Wednesday 22-03-2023 - 12:00

 

Hi everyone! It's that time again where I update you on some of the things I've been up to this month. February was a bit of a shorter month, and I also took a week off of annual leave, so you'll be pleased to hear there's less content to read about this month. As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please do get in touch with me via email at Emma.Barlow@law.ac.uk

 

Cost of living

This month saw the University launch free period products in the bathrooms for students and staff at our eight own campuses. As a measure which began as a trial by the SU at our London campuses late last year, we're immensely grateful to the University Executive and EDI team for funding this project moving forward and including us in the collaboration. I also just wanted to say a huge thank you to our Estates and Facilities team for providing the infrastructure, rolling out the products so quickly and continually managing these products on a day to day basis. It wouldn't be possible without the hard work of these teams so a massive thank you to you all again. For those at our satellite-based campuses, free period products should already be provided by your host University.

 

The University also circulated a petition to all UK domicile students outside of London, Guildford and Southampton to see if there was demand for hosting a Northern graduation ceremony in addition to a London ceremony to help reduce the overall cost of the event for students. I've been supporting the University by promoting this survey out to eligible respondents and answering any questions students might have around this topic. This is something we as an SU are very much in favour of due to the demand we hear from students which has sadly only increased during this difficult economic time. We are yet to hear the outcome of the survey but are pleased to hear over 2000 students have responded already.



If any additional ceremonies are to be implemented, such changes unfortunately wouldn't be in place earlier than 2024. In light of this, following our recommendations in our Cost of Living report, the University has launched a generous Graduation support fund (including free gowning, guest tickets and a contribution towards travel costs) to assist eligible students in funding the cost of graduation. This is in place for all our graduation ceremonies this year, including our upcoming ceremony in May. For the upcoming ceremony, all students who are eligible to receive this fund have been contacted about how to apply. 

 

ULaw Leagues

This month we ran our highly anticipated ULaw Leagues event. I was running our events in the Manchester campus for the beginning of the week, and then at our Leeds campus for the second half of the week. Activities we ran included; house of cards, party pong, darts and tower building. It was great to have both student and staff teams engaged and competing against each other across our 6 campuses. Huge congratulations to 'The Titan Tribe' who was our overall winning team from the Manchester campus. If you're interested in seeing where your campus ranked, you can check out the leader board on our website: ULaw Leagues @ University of Law Students' Union . We'd love to hear your feedback on what you enjoyed, what we could do better, and how we could increase its success in future years – so please get in touch with any feedback you might have. 

 

 

Election content

Next month voting opens for our two Co-President roles for 2023-2024. We've refined the roles slightly, so for the next academic year there will be a Co-President of Academic Affairs, to focus on improving your academic experience, and a Co-President of Union Development, to focus on enhancing the university experience outside of your studies. This month I worked with members in the team to create and record promotional videos for both our nomination process (for those students wanting to put themselves forward to run as Co-Presidents) and voting period. Keep up to date with all our election content by checking your emails, our SU Instagram page, and our website: Co-President Election 2023/24 - Vote @ University of Law Students' Union . Voting is open between Monday 13th March – Friday 24th March at 12pm, so don't miss out and make sure you have your say! 

 

Campus' road trip' planning

To promote our elections, the team is planning on visiting all our UK based campuses during the voting period. Including, a trip to our campus in Berlin. I'll be heading to Berlin, Bloomsbury, Moorgate, Leeds and Sheffield in March. This month I've been in touch with SI teams, student reps and tutors to coordinate, plan and promote those upcoming visits. Keep an eye on your inbox for further details about when myself and/or another member of the team will be coming to your campus. 

 

University Mental Health Day (UMHD)

Following up from my update last month, the date for the national event has been confirmed for Thursday 9th March and planning the events for our ULaw campuses has been going well. I've decided to run a series of self-care events on the 9th, all being run online to ensure our entire staff and student body can attend. These include yoga, communiTEA and a talk being run by the University Mental Health team on managing your mental health in a digital age. Alongside these online events, I've been able to collaborate with the Library team at all eight of ULaw's own campuses to provide a stall of selfcare freebies and information about mental health and wellbeing services – both provided by the University and externally. This month I've been creating and compiling the information resources for the stalls along with researching, budgeting, purchasing, packaging and shipping the boxes to these campuses. Freebies include stress balls, badges, teabgs and biscuits. So make sure to head to your campus library on the day as well as keeping an eye out in your inbox to find out how you can sign up for the online events. 

 

Collaborative projects

This month we've started working on some new projects with the University to improve the student experience of several different student groups who are harder to reach and, in some instances, fall under the Universities widening participation remit. These include, discussions to be involved in a working group focused on improving the international student experience, review of the support measures for disabled students studying at our online campus and initial planning for Gypsy, Traveller, Roma, Showmen, Boatmen (GTRSB) History Month in June. 

 

Training and development review

I also participated some important training this month around sexual harassment and how to be an effective bystander. It was incredibly insightful and gave some simple and effective measures to take away and implement. It was great to see students, University and SU staff in attendance and is a training session I hope is continued in future. 

Alongside this, I had a professional development review this month and received some really great feedback on areas where I can improve and grow upon during my remaining few months in office. 

 

Student Staff Liaison Committee (SSLC) Project

Whilst we are awaiting the results back from the piloting of the new SSLCs, work continued on this project this month by setting up the central repository which will hopefully be used to store SSLC minutes in future. It's been set up so it can be reviewed at next month's meeting to see if its effective and can be accessed by both staff and students. Alongside this, I have begun creating a guide for where these documents need to be stored as part of my handover to the team taking on board this project when it's fully set up.