At Sussex, we’ve been spending a lot of time looking at how students can make change.
We’ve been looking at what it is that they can do to make change (as opposed to what we do for them).
We’ve been exploring how all the different bits of work that fall under the remit of Student Voice can fit together – with advice, democracy, research and support for officers and reps.
And now that our elections are over, we’ve been talking about student rights as a common framing for these different areas of our work, and looking through slides from last year’s Membership Services Conference on our mini away day.
We have also been looking at student complaints and nudniks, and how one student making a complaint that really lands can bring about much wider change.
Causing a fuss
Nudniks are people who complain, and are assertive in their rights, often motivated by a sense of injustice.
They’re good at holding powerful people and organisations accountable, particularly over broken promises. You’ve probably come across someone acting in this capacity in a queue, when a train is delayed, or when their food is cold in a restaurant.
You may even have come across some on campus – an especially vocal member of your council, or a society president who wants to revolutionise the system for room bookings.
Our advisors recognise examples of students they’ve supported before who fit the definition – and note how these had often been cases which led to reviews of university policy.
It’s this process (outlined in the slides linked above) that we’re interested in. Students experiencing problems, students complaining and asserting their rights, and the university making positive changes as a response – either to avoid the hassle of future complaints, or (ideally) because they’ve realised they’re doing something they shouldn’t.
We understand our role as the union in facilitating that process to happen – and spent the end of our team day looking at how we can reduce the barriers to complaining, how we can promote student rights, and how we can make it more likely that a complaint lands well and then leads to a change in policy.
Making it “cooler” to complain came up, discussing complaints as a form of political agency – and we discussed complaining as a form of solidarity – after all, nudniks might act against a cost benefit analysis for them as individuals, but when we look at change resulting from a complaint, the benefits to the community as a whole can be much bigger.
But despite all of this, we know there are still a lot of things that make it less likely that someone will complain – and a lot of students (often referred to as “passivists”) are more likely to “suck it up” than to stick their neck out.
Meet the parents
The theory with nudniks doesn’t rely on a large volume of complainants – it’s the quality of the complaint, and the persistence of the complainant that matters.
We all knew students who’d been effective at complaining, but a few in particular have stood out to Lewis and Flo. They have all been student parents – and when they’re talking about why they’re motivated, the parental thing often comes up.
The sense of injustice and frustration, and the concern for the system is more stark for someone who has children who themselves are shortly planning to enter into higher education. It’s parents who, through their role as current student reps, have become acutely aware that protection for students when changes happen is weak.
Parents tend to be good at complaining, even when they aren’t current students. By nature of being a bit older, a bit more sure of themselves and (perhaps) a bit more experienced at navigating the kind of procedural gridlock that drags out so many complaints and appeals.
This isn’t just limited to universities – Joe was a sabb in 2022/23, and by far the most aggrieved emails he received asking what the SU was doing came from parents, not students themselves.
Just last week a prominent parent campaigner won a battle to change the way graduate salary statistics are published. Many in the sector won’t agree with him – but he’s become a “go to” person for the parts of the press that are suspicious about university. It would be helpful if there were others more in line with our goals.
Downsides and opportunities
We’re normally, (understandably) reluctant to think about engaging with students’ parents as political allies. Not everyone has parental support, and the union shouldn’t rely on any assumption of this.
There are valid concerns around transmission of cultural capital, and not wanting the union as a service provider to recreate the very hierarchies we’d hope education to dismantle – we should ensure the agency always lies with our members.
And of course it is the case that SU advocacy and support for any individual needs to be designed with estranged students, bereaved students, first generation scholars in mind, without any presumption of parental support.
Nevertheless, there may be opportunities to leverage examples where parents are playing a more active role in a complaint process as a tactic to bring about policy change.
With nudniks, you don’t need a critical mass of complainants. You need one, in a strong position, to bring about system change to the benefit of everyone. And post-pandemic, the role of parents in their children’s education might be changing, or at least being thought about differently – especially as frozen loan thresholds and fiscal drag shift more of the immediate cost onto them.
Yet we’ve hardly come across any SU with a dedicated page on the website, or guide for what parents need to know that might help students navigate adversarial processes – let alone an SU with a dedicated political strategy to engage them as stakeholders in campaigns.
Parent power
When Joe worked for NUS, he was working on member engagement in the lead up to the general election. One of the things that can make national lobbying easier is if political parties are trying to court the student vote.
You’re in a much stronger position asking potential MPs for commitments if they feel some level of reliance on you or your members to win – hence the importance of work like this gaining traction. It’s why getting students to turn up in 2024 is partly about setting the groundwork for 2029. It’s also why it’s a problem that the Labour Party strategy revolved around two key target voter groups as “Stevenage Woman” and “Workington Man”- with little desire to win over “UEA Student”.
Whether or not political parties will re-focus their strategy more towards winning over young people and those in education remains to be seen. But a paradox we’ve always wrangled with is that the general population tends to have a pretty favourable view of the idea of higher education, but is seemingly dead against any kind of increase to funding (either through state spending or tuition fees).
“Stevenage Woman” might care about HE – but isn’t aware of the scale of the challenges facing it. Universities aren’t likely to have a truly open conversation with the general public soon – there’s always that problem about not wanting to cause a “run on the bank”.
So it might fall to SUs to work to create that kind of change in perception. People like our reps – who become aware of the challenges facing HE, and feel genuine concern as their children are going round open days in October. Rather than just protest the open day, (a controversial tactic that itself is partially a form of leveraging power in the parent-university relationship) SUs could think more deliberately.
We could choose to empower parents with advice on how to support students to succeed in a way that encompasses their rights when things go wrong. We could publish material for parents that explains how they can both support their children – and other students at university – in a way that is empowering rather than damaging.
We could create communications that explain what’s helpful and not helpful that are led by students themselves. We can publish some of our stats and research and policy knowledge in a way that might encourage parents to join the fight for better funding and improved mental health support.
But we can also think about how we can enable parents that are keen to make complaints to do so in a way that is more likely to result in change. After all, if students themselves – for a myriad of reasons – don’t fancy kicking up a fuss, it would be wasteful to ignore those that do.
