Impact spoke to Chloe Averill about her past year in office as UoNSU’s Equal Opportunities and Welfare Officer. She spoke about her successes in ensuring there are ways for students to get home safely but also about the drawbacks of funding and the difficulties of addressing mental health issues.
How have you found your year in office?
It has been very good. It took a long time to get into exactly what our roles were but now I’m understanding it more. It’s tough because you can always be doing more – you’re never going to be perfect. But I’ve met lots of nice people and I’m hopefully doing some good work.
What has been successful about your time in office?
Improving and promoting the Safe Taxi scheme. We launched the fixed price scheme which went down really well – around 1,500 students signed up for that. Now we’re just making sure DG Taxis stick to it.
We are in the process of getting accreditation from the NUS on their Alcohol Impact initiative which aims to promote responsible drinking
About 11 people signed up for the Emergency Taxi Scheme where they use their student card to get home. There’s usually only two or three in the whole year, so it shows people know it’s there but they’re not using it every night to get home which isn’t what we want. We are in the process of getting accreditation from the NUS on their Alcohol Impact initiative which aims to promote responsible drinking.
What problems have you faced?
One problem is funding. You have this big vision and think you know what students want but when you’re actually in the role, it’s something different. It’s hard when you’ve got a manifesto point you really want to work on but there are barriers like funding and research that contradicts what you originally thought. If that happens, I try to reframe my manifesto point to see if I can still work on it.
Have you done anything whilst in office that you didn’t put in your manifesto?
I do a lot of work around mental health issues, informing students about services available to them. I enjoy doing that. I never put that in my manifesto because I didn’t feel like I knew enough about it and didn’t want to assume what people wanted. We’re researching into how accessible services such as counselling are for healthcare students who are in lectures 9-5 and then on placement.
We’re also looking at making the University’s online presence on mental health provision more accessible
We’re also looking at making the University’s online presence on mental health provision more accessible and have centred training for society welfare reps more on mental health. There’s also the Dignity policy – making it easier for students to complain or get the right support if they feel like they’re being harassed.
What happened to the 24 hour hopper bus which you pledged last year?
That’s a case of constraints. A hopper bus working group was set up but we say when we’re campaigning for things they have to be deeply felt, widely felt and winnable. The Derby hopper bus was more widely and deeply felt than the 24 hour hopper bus. It would stop students having to get to lectures two hours early because of how unreliable the service was. I’ve asked if I can still sit on the 24 hour hopper bus group to see if there is a way we can work with it. If not, I’ll look at other safe ways for students to get home.
What about the safety bus you spoke of?
I got the idea from Sheffield University. It worked really well there but their bus went directly from halls to the Union’s club and back. It’s different here as we would have to get into the city and there are various nights on around the town centre. The University said we don’t have that sort of funding so I’ve had to accept it’s not something that can be achieved this year.
If a student gets into that taxi, they’d lose all their security and compensation rights if a crash were to happen because they didn’t book it
Taxis are the biggest problem. When we were analysing the research, students were walking home because they were overcharged by taxi drivers. We’re working with the council to make sure taxis can’t just wait outside clubs because that’s illegal. If a student gets into that taxi, they’d lose all their security and compensation rights if a crash were to happen because they didn’t book it. Students don’t know about that so we’ll probably promote it alongside the safe taxi scheme. Rather than just saying ‘this is what we can give you’, we’re telling students why it’s unsafe.
What happened with the lower gym membership fees?
When we started in September we wanted to work on it but the University had already decided on a new fee structure so unfortunately there was nothing we could do. We’ve worked with the students it has affected in the sports offices and have their thoughts on it. The number of gym memberships has increased by around 1,300 students this year though, so it’s worked out quite well. If you look at it in terms of the Gold membership, we’ve reduced it. But obviously you pay more for Bronze.
You spoke about putting a welfare rep on every sports team. What about other societies?
I chose sports because it’s such a good thing for mental health – healthy body, healthy mind. I think that’s where we can have the most impact. Getting into a sports team if you have social anxiety isn’t really accessible and once you’re in, the nature of the teams might mean it’s not easy to talk about mental health there.
A lot of course based societies have peer mentoring schemes so we want to work with them to have more of a welfare role. The ‘Welfare in Sports’ idea is just a pilot so if it works out, we can always implement that across other societies.
How have you worked alongside the women’s officers?
We have our part-time women’s officers who work on women’s issues. We have liberation officers who are liberated to work on the issues. My role isn’t campaigning but I would support the LGBT officers to campaign on those issues. We’re looking at what we can do around lad cultures. All the officers want to work on it but we end up shouting at each other in meetings because we’ve all got different ideas. We have a meeting set up for next week.
We’re looking at what we can do around lad cultures
Impact’s sexual assault article highlighted a gap in policy. Have you made any changes?
That’s the dignity policy. We noticed through the article and the student who made the complaint that there was a gap. It wasn’t intentional, we just didn’t see it. We’re working on making the policy more accessible. We’re looking at making the changes ourselves and then taking it to the University to implement them.
At the moment it says that a Student Union rep can be approached if there’s an issue around harassment but we can’t give advice, we can only signpost students to the relevant service. If it’s a Union event, we can implement sanctions on the Union team because we sign union codes of conduct. If it’s a community issue, the Union can’t act but the University can because you sign a student code of conduct. We want to make that really clear. We’ll also make the website more accessible, even if it’s just a flowchart on where to go.
What aspects of your manifesto have gone well?
Lighting is going well. In the next four weeks, lighting on Station Road will be improved. A lot of that was done before though so I can’t take all of the credit. We went for a walk around campus with the Estates team at night and looked at the dark areas. They said that by the end of January they would’ve implemented lights down on the Downs and between Trent and Humanities so I need to see if it’s been done. We’ll do another walk before summer to look at the Jubilee campus. We also did welfare workshops for off-campus halls such as Raleigh Park with food incentives. I also went and promoted the Taxi Scheme at the off-campus hall Christmas markets.
Is there anything else you’d like to highlight?
The Welfare in Sports campaign. We had ten sports presidents in our first meeting last week who spoke about barriers and how to improve them. They were all really positive and openly talked about their own issues. They want to work on it. Student Minds and Nightline have been involved too. Hopefully it will expand in the future and sports teams will have more training on how to spot signs of mental health issues.
Hopefully it will expand in the future and sports teams will have more training on how to spot signs of mental health issues
The aim is that people talk about mental health without the stigma attached to it, so if they’re suffering from anxiety, an eating disorder or more serious mental health problems such as Bipolar, they’ll talk about it. Especially because sports teams focus on socials – people on medication or who don’t drink because of religion are completely excluded. That has a bad influence on mental health too.
Any advice for future candidates?
Focus on your own campaign and don’t worry about other people. Don’t let seeing your name in the media knock you down. Make the most of the staff mentors – speak to them about anything. Try not to let the campaign take over. Take care of yourself!
Tamsin Parnell
Image: Andreas Billman for Impact Images
