You hear about a crisis. You put in a quick meeting with student officers and staff together.
You make an action plan (complexity varies from an Instagram comms plan to a yearlong campaign). You enact that plan.
Crisis averted. Repeat the cycle as many times as necessary.
OR
You care about something as a student. You realise you want to change it.
You run to be an SU officer on that platform and with loads of promises on it. You get elected.
You work as hard as you can during the year to make changes around that issue. Success was whatever you think it was…
Broadly, these are the two ways SUs run and enact change. The nature of our jobs is immensely reactive. There’s an issue, we move to fix it.
The election of student officers means change cycles are about a year long, and what doesn’t get fixed gets added on some sort of “issues car park” that might or might not be addressed at some point.
Maybe it will be, if enough students make noise about it, or if it happens to align with what incoming officers want to work on.
At Bath, about six months ago we began to challenge that model.
We asked ourselves if we were being as effective as we could be as a representative body. The honest answer we gave ourselves was that we weren’t.
Don’t get us wrong. We achieve tons as a students’ union. We have some great ways of lobbying and influencing, like our SU Top 10.
Our size, the post-Covid era, a recent change in senior leadership and a strong partnership with the university has enabled us to try new ways of working and different staff and officers’ structures.
We were also inspired by our time in the Baltics and Finland last year, where we saw similar university and SU joint ambitions on delivering the best student experience. Our new approach is a different, partly riskier approach to our influencing.
Because we decided that to win big, we had to change things. And what we want to achieve is as ambitious as we can get.
The best student life in the world
The gist of it is that we wanted to know what students and future students thought the issues were with the student experience, and we wanted to plan our work – internally and in partnership with the university – around their feedback.
We wanted to propose things, rather than only react to them. And we wanted to do it in a way that enabled us to thrive and be the best in the world, rather than just survive and compete with a few counterparts.
So, we went out and spoke to our students.
We collected feedback by bringing our entire SU staff and officer team together, tasking them to go out and talk to students. In a period of just over two weeks (and including two university open days), we asked students and prospective students what their biggest challenges were (or perceived future challenges), and what the positive things were (or things they were excited about), in relation to their university experience.
We spoke to 1,000s of students and collected over 11,500 individual comments in total.
We also collected feedback through forums with students and student leaders, different surveys that we ran throughout the year (like a cost-of-living survey, housing survey, a wellbeing survey, among others – cited throughout the report as relevant), and publicly accessible data from the SU, the university, and in some cases, the sector.
And after months of collecting this feedback and curating it, we reached six core ambitions:
- The University of Bath will be the most accessible university experience in the world.
- We will be the most empowered students in the world, and this will help us change the world.
- Bath will be the best city in the world to be a student.
- The University of Bath will be the most healthy and supportive student community in the world.
- Our learning experience at University of Bath prepares us to shape the world.
- The University of Bath will excel from the strongest, most constructive partnership between students and their university in the world.
What each of these mean in detail, I will let you read in the full report.
What shaping tomorrow looks like
The honest answer is, we don’t yet know.
This report was finished and announced in December and launched in January – this very week! So, we presented it at the University Executive Board where it was very well received. The outcome was the beginning of further conversations – developing a set of strategic conversations – where we will talk about how the SU and the university can work in partnership to deliver on these aims.
The next step of this journey with us is a massive launch to over 100 members of university staff, where we will look at the findings in detail and even include video testimonies from students that participated in the gathering of data.
Our hope is that a conversation begins where the university recognises that as the voice of students, we are best placed to shape the student experience to be the best it can be. With the right resources and support, we can lead on the work of this partnership and ask for help when we need it.
In the current higher education landscape, where resources are tight and institutions are trying to be as cost-effective as they can be, SUs are uniquely placed to deliver great value for institutions along with delivering significant levels of impact, all while empowering their students. This is core to our SU strategy as well – building on our model of student-led activity, which is underpinned by high-quality professional staff support.
We ensure student leaders and elected representatives are at the heart of creating opportunities for their fellow students to come together and inspire each other to change and shape the world around them. And, in a way, this manifesto also provides our soon-to-be SU officer candidates with a blueprint on what they could focus their campaigns on, and how they can make informed promises on their track to becoming the next student leaders of our union.
What about our Strategy?
Our SU strategy, like most SUs, talks about our strategic ambitions, our values and our foundations. All this is important and will strengthen our organisation. But Together We Shape Tomorrow stretches our thinking – beyond how the SU improves the experience of its members, but to how the SU leads and works with the university to deliver the best student experience.
We’re busy thinking about new, bold and creative solutions – and confident our next strategy will look very different.
Internally, we expect that this work will help us prepare for the future and allocate resources to these core ambitions, as we expect them to remain pressing and even grow in importance. Rather than react to things as they come, we hope to put new officers’ priorities and the top 10 (link above) together with some of the core ambitions.
Whether or not this is a cyclical report, we haven’t decided. What tomorrow looks like, the ambitions illustrate what we hope from it, but the university will have to decide how much they believe, support, and invest in that vision. What we know with certainty is that it will direct our strategy massively.
And towards tomorrow
Our recommendation to other unions would be that, whether you have the time and resources to put something like this together, or a relationship with the university that puts you in the position to build such a close partnership like the one we propose, the exercise of asking your students about the good as well as the bad, and prospective students what their student experience would ideally look like, will strengthen your position as an informed and trusted voice of students.
It also helps to combat the persistent reactivity we are all too used to as a sector, enabling you to work with students to shape long term goals for your union and institution. We think there is an opportunity for SU’s to really drive strategic thinking in relation to the student experience well beyond our own organisations, and we are hoping our model provides a framework to do this.
Keep an eye out for further updates. Hopefully, the tomorrow we shape will be one others want to be part of, and the next blog post related to TWST will be a pathway to get there!
