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I came here through clearing, and since then I’ve been given me so many opportunities to get involved both within the university and the students union which has given me an insight into issues you all face. I want to change Keele as a whole for the better – for you, for all.
These are a few of the following things that have driven me to run:
Barriers to Learning
University is already hard enough, but often we as students face barriers to learning which are frustrating at best and disadvantaging at worst. I have clear plan on how to address them:
- Continue the fight against the 10am assessment deadline, pushing it back to no earlier than 12pm (noon) on the original deadline day.
- Lobby for more transparency around hidden course costs in both marketing and course materials.
- Directly urge lecturers to utilise lecture capture if not already doing so and provide materials such as email templates allowing students to lobby staff members. Demand more transparency between staff and students as to why lecturers are not using lecture capture.
- Oppose any rise in tuition fee for undergraduate students, and demand higher quality education in relation to potential rising postgraduate fees
- Encourage timetabling where possible to group teaching together with breaks for lunch avoiding excessive gaps between lectures.
- Keep Wednesday Afternoon frees, and explore the viability of using Wednesday mornings for optional pastoral support e.g. personal tutor meetings
Employability
One thing most of us can probably relate to is the inevitable panic about career! All too often I talk to people who don’t know that Keele has a careers team, or what they offer. To address this, I will:
- Ensure that careers material is visible and accessible to all, including students who may not be IT-savvy. Ensure that the Keele Connect app is better publicised and explained.
- Work with school career officers to increase their visibility but to also to increase the provision of tailored career support, such as drop-in sessions in collaboration with career advisors.
- Collaborate with Activities and Communities officer to support and encourage academic societies to run extracurricular events surrounding employability.
- Lobby for more centrally ran, free, and certified courses to do alongside your degree.
Student Representation
I’ve learnt as both an SVR and an LVR that getting feedback can be hard – it can also be hard to close the feedback loop. Often students go unaware of what changes their voices make, and often students feel underrepresented. I’d like to fight against this by:
- Putting an online student voice platform back on the agenda by exploring the viability of implementing Unitu, a platform used around the Higher Education sector, to allow more people to engage anonymously with feedback and to allow staff to directly respond.
- Lobbying that the university keep future consultation schemes open allowing those who may typically go underrepresented, such as liberation groups, to have a voice.
- Pushing for more physical campaigns like Speak Week to ensure the voice of those who do not engage in surveys etc are being heard
- Working in collaboration with respective liberation part-time officers, and groups such as LGBTQ+ society and BAME society to inform my campaigns.
Academic Support
I’ve seen first-hand how the EC system varies from school to school which simply isn’t good enough, and from speaking to staff I know how they all too often feel as if they’re failing students as personal tutors. To fight these issues, I will:
- Lobby the university to simplify the exceptional circumstances process and provide more information on it e.g. what is classified as an exceptional circumstance, and improve consistency between schools through sharing of best-practice centrally
- Fight for a standardised email response time policy e.g. reply or acknowledgement of email within two working days
- Fight for better support for personal tutors, through centrally ran workshops covering mental health first aid, LGBTQ+ allyship, and supporting BAME to allow them to better support you
- Oppose university policy on personal tutors, removing the need to provide a reason to change your personal tutor – you shouldn’t have to disclose just to feel comfortable.
Assessments and Attainment
Why do schools all too often rely on the same assessment types? They should try something new. Beyond this, liberation groups on average attain lower than the national average but there isn’t always a clear plan on how this will be addressed. We can do better by:
- Encouraging more variety in assessment types when modules are being designed, allowing for individual strengths to be equally and fairly assessed
- Fighting for more advance notice of assignments and earlier release of essay questions to allow for students to seek guidance if necessary, especially before the holiday periods where staff may not reply to emails
- Lobbying schools to prevent clashes in deadlines between modules and fight to reduce the number of early January deadlines which make revising for exams harder
- Demanding schools adequately address how they plan to close attainment gaps within their annual course reviews including individual attainment gaps for liberation groups.
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