14
Examination of Witnesses
Rania Regaieg and Mack Marshall.
Q106 The Chair: Good morning. This is the Industry and Regulators Committee of the House of Lords. We are conducting an inquiry into the Office for Students. This morning we have evidence from Rania Regaieg and from Mack Marshall, who have both had experience as students engaging with the whole of the university sector. Therefore, we would like to ask about your views and your understanding of the OfS.
Can we start with a very general question about any experience that you have had working with the OfS, feeding information in, and get an assessment of how you generally were listened to?
Rania Regaieg: My experience of working with the Office for Students has been minimal, to be completely honest. Bear in mind that I have been vice-president community and welfare for a year, and this is my second year as a sabbatical officer. The first time I had contact with them was when I started a network for the sabbatical officers in the south-west, and we invited them to speak to the officers in that south-west network in order for us to get a better understanding of what the OfS is and how we could work better together.
Moving on from that, we have responded to some consultations where we were able to have internal support. Again, as a student union, sometimes we are not able to respond to consultations when the OfS asks us to, if we do not have existing support to enable that. I have also been involved with the TEF, particularly this year. I have led the students’ submission in my student union and gathered student feedback to that.
Overall, I would have liked to have more engagement with them. I would have liked to be able to have a direct way to influence policies or potentially their priorities, but my experience so far has been minimal.
Mack Marshall: I would echo what Rania said. I have been education officer at Newcastle for a year now, and the most engagement I get is typically through a weekly newsletter or email just summarising what is going on at the Office for Students.
I also led on the teaching excellence framework students’ submission, and support and guidance through that was very much on the side. Most of the student unions, guilds or associations were expected to put in a submission to that, and there was not really the signalling for resource or capacity to do that. The quality of the submission depended on the student union and the support networks, but there was not much support through that process. It was typically as though you were consulted; you were not really engaged as a partner with the OfS throughout the process.
For the TEF, it is noticeable that we were the main student contact, but we did not really have an OfS contact. We never had a person to go to or work with if we wanted to work on policy or procedure, or to improve the student experience. We would never look to the OfS to support that, because it has not been a present partner in that work.
The Chair: You are suggesting that it was more a token consultation than reality.
Mack Marshall: Yes, I would say so.
Rania Regaieg: Yes.
The Chair: The clue is supposed to be in the name. It is the Office for Students. Do you think most students have much concept of the OfS being their protector or their advocate?
Mack Marshall: I do not think students even know what the OfS is. For the most part, they do not need to. I do not know who the regulator is for my kitchen appliances, and that is fine, but I also know that, if my toaster breaks down, I should be angry and I should complain, and I would know who to complain to, I suppose.
Students come from a background where it is Ofsted or further education, and they know that there is not much room to argue, complain or voice their interests. At university it is a very different picture. You would hope that that is where you would know of the existence of the OfS and that you could raise things to it, and you would know your rights or the conditions of registration, for example. There seems to be a lack of effective communication to officers, student representatives and students themselves about expectations, educational quality and what is expected in their teaching, their learning and their experience.
Rania Regaieg: The general student body is not fully aware of the OfS and what it does. I was not aware of it when I was a student. I have become more aware of it only since I have been an officer representing students.
We not only need to be aware that it is there. We also need to know what it can do for us and how it could help us to improve the student experience, particularly of the conditions for registration, as Mack mentioned. We need to be able to understand them as sabbatical officers so that we can help other students to understand them. Frankly, the OfS website is not written in a way that is easily accessible and understandable to students. If we understand it better, we can help other students to understand, which will then, I hope, improve the perception of the OfS in the student body.
Q107 Lord Burns: Good morning. Do you think that mechanisms such as the student panel and the National Student Survey have much impact on the work of the OfS? Do you have much involvement with the student survey?
Mack Marshall: On the NSS, the questions about assessment and feedback have been scoring low across all institutions for a long time. Questions on community and well-being are typically scored quite low across the sector. In my eyes, if the OfS was responding to the NSS as the big student survey and that was driving its work, we would see more regulation on things such as assessment and feedback. We would see more guidance, drive and support there, but we do not see that at all. We have NSS action plans at our institutions and we respond to it, but, from the top level, we would expect more guidance on sector-wide challenges such as assessment and feedback, which has been scoring low for years. We have not really seen a reaction to that.
Lord Burns: What are the main concerns? What are the things that you would like to get over to the Office for Students about the experience of being a student?
Mack Marshall: I am sure Rania will add to this too. For me, the key things that students are worried about right now are the cost of living crisis, well-being and industrial action. We do not hear anything from the Office for Students on those things, or at least nothing substantial enough to influence our work and to improve the student experience. We do not typically look to OfS for that guidance and that consultation to say, “Okay, we’ll use this in these meetings to make change with our institutions”.
We are not hearing anything on what the minimum number of well-being councillors should be in an institution, whether we should be waiting two weeks or seven weeks for a councillor, or what students’ rights are when it comes to industrial action. That sort of guidance, regulation and support is vital if we are to deliver for students.
Rania Regaieg: I have similar thoughts on what students think they need and what they are struggling with at the moment. That is common particularly across the south-west, and across other student unions. We not only need the OfS to provide information on the services that support the students, but we need to know the bare minimum or standards of those services. You can have a service, but if it is not working well, and we do not know what good and effective services consist of, we are not going to be able to challenge in turn in our universities and improve those services for the students.
You asked earlier whether we have had any engagement with the student panel. No, we have not. In my student union, we have never had any direct link to the student panel. I have tried to find a way to work with them. That is something that we would like to look into, potentially to build those connections. Having a student voice in the OfS, whether that is through a student panel or elsewhere, is really important. It is supposed to be the Office for Students. If you do not have a student voice, why does it exist?
Mack Marshall: It is really interesting that none of the regulation or framework for the OfS talks about students as partners. In the work we do in institutions, we are seeing literature and evidence that working, partnering and co-creating with students is the best way to deliver results and to get a student-centred experience. Students are like an add-on in these processes through the consultation, the student panel and the NSS. It does not feel like they are integrated at the heart of the practice, which would be ideal.
Lord Burns: We are trying to find out how the students and the individual student unions could play a bigger role in influencing both the student panel and the OfS in terms of student experiences. Can you think of ways in which that could be improved?
Mack Marshall: Do you mean in terms of how the OfS could engage better with students and be more student-centred?
Lord Burns: Yes.
Mack Marshall: Communication is key to that. It is about communicating with student unions and officers. We do not have a lot of engagement with them, so it is about having that principal lead of someone to go to and contact, communicating better to students about the conditions of registration and what their rights are, and integrating that practice so that it is not just a consultation but an ongoing process of engagement.
Lord Burns: I have noticed that your comments have not been about your education, but, in a sense, the things that surround it. How do you feel about the quality of the education you are getting and whether you should have more of a voice with the OfS?
Rania Regaieg: It is particularly difficult to answer that one when you do not know the bare minimum level that you should be getting. If you do not know your rights, how can you evaluate whether you are getting good quality? I know that I was happy with the education that I got when I was studying at my university, because everything mostly went well for me. I thought that was what I should be getting, but I do not always know my student rights very well. That is the same for pretty much all the students. We need to know our rights in order for us to challenge and to say whether it is good-quality education.
Mack Marshall: On the wider student experience, I know we talk a lot about well-being and the cost of living crisis, but as officers we see the impact of mental health and financial stability at university. Those things are not extracurricular; they integrate and influence the full student experience. Studying is a huge part of that.
Q108 Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted: I am hearing that you find it difficult to get integrated, if you like, into the machinations of the Office for Students. In theory, at least, you are supposed to be involved in some OfS processes such as the teaching excellence framework reviews. I have heard what you have said about it being very difficult to respond to consultations because of a resource issue. That probably merits some further looking at, but to what extent are your student unions and the wider student bodies aware and engaged in those processes?
Also, is it clear to you why students are consulted in some areas and not others? I understand the issue of resources, and that even for you to communicate outwardly in the student area requires resources, but how is that going?
Rania Regaieg: For me, it has gone well in the sense that we have used pre-existing feedback as well as gathering new feedback that we did not have. We used the resources that we already have, so we are not reinventing the wheel, in a way. It has helped us a little.
The area we struggled with a little was what needed to be in the student submission, when we were going out to students and asking them about their feedback, so that we could formulate our response to that and eventually submit the report. The guidance for the student submission was released very late, I believe in October, and the submission itself was in January. That did not leave us with much time.
In my university, students start around September. In other universities they start in October. They have not really settled in yet. You are trying to ask them about their experience of education and everything, and they have been there for only a couple of weeks. They do not necessarily understand much about that. November time is usually an assessment period, so no one wants to contribute as much to those kinds of things, and they are gone for Christmas. Then it is submission time in January.
There could have been better support throughout that time. Better planning of the timelines for when you are going to release the guidelines would give us more understanding of how we can work locally with the students and ensure that we engage with them to contribute to our consultation and our reports.
We do not necessarily understand why the OfS consults on certain things and not others. I do not know why certain things are prioritised and others are not. I would like to understand how priorities are chosen internally. That would be particularly helpful for us as sabbatical officers and student unions.
Mack Marshall: I would absolutely echo that. I thought the teaching excellence framework was a fantastic opportunity, and the student submission was a great opportunity to give student perspectives on the student experience and student outcomes. When I came into the role in June, we knew that we would have to submit at some point, but we did not have a date. We knew it might be early 2023. That could be anywhere between January and March, and we are balancing multiple deadlines and multiple workloads.
We were really excited about the opportunity to give the student voice. At my student union, we were really lucky that we had four years’ worth of student voice data to draw upon. We did not need to do a great deal of additional evidence gathering, but that is not the case for every institution. The guidance came out in October, at which point I had already written a draft and had to restart because of the different expectations. We would not treat our students like that if we were asking them to do an essay. We would give that and they would be able to plan their time a lot more effectively.
Exactly as Rania said, we want to engage with current students. The expectation was that that process was to get current students’ views on what their education looked like. If you give us the guidance in October and we are submitting in early January, we have minimal time to get that feedback, to ensure that it is quality feedback, to influence the process and for students to be able to engage with that effectively. That was really tricky.
I do not think that students are aware of these processes, much the same way that they are not aware of the Office for Students. We wanted to co-create this piece. We consulted with our student representatives as part of writing the submission, which was something we chose to do. That was not expected; that was not a requirement. Then we made sure that we communicated what we were doing and, when we submitted it, what our action plans were back to the students. Again, that was our choice to do that. There was no expectation. The OfS did not that process more accessible to students. That was our choice, and we were really pleased we did that, but it was not supported or guided by the Office for Students.
I am unclear as to why we are consulted sometimes. I understand that the teaching excellence framework is about student experiences and student outcomes, but on the wider student experience, including the cost of living crisis or access and participation plans, sometimes you are consulted and sometimes you are not. It is a consultation; it is not about working with students as partners. It is hit and miss, so a bit more clarity would be really appreciated.
Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted: I am really picking up a lack of communication and possibly awareness of the cycle of student life and when is a sensible time for them to ask for input. Do you feel that the student input impacts on the OfS’s work? Are you seeing results? You do not understand how they set their priorities so, on the other side of that, when they have consulted, do you see any results and should they report more clearly on that? For instance, should they have an annual report about how they have taken into account the input from the student side? I would hope that would be timed well to match with the student cycle.
Mack Marshall: At our student union, we do a strategic plan every five years and we set out our KPIs and objectives. I am sure many other organisations do the same. It would be really nice to see that from the OfS. What are your priorities and how are they influenced by students? When we are getting the university to respond to student feedback, we often say, “Can you close that feedback loop? Can you say what you did, what you couldn’t do and why you couldn’t do it, why you did what you did and how you did it?” We do not have that closing of the feedback loop, so reports like that would be massively helpful.
Rania Regaieg: We would really appreciate that as well, particularly when it comes to the NSS, so that we can understand the national picture and what is being done with that feedback. NSS is for final-year undergraduate students. They do not see the impact of their feedback. They give it, they leave, they go and get a job, and they get on with their lives. That feedback itself helps the universities to make those courses much better for the students who are coming afterwards. To have a report from the OfS detailing the impact of the feedback and the work it does would be especially helpful.
One thing to note when we talk about processes and the TEF is that the submission itself is optional. It was not even mandatory, but as student unions we have put a lot of hard work into it within a very short timeframe. If the OfS really thinks that it is putting the students at the heart of its policy and at the heart of everything, should that student submission not be mandatory? Why is it optional? Universities do not even get penalised if they do not put in a student submission. We chose to do it because we care and we want the student voice to be heard as part of that. I believe—as do many other people, I presume—that it should be a mandatory submission, not an optional one.
Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted: Do you think that, if you were more involved, you would be more stretched because of the resource issue? I do not quite know how you are going to close that gap, but one effect of you being more consulted would be that you always have to do more work on your side. Also, how close do you think that relationship should be? You mentioned previously that you would like to have context and go to people who would help out, but would you feel that that was in some way breaching independence? It is always a question between a regulator and other people, but then it is supposed to be for your benefit.
Rania Regaieg: We would like to be less consulted and treated more as partners. Personally, as a student union president, my student union and I work as partners with our university. For example, we have a university and student union partnership board where we meet regularly and work on a partnership project each year together. That is not a consultation. That is about co-creating with students and working as partners.
We would like that kind of work with the OfS, which we would prioritise because that is something we care about. It might mean that we are a little overstretched, but if we know what kind of projects we are going to be co-creating together, we can then plan our year in advance. I can assure you that that is something all student unions would prioritise. There could be ways to connect through the OfS, either through the student panel or through other areas.
Q109 Lord Reay: Just this weekend I heard that one consequence of industrial action was that markers or graders of degrees had gone on strike. I know of a particular institution and a particular person suffering from this. She was unsure whether she was going to be graded in time for her degree finishing this summer. Her papers from the last few months would all get graded by sometime in 2024, by which time she would obviously have left and got a job. Is that something that your members complain to you about, and perhaps you complain to the OfS, as giving you a rough deal, or is that kind of thing not a particular issue? Where is the complaints process about that if it is necessary?
Rania Regaieg: Usually, complaints of that nature get raised in the institution itself, so it would go through the university’s complaints procedures first. If the student is not happy with the outcome, they can raise that to the OIA and then it goes to the OfS. We have an advice centre in the student union itself. It is completely independent from the support advisers that the university has, and they can guide the students through that complaint procedure, but we do not get involved in it personally as sabbatical officers.
Mack Marshall: Currently the University and College Union is taking industrial action across the majority of higher education institutions, and that includes a marking and assessment boycott, which I think you are referring to. Yes, we are hearing a lot about that at the moment. It is causing a lot of student anxiety.
What would be really useful from a regulator right now would be to know what students’ rights are in terms of industrial action. I am getting lots of questions and, if necessary, we are typically pushing them towards the university’s procedure of putting in a complaint, appealing or whatever, but we do not have any steer from the OfS as to what students’ rights are in terms of industrial action. That is one of the key student anxieties right now.
What is the expectation? What can students complain about? If you do not get your coffee when you go for a coffee in the morning, you know that you are entitled to your £3 back, but how does it work in higher education? I do not particularly understand that well enough, and I am involved in the sector. We do not expect students to, so we would appreciate that guidance and that steer from a regulator.
Q110 Lord Agnew of Oulton: Good morning. My question was about whether you think the OfS is looking after the interests of students, but you have given a pretty clear answer that it is not. Just to start at the baseline, is there an allocated senior person in the OfS who is your representative as senior members of student bodies? Is there a go-to person so that you can say, “We’re worried about the strike action and the failure to have degrees marked in time for us to go and get a job”, and that kind of thing? I am just interested to know what the interaction is there.
Beyond that, I am very worried about the value for money that you receive as students as part of your educational package. Do you get any sense that the OfS is representing your interests on that?
Mack Marshall: I am not aware of a contact. If there is one, it is not communicated to us effectively. The issue regarding value for money for students, from research done a few years ago, is about transparency and clarity as to where their £9,250 goes. If we are talking about undergraduate home students, it is about where that money goes and where it is being used most effectively. That is about whether they have enough books in the library or whether they have a place to sit and study. That space is the resource thing, which typically students view as value for money.
Lord Agnew of Oulton: What is your verdict on that?
Mack Marshall: It is really tricky to say whether students are getting value for money, because it will differ by institution, by course and by programme. Value for money is often about whether students get what they expected. We do not typically have that minimum baseline that Rania was talking about earlier. What do you expect? What are you promised? Are you going to get X, Y or Z contact hours? Are you going to graduate effectively and have career opportunities? We do not have that minimum baseline for students to judge value for money against.
Lord Agnew of Oulton: That will lead me on very neatly to my next question, but, Rania, is there anything you would like to add to Mack’s comments?
Rania Regaieg: No, it would be pretty much the same. I have never had a direct contact to go to, so I have a similar view on that one.
Q111 Lord Agnew of Oulton: It segues beautifully into my next question. Do you think that universities give you enough clarity in the prospective offer? When you are a kid at school thinking about which university to go to and which course you are going to study, do you feel that you get clarity from the university as to the baseline of the offer, as Mack calls it? If you are going to study English literature, for example, do they explain to you that there will be a very limited number of contact hours, but that there will be X tutorials per term where you have regular feedback, Y essays marked and given feedback within Z days or weeks? How much of that do you receive to help you make your decisions?
Rania Regaieg: All those details tend to be given to you once you have registered. For example, you will not get your timetable until you have registered. Then you would know how many contact hours you will have. Before then, you would know a percentage of contact hours.
I am an international student, so it is slightly different for me. I was given lots of information before I came here to prepare me to settle in the UK, but none of it was about contact hours and those specific details. It was more about the wider learning outcomes of different modules and the modules that I will have in my programme: “Here is what to expect from us”. Do I know what I should be expecting? Is that a good standard? Is that the bare minimum? I cannot really measure that because I do not have a scale to measure it against. It goes back to what you were saying earlier. It would have been great to have that.
It is not particularly necessary to know the exact number of contact hours. I would like to know that I will have a good, holistic student experience. I came to university to get a good degree as well as to get involved in all the other activities that you would as a student. That is what I did. I got involved in sports club societies and student representation, and now I am a president of the student union. That is what made my student experience great. It was not just about the education and the contact hours I got. It was about the whole picture and how that helped me develop as a student and a human being throughout those years that I spent at university.
Lord Agnew of Oulton: Perhaps I am using poor examples, particularly in your case, doing fashion, which is a less easily definable course. What I am trying to get at is that, for many students, the student debt you will leave your institution with is probably the second-largest financial liability that you will take on beyond buying a house. My worry is that these are young people who are still essentially children. You cannot borrow money under the age of 18, but you are being asked essentially to commit to £50,000 or more of debt. Are you getting enough information to help you make that decision?
Mack Marshall: You are absolutely right. Students are vulnerable consumers. This is one of the biggest financial transactions that they will make, typically at 18. It is important to be absolutely clear about what you should expect from your programme and from your degree, and how many contact hours you should typically expect to get. Obviously, that changes and you find out more at registration, but what would be useful, as we were saying earlier, is the OfS or a regulator being able to tell students what their rights are as a baseline: “In going to any higher education institution, you should expect this level of assessment and feedback quality, and this level of teaching”.
Students cannot judge whether they are getting that value for money and whether they are making that informed decision if they do not know that there is that higher body to rely upon and to back them up, essentially. They need that back-up. As a student, I did not know what the OfS was and I did not know what my rights were. I am learning that now as an officer and being involved in the sector, but I still do not fully understand it. That is the sort of thing we are looking for.
Lord Agnew of Oulton: If I use the purchase of car for £50,000 as an example, you have a pretty good idea of what you are getting. Do you think there is a comparable level of knowledge when you buy an undergraduate course at a university?
Rania Regaieg: We see it as an investment in our future and our education. We do not necessarily see it as putting money into something that is physical. As much as we would like to have those baselines to be able to measure whether it is good quality, we see it more as an investment into our future and our knowledge.
Mack Marshall: Higher education, the university experience and knowledge is too complex to compare to a car, unfortunately. It is not the same sort of experience. It is holistic. There is so much more to it.
Lord Agnew of Oulton: I accept that and that is a fair pushback, but it is not me who is incurring these debts. My worry is that half of you will not pay it all back. It sits over your heads for what can be decades. That is why, for me, the initial decision-making process is so important. You should be given as much information as possible. Rania, you can tell me. Does it not particularly trouble you that this debt will be over your financial position for many years to come, because the benefit of what you have achieved and learned in your degree is more than the value of the money?
Rania Regaieg: The debt does trouble me, yes, but, as I said earlier, it is an investment in my future that I am willing to make, no matter what that debt would be. It would still be great to get a good-value education. How to measure that is particularly difficult, because there are no standards or measures. I cannot make that up for myself now and help students understand that. I think it is something a regulator could help us understand.
Again, it is about investment in a future, and not just our future. We are literally the future generation; we are the society. I see it as a valuable contribution. It is probably one of the only times you would hear me say that putting ourselves into debt is a good thing. I would never say that. I would never like to put myself in debt, but my education would come first and I would choose to put myself in debt for my education and for my future.
Lord Agnew of Oulton: My concern is whether you are getting enough information to make that investment decision. The regulator, in my view, should be helping you. Your view is that you are getting enough information to make that investment decision.
Rania Regaieg: It will be different from one institution to another. In my case, I can say that I have had enough information. It is not just about the quantity of the information; it is the quality as well. You could be getting lots of information and having continuous communication with the university, but is it really the information you need? I would rather have quality information over lots of information that is not necessarily valuable to me.
Mack Marshall: How do you know whether you are getting enough information if there is no baseline? For example, we have been working a lot this year on hidden course costs, such as how much the textbooks cost you when you start studying a programme, or whether you need to buy a lab coat or smart shoes for a part of your programme. Those are all additional costs. We have been looking to the regulator and saying, “That needs to be made clear when you’re looking at applying to university, so you know whether you could financially afford it”. We should not have to think about that, but at least we could make that transparent. When you are a prospective student, it is really hard to know whether enough information is there if there is not that baseline. Those would be my thoughts.
Q112 Baroness McGregor-Smith: You talked at length about it being an investment in your future, which I completely admire and agree with. Do you think, though, that that could make the universities pretty complacent? Students sit there saying, “This is about an investment in our future. Whatever it costs will do”. How best could the universities balance against that to make sure you get the right baseline?
You are right that there is so much information available. Everyone may well read that or have different sources and see things differently. Would it therefore be better for us to have a very strict code of what they should write down to say, “This is the total cost of your education”, whether it be just the course costs, the accommodation, or all the extra costs that you incur? What would you say?
Rania Regaieg: A way to help them identify that would be helpful, but the best way to do it is through talking to students, and students’ priorities change every year. They might not be completely different each year, but, as we were talking about earlier, students care about cost of living now, whether they are getting enough support from their universities, and having good mental health support. I do not particularly see those priorities changing over the next couple of years. If we can get a baseline of good provision and a good standard of support, we can help universities get the right information to students at the right time when they need it. To make it completely strict might not be the most helpful way to move forward.
Baroness McGregor-Smith: Is that because you are saying that priorities are changing as well?
Rania Regaieg: Priorities change. We are living in a world that is volatile and in which things happen. We never expected that we were going to have a pandemic, but it happened.
Baroness McGregor-Smith: Do not remind us.
Rania Regaieg: I am not going to bring that up again. We need to find a way that is flexible enough in order for us to change with the priorities as they evolve.
Baroness McGregor-Smith: Since the pandemic, there have been a number of changes such as the cost of living crisis, the mental health support needed for students, the switch to virtual and getting used to being back in-person. There has been so much change, and I guess more will continue.
Back to my original question, they can give you a total cost up to a point, but should that include what the student needs? “This is the experience. You get your course, and here are all the things you get for that”. Would that be helpful, even if it changed every year?
Rania Regaieg: It would be helpful, yes.
Q113 The Chair: We have talked about getting information before you go to university, and about the lack of contact with the OfS. You both had the experience recently of being in a university. Do you think universities, as individual institutions, listen to student unions and to students? Some of us have experience of governing bodies and university councils that have had student reps on them. As student reps, do you feel that universities and individual institutions engage properly?
Mack Marshall: I am pretty confident as sabbatical officers that we have a lot of opportunities to influence our institutions and to really try to enhance that student experience. As you say, I am a student governor. I am on the council of my university, and I know Rania is as well. That is a really good opportunity. We are part of governance procedures. We have student representatives across the whole university at programme level, school level and faculty level. We have students at high-level meetings. Student unions have a fantastic opportunity to do research, to feed back, to collate information on the student experience and take that right to the top, to hear those student concerns, to take action and to make change. We have a fantastic opportunity to do that.
Obviously, there will be areas where student unions and universities are pushing back. There will be conflict to that partnership working. Student unions and sabbatical officers having the opportunity to voice students’ concerns to the top, essentially, and to make those changes, be it in education policy, cost of living or well-being, is hugely important.
Rania Regaieg: It is fairly similar for us as well. We have different procedures and ways to input into the university. We have student representation at various levels in schools, colleges and all the way to the top. I am a student governor and I sit on the board of governors of my university. I even chair one of the groups that feed into the board of governors, where I run strategic workshops throughout the year for the governors as well as our board of trustees of the student union around the students’ priorities during that year. We launch new projects each year.
Earlier, I mentioned the student union and university partnership board that is co-chaired by me and the vice-chancellor. We also meet outside those formal meetings. We take them to our student union, have lunch with them and get the students to speak to them in person. My overall experience has been positive, and my university has co-created projects and worked in partnership with me and previous presidents as well as vice-presidents.
My experience cannot be taken as the experience of all student union presidents. It differs from one institution to another, but I am lucky that I have had a positive experience so far. I have been able to represent students on different levels in the university and outside, on a national level. I have had a positive experience overall, and that is what keeps me coming back to my student union.
Lord Burns: Are you doing this at the same time as doing your master’s?
Rania Regaieg: No, I am not. I have taken time off from my master’s.
The Chair: There are limits, and there are limits to the time for this session, I am afraid. Thank you both very much indeed for the very direct evidence that you have given us this morning.
