Our Academic Affairs Officer, Lisa and Development Officer, Adam trained 140 undergraduate course reps to ensure that your Course Reps can lobby for a better education on your behalf. 93% of reps have said that it will help them in their role! 

We reformed the Course Rep system! Lisa’s predecessor, Ben, worked to change how Course Reps were elected. Lisa and Union Staff supported the Course Rep election system which resulted in more course reps being elected and ensuring that you’re being represented.

Our Course Reps in Geography raised a concern about a lack of interdisciplinary modules, this was looked into and they have recently confirmed two new interdisciplinary modules to start next year.

Our President, Alice, proposed splitting the Academic Affairs role and from next year, we’ll have two Academic Officer positions (one for Postgraduate issues and one for Undergraduate issues) to ensure that education is a top priority of the Students’ Union. We are one of the few Union’s in the country to have this provision as we understand that the issues that undergraduates and postgraduates face are huge.

Lisa gained a commitment to additional social learning space in new teaching and learning buildings. This includes plenty of space for eating your own food!

Union staff have been supporting students who submit their ideas for educational change through our student voice platform. A student has already created an idea about reading weeks. You can submit your own idea here.

The Students' Union recruited the biggest team of Faculty Reps that we've ever had which means we have an army of reps to achieve wins for students.

In 2015/16, our Advice Service dealt with over 700 cases, and over 100 of these were academic issues. Whether it was a student accused of plagarism or making an appeal about a grade - our advisers were here to help.

We've done a lot of work crafting a policy on how the Union should tackle fee rises, which is really important with the University soon being able to increase tuition fees in-line with the teaching quality.  

We don't think you should have to pay more an excellent education!

„Course Reps have lobbied for additional lectures being put on when students perceived that content had not been presented effectively ensuring that their education is not severely impacted by this.

When a university department announced that summatives and formatives could not be written on the same topic only a week before the deadline, a Course Rep convinced the department to change this policy immediately.

Last year some students found they had lectures straight after each other which were the other side of campus - you came here to study and not be Mo Farah so Course Reps managed to get the rooms changed to be in the same building.

Because of the nature of their courses, some joint honours students can feel detached from their departments. Our Course Reps have convinced the departments to run social opportunities for these students to get to know each other better.