Launch of our Annual Members’ Consultation 2023

It’s that time of the year again – the official launch of our Annual Members’ Consultation.

This article comprises three core elements:

1. The past - what the Union has been up to, 
   
2. The present - our progress and ‘wins’ achieved for you, our members, to date and  
   
3. The future - (exciting!) ideas for potential developments moving forward. 
   

To ensure this consultation is accessible to all and tailored to your interests, we've moved it entirely online. This allows you to ‘jump’ to sections using the links attached in the section outline above, which in turn gives you more time to look at the information that matters most to you, at a time and in a place that suits you.

Similar to last year, we’re also running it alongside our annual Beds SU Survey so you can also provide live feedback on our performance, as you’ve read about it here. We hope that this will provide us with lots of information that we can use in planning for the next academic year.

So please, have a read of as much or as little as you like, get in touch if you have any questions, and have your say on our performance so far and our ideas moving forward.

The Past: what has Beds SU been up to?

2021/22 - catch up on what you missed last year:

• View our Impact Report for 2021/22 (pdf, 22 pages)
• View our Financial Overview for 2021/22 (pages 18-19 of impact Report)
• Read the full version of our Audited Accounts (pdf, 38 pages) 

Any questions? Use this link to ask a question. You can take a look at what other people have asked further down this article.

The Present: the year so far...

2022 was a year of firsts, including our first full year of delivering our latest 4-year strategy (2021 – 2025). As our Co-Presidents, Laura and Quadri, mention in the Impact Report,

“We are pleased to report solid progress against our objectives and through our commitment to ensuring our students understand the role we play, in every aspect of their student life”.

By 2025, Beds SU aims to deepen its connection with members to ensure students benefit from engaging with their students’ union in their educational journey, whilst being visible and accessible throughout all aspects of the student experience.  We are also committed to taking risks on issues that matter to our students, on your behalf.

Our strategy will continue to ensure that we empower your voice and advocate for a fair, equitable and rewarding student experience:

• in your course,  
  
• in your student life,  
  
• in creating positive change, and  
  
• when you need support.  

You might wonder how we are going about to achieve this. Well, have a look at the links below to find out more about how each of these areas of work have been contributing towards a number of positive changes in your student journey so far:

• Your Exec ‘Win’: The Community Pantry 
  
• Communities 
  
• Student Voice  
  
• Events  
  
• Advice 

You can also view a summary of our Financial Forecast for 2022/23.

Any questions? Use this link to ask a question. You can take a look at what other people have asked further down this article. 

How are we doing? Provide feedback on our services in the Beds SU Survey and get entered into a prize draw where you could win one of five £200 cash prizes.

Your Exec 'Win': The Community Pantry

The cost-of-living is an issue affecting most people in the UK right now, including our student community. This has been made a priority for the Union after our ‘Cost-of-Living’ survey received 1,259 responses, to which 84% of you agreed that you were worried you “would not be able to afford basic necessities due to the rising cost of living”.

Your Exec Team wanted to ensure that as your SU, we could play our part in offering short term support to students, experiencing extenuating circumstances and unforeseen hardship. That is why they successfully launched a Community Pantry.

This has been trialled first in the Luton campus, with scope to roll out to other campuses, if there is a demand and resources permit.  So far, we have been able to support approximately 20 students  that needed to access emergency supplies!

*17 visit to Community Pantry

Communities

Our societies continue to be one of our key communities that bring like-mined students together to share common interests, with a 26% uplift to 958 sign-ups so far. This equated to 584 unique students – an increase of 19% compared to last year.

*65 societies, 958 combined members

* Over £1,900 granted to Societies for events and activities

One of our highlight events of the year was when our Tourism and Events Society organised a Festive World Travel Market. They invited students to explore their curiosity over various cultures and start ‘thinking about their next holiday destination’. The Metro was filled with flags of the world, buzzing with student-led “Christmas stalls” that showcased countries from around the world (Italy, Bangladesh, Bora Bora, to name a few!). Students were kept entertained with information, advice, free food, drink tasting, fun games, and even an impromptu dance session between different cultural dances.

It was a perfect opportunity to make new friends and have fun before the festive break – the society certainly ended the year on a high!

*71 visits made by staff to satellite campuses in the first two terms

Last year’s huge engagement in our University of Bedfordshire Student Chat group on Facebook was followed by another hit and brought another 2,899 students together to talk about things that matter to you. 

*11,880 members in the Student Chat. Please note, this is an estimate as we also have members joining for business purposes.

Student Voice

*103 student voice enquiries, 90% of course rep positions filled, 30 forums held to collect your feedback.

Feedback Online

To date, the total number of student voice enquiries via the online form is 103. The SU worked in partnership with the University to ensure that your feedback was sent to the most appropriate place and that you get a response as soon as possible. 

Talk to Your Reps

This year, a total of 406 Course Reps acted as key partners between Beds SU, UoB, and the student body, championing your academic views and ideas. These students dedicated a significant amount of time to collate and act on student feedback alongside their studies, that in turn aimed to influence and enhance the student experience across courses.

We saw a number of wins for our individual campuses, with Campus Reps working hard to secure exclusive benefits for local students. For example, our Milton Keynes Campus Rep, Lynsey Rush, secured a 25% student discount at Middletons Steak House and a monthly offer of £35 with no tie in or joining fee at Bannatyne Gym.

Attend a Meeting

Feedback from these Reps – alongside our other feedback routes above – feeds into committees across the University, influencing change at all levels. We also hold a number of our very own forums, spread between Campus Forums Student Network Forums, and Chats for Change. This ensures a diverse offer of platforms to which students can attend and discuss both individual and broader themes impacting their student experience.

As a result of these, we were able to hear from students, report their feedback, and achieve a number of positive changes, including a laptop loan scheme on outlying campuses and a hot drink vending machine at Milton Keynes!

Through using the Three Methods to feedback, several Arts and Creative Industries students requested a space to showcase their skills. We've worked alongside them to create Beds SU's first ever Green Fashion Show, celebrating the fantastic creations made by our students, and providing more information on sustainable clothing.

Events

We have continued to work hard to provide facilities and entertainment that caters to our diverse membership, paying close attention to student feedback and demands on services that, together, inform our commercial direction.

After feedback from our students both in Bedford and across all of our campuses, we were delighted to continue our Afrobeat nights at Metro and debut the event at the Hub. Our most recent event at the Hub in Bedford had 120 students in attendance partying until the early hours.

In celebration of pride month, we hosted a Drag Bingo Night with the one and only Sandy Flaps for an entertaining night of bingo with several novelty prizes won!

*285 events (Luton - 161, Bedford - 105, Other campuses - 19) held in our venues in the first two terms

Another year of Diwali celebrations embraced a fantastic atmosphere where many students joined and danced the afternoon away, whilst dressed in traditional clothing. Our Indian Society, with the support of our SU and Metro staff, made it all the more special and dressed the Metro with traditional decorations to set the mood. Plenty of students stayed for the whole day, with the die-hard amongst them still sitting around with guitars and singing traditional Indian songs until closing time!

Our venues not only look to provide a space for activities and socialising, but they also offer employment opportunities to students. As a proud Living Wage employer, our not-for-profit venues – Metro and The Hub – put more than £92,500 back into student pockets so far this year, as well as an additional £70,000 put back into International student pockets.

*9,000 hours of student staff employment paid

Advice

We are pleased to confirm that we have continued to deliver a fully blended support service for second year running.

As previously mentioned, with a simple click of one (red-coloured) button, you can now contact Beds SU through one single email address – help@bedssu.co.uk – and our enquiries service does the hard work for you, tracking down the right person to answer the question!

*4,478 student enquiries received so far

As stated on our website, we do hope attending university will be one of the best experiences of your life! But, we also know it has its ups and downs and we have a dedicated team on advisors on hand to help. 

Our online drop-ins have been continuously utilised and valued by many students. Supported by the enquiries team, they are designed to help you get quick access to an Advisor from wherever you are. We additionally offer a Drop-in on Thursdays from 4:30pm - 6:00pm, especially for those with work or caring commitments that prevent them from joining Drop-ins during the day, launched this year on the back of student feedback.

We have continued to offer support to students from all UoB campuses on topics such as Academic Appeals, University complaints, Finance, and Housing. One major outcome of a recent appeal we had allowed our student the opportunity to re-submit their work, uncapped, which meant they had the opportunity of getting a higher grade.

Our Advisors alongside the wider Students’ Union team are also creating more self-help articles, including ‘How to Complete an Academic Appeal’ to ‘How to Claim Money Back for Delayed Trains’, to offer students help and support in an easy and accessible format. In this academic year we published 53 articles, with many more planned for the coming year.

*205 hours of online Drop-ins offered, 53 self-help articles published for students, 543 cases supported by our advisors

Every student who uses the enquiries and advice services are given the opportunity to feedback on the service that they receive and we’ll be using this feedback to ensure that we continue to improve what’s on offer.

Any questions? Use this link to ask a question. You can take a look at what other people have asked further down this article. 

How are we doing? Provide feedback on our services in the Beds SU Survey and get entered into a prize draw to win one of five £200 cash prizes.

The Future: what's coming next?

Beds SU is constantly changing based upon the needs of our members, and each year we collect feedback to better our services and activities for students. We are very grateful for everyone who has taken part in this Annual Members’ Meeting 2023.

On that note, the elected Executive Committee, on behalf of the Board of Trustees, have proposed a range of changes to our Bylaws, our governing documents that guide the way we work for our members. You can read the full document (also supplied) or a summary of changes found below.

The summary has been divided between 'big changes' which impact the spirit of Bylaws, and 'small changes', which do not.

As a member-led organisation, we need your approval to make these changes. Which is why you are asked to vote in a referendum and have your say in our Beds SU Survey.

The question simply is ‘Do you approve this change: yes or no?’.

If you have any questions or would like clarification, please contact be.heard@beds.ac.uk.

The big changes: Sabbatical Officer Proposal (Chapter 5)...

At Beds SU, we constantly review the way we think, behave, and look based upon feedback, experiences, and the needs of you, our members. So, the Executives are proposing a change to the structure of the Sabbatical Officer team you elect to better allocate Union resource, giving you better visibility and access to reps.

We want to reduce the full-time team to two Co-Presidents, and introduce four part-time Faculty Officers, one for each Faculty of the University, that will be current students from YOUR Faculty, spending time with YOU in improving YOUR student experience.

Press the video below to hear all about it in detail directly from our current Officers:

The small changes...

Small changes that are proposed below are a result of our annual review process to ensure our Bylaws are up to date. We have summarised which sections of the Bylaws have been updated and tried to highlight what prompted the change, the intended change, and the effect that you should see if these changes are passed.

Some highlights include:

• introducing a group of student experts that will 'keep us on our toes' by holding our democratic process' to account on YOUR behalf;
• opening submissions of and voting on petitions for ALL students ensuring we represent the most current student-issues; and,
  
• aim to improve overall transparency with the SU by enhancing, for example, our Elections and Officer engagement.

Read more details about the above, as well as other changes we are proposing, by clicking this link. This is also compatible with a screen reader, if required. If interested, feel free to read this version (pdf, 40 pages) which indicates how the full version of the Bylaws will look like.

Now, for one last time... as a member-led organisation, we need your approval to make this change. Which is why you are asked to vote in a referendum and have your say in our Beds SU Survey.

The question simply is ‘Do you approve this change: yes or no?’.

If you have any questions or would like clarification, please contact be.heard@beds.ac.uk.

Got an opinion on how we’ve performed this year? Provide feedback on our services in the Beds SU Survey and get entered into a prize draw and a chance to win one of five £200 cash prizes.

Your Questions

Thanks to everyone who has been in touch with questions. Click on the questions below to see the answers already provided or ask your own question here.

Where do my questions get sent?

It depends what your question is about – we will seek to get it to the person who knows the most about it. For example, if you have an operational question about our Campus Reps, we would ask the staff member responsible for supporting Campus Reps. However, if you were seeking information about the strategy behind the Union, we might ask one of our Board of Trustees to get back to you.