We spend much of the summer travelling around higher education delivering training on higher education policy, analysis and influencing to students’ union officers.

It’s fun, rewarding and frequently inspiring – but our days on campus are increasingly peppered with a problem – and that’s SU officers on conduct panels.

For large parts of a day when they should be discussing AI, belonging, campus facilities or internationalisation, SU officers are either preparing for or attending disciplinary panels involving students.

In many cases this aspect of “stick an SU sabb on it” culture (deployed frequently and lazily when one thinks they ought to have a student in the room) is codified into procedures that were developed when cases were rare and were more about “fights” or “weed in halls” than serious sexual or racial misconduct.

It’s not so much the disruption to the training sessions – although that is annoying. It’s the increasingly anachronistic nature of a practice that is growing both in scale, complexity and emotional demand given the nature of the issues being discussed.

Great expectations

First, we should look to regulation. The Office for Students’ consultation on harassment and sexual misconduct was oddly light on panel practice, although we might hope that situation changes when the response to the consultation eventually emerges.

Meanwhile the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIAHE) argues that the following represents “good practice” (its phrase for “what it expects”):

…Include trained student representatives on disciplinary panels where possible, although there must be appropriate separation between the representative on the panel, and those providing advice and support to students.

From OIAHE, Good Practice Framework: Disciplinary procedures, revised October 2018

On the separation issue, we don’t doubt that in all but the smallest providers this proviso is being adhered to on a technical basis. But more broadly student leaders are frequently involved in receiving disclosures from students, even if they are then signposted on.

We are also concerned about the abject lack of training that we are told is being delivered for student officers in this position – in some cases it’s non-existent, in others it’s basic stuff on what the policies say rather than weighing evidence against the relevant standard of proof.

We’d add here that it’s just as bad when the student officers reveal that have had training, but they’re the only one that has on the panels that they sit on.

Send him down

The bigger question is why it’s an SU officer at all. There’s a history to this – much of the campus student unrest in the UK in the 1960s and 70s concerned the struggle for fair disciplinary codes.

A National Union of Students (NUS) pamphlet in 1966 had argued that British justice allowed trial by one’s peers, and on these grounds NUS suggested that students be included on any discipline panel or committee.

One of the basic principles – that on non-academic matters at least, university officials/academics have no (more) special perspective than students’ peers – was hard won and is now long established.

This eventually became the norm throughout the late 1970s and 80s, with universities tending to invite the SU to supply (full time) student officers for any disciplinary panels that were convened – and in a large number of universities, the practice continues for both academic and non-academic misconduct.

But the more we talked to the student officers undertaking these tasks, the more we become concerned – and we began to identify a raft of issues that Jim and our colleague Sunday Blake included in a broader chapter on how to involve students in work on gender-based violence in a book on the issue.

• Reports of some student representatives (perhaps deliberately) misunderstanding their role, who may have thought they were there to support the student being accused;
• Concerns about the “profile” and surrounding “bias” of a student officer, particularly where they may have campaigned on issues surrounding gender-based violence and resultant concerns about bias or perceived bias;
• Concerns about panel diversity exacerbated by a lack of diversity amongst the SU officer team;
• As standards and expectations on panel members have increased, questions surrounding the capacity of an otherwise busy elected student representative to make effective contributions and judgements;
• Concerns that “this year’s Welfare officer” just “isn’t up to it really”;
• The problem of student panel members not turning up despite having confirmed attendance, insofar as that represents something outside of a university’s control;
• The need to progress cases during the summer when some student panel members may not be available;
• A sense from professional services staff that the student officer is there to both undertake their role but also under pressure to informally police outdated or inappropriate questions or views from others on a panel;
• The emotional and time burden on student officer members of panels involved and concern at insufficient support for student officers engaged in these processes;
• The risks when a student panel member may have used phrases or engaged in conduct which not only placed that particular panel at risk but risked legal proceedings against the university;
• Ambiguity around the extent to which a student would be covered by any insurances in place, and questions over the liability of student members where employees would be able to shelter under vicarious liability in an employment contract;

In the book, neither Jim nor Sunday took the view that these concerns should automatically involve the removal of student members of disciplinary committees, however complex and onerous the duties are when cases involve gender-based violence.

On the contrary – they regard student membership of panels as an important point of principle, given that an established way of strengthening and maintaining confidence in processes amongst the student body is to retain student involvement in them, and on the basis that it is perfectly possible to put in place appropriate safeguards to address all of the above concerns.

Crucially, we just don’t think it makes sense for student leaders to be on these panels, any more than it would for a pro-VC.

Alternatives are available

At some universities, there is a pooled disciplinary panel volunteers scheme, where all of the volunteers are current students, and it’s the students’ union advice centre that recruits and manages the volunteers.

They undertake training at the beginning of the year with external and university staff, including on the issues surrounding “burden of proof” and gender-based violence, as well as effective and appropriate panel conduct – and come together to discuss and review practice that can feed into improvements.

At another university, a scheme involving the joint recruitment by the SU and university of recent graduates into a pool operates effectively, and in others the “volunteer” style schemes above involve paying students on a sessional basis to undertake the duties involved.

We’d like to see types of this practice extended such that trained (and paid) student panel members could sit on panels at other universities or providers – especially where the provider is small and specialist or a franchised college.

We’d also like to see other types of this “stick a sabb on it” culture reviewed. In the early part of the summer we also lose student officers to quality review panels, and more generally it is just not healthy to have a small team or 4 or 5 officers (often containing one or two that have portfolios related to education and welfare) being expected to be effective on endless committee, boards and panels eating up their entire week.

We are pretty much the only country in Europe that does this – everywhere else there are strong traditions of the SU appointing a much broader base of students who are funded to pay students for their time to prepare for and contribute to university decision making.

Crucially, this is really about effectiveness, fairness and legitimacy. Maybe having considered all the options it really is the case that the “SU President or Welfare Officer” should be the person on the panel to deliver those three things. But we think it’s long past time to re-evaluate existing practice with that question front and centre.