism doesn’t quite align with this form of advocacy, it enabled them to see this in a fairly unique light, which was about enabling a complex organisation to respond swifly to a broad range of unpredictable circumstances.
So I chose to present the policy purely as a list of belief statements, which is actually similar to how the British Youth Council (BYC) used to create its policy. For the BYC, the advantage of this was that the Charity could consider its resources against any given context and create a programme of work based on policy beliefs that was deliverable.
Alvina Imran (SU President): I started as President in July and I really didn’t understand what Alan and Ed were talking about when they first discussed this with me. I turned up to a session (in the middle of the summer riots!) to have a look at a massive long document with loads of tracked changes in it, trying to work out what this was all about. But when I saw what kind of statements were in there, I quickly understood how powerful it could be. We spent most of the day understanding the approach, and then going through the document bit-by-bit, ensuring that we understood and agreed with what was in there.
Lauren Beckett (Director of Advocacy): I think it’s fair to say that even spending a lot of a day on the Policy Book didn’t get it to the right place! When I looked at the document afterwards it was still a bit of a mess and we (well, really I…) had to comb through it for duplication, errors, omissions etc. Eventually we got it to the point that it was 90% agreed, and we took it to Board for approval. So yes, it’s not perfect, but it’s something we can build on in future years. We also took a new Bye-Law to Board as well, so that we had a framework for how the document will be used in future- how changes get approved, how this links to other democratic processes e.g. referendums, etc…
Ed Moloney (CEO): I think it’s powerful because it tells students what we think about things. It helps officers to be more empowered. It gives clarity to our major stakeholder, and allows us to flag things when our positions change. It aligns the officers’ and organisations’ policy positions. It is a vision for the student experience at Salford that we can all get behind (and that includes the University, too!)
Alan: This should in theory make all of the work much more deliverable. Putting everyone’s efforts behind what is already agreed, focussing on the actions – it at once is more empowering and active for the elected officers, and on a more solid and consistent basis for the staff supporting them. On top of this, having a solid rebuttal list has its own multiple advantages – partners can see how they align, the University knows what the Union already thinks in a given space. What is needed is membership engagement to bring these beliefs to life.
Alvina: One of the ideas we’ve had is to ask senior university leaders to choose a section of the policy book for our next catch ups with them. We’ll be able to ask them what their views are on the policy statements, and we will be able to have a conversation with them about how far towards the vision they are. We think there’ll be some interesting conversations prompted by it! We also hope that if the university leadership team have an issue with one of their programmes or teams, they might be able to use the policy book as a tool to help them to reset standards, easily demonstrating that the standard that this comes from students, not just themselves as leaders. This is partnership in action.
Alan: The union, like any organisation can hold many beliefs, but can only act on some at any one point. This is a question of resources and of effectiveness. The next stage is for the democracy to decide, in the current context, which policies relate to the membership’s current priorities and to action plan appropriately around this. What this means is that the Union can organise its membership around the key issues of the time, and not worry about many of the debates around what it believes, but make this a case of how to organise and deploy resources in the most effective way.
This also acts as a reference for the membership – they may think some policies are wrong or missing. This is transparent and available to those that want to change what the Union believes, but it lowers the barriers to entry to such activity. Campaigners for and against can organise around the union’s current policy positions and campaign to add or edit, as they democratically wish.
This also is true for election campaigns: candidates can reflect on the union’s policy, where it stands and where they stand on issues. They can then form their platforms based on this. All in all it creates an opportunity for the democracy to actually know what it is working with, whether or not an individual or group agrees or disagrees with those positions.
Lauren: As Alan says, we think that there will be some key stakeholders who will be interested in this. We might be naïve(!), but we hope that elections candidates will be able to use the Policy Book to see where they agree or disagree with the positions, and elevate the elections to being far more based in policy debates than personalities (although personality absolutely must still be part of it!).
Ed: Let’s also face it, there’s some areas of the Policy Book where we don’t have as much confidence in our positions as other areas, particularly PGR students. We only have about 100 of those here at Salford. But we should probably go to speak to those students to see how right we got it, and where they need more support. It will hopefully be a way to energise some student demographics such as this.
Alan: Where this works is about selecting the priorities, as ever. What are the University’s priorities? What are student priorities? Now, what beliefs does the union have about these and how does it form its workplan based on this? This will mean, for example, that University agendas can quickly and efficiently have notes returned from the Union on their existing position on any proposals, so that a full discussion can be had with plenty of notice. It means that students can act and organise in ways that might command more use of the Union’s resources. It means that the Union can focus its officer programmes of work each year.
Lauren: We’re talking to our marketing and comms team about how we bring this to life. Sharing a word document on our website isn’t a brilliant way to engage students! So they’ll probably distill it down into something more meaningful for the majority of students. I went to a session recently about using AI in SUs, where you can get ChatGPT to read committee papers and business cases, and test them against your organisational strategy, articles of governance, bye-laws etc. The idea was that ChatGPT could highlight where there might be areas that officers and staff would want to prioritise their time reading and understanding the proposal. I think this approach will be massively improved if we feed the Policy Book into an AI model like this.
Ed: And I think that says something about the current state of affairs in our SUs, if a massive corporate large language machine AI model that’s sweeping up everyone’s data doesn’t know enough about SU policy positions because we’ve not really ever written it down in one place…
Alan: I would just add that the process we’ve described above was probably more painful for Salford than it would be for another SU, now that you’ve broken the back of it. All another SU would need to do is to take Salford’s document and go through it and check that they agree with everything and there’s nothing missing.
Alvina: It might be that NUS has a model document in the future, and other SUs can just adopt that. It might even make national student policy setting easier and better, including by showing just how much agreement there is between most SUs.
Salford’s new Policy Book, a new by-law and the covering paper to Board.
