Thursday 10-11-2016 - 15:58

This week we held our first Student Jury – a group of randomly selected students from across the University coming together to talk through the big ideas on campus and decide what the students’ union should be doing about them.

These ideas have come through our new online ideas system. Any student can submit ideas about your students’ union, your university or even your community. The Executive Committee, including the Full-Time and Part-Time Officers, works out who could actually do the idea and make sure that approved ideas are implemented. If they think an idea might be contentious, they pass it on to a Jury. There's more information on our website about our brand new policy-making processes.

The Jury think about the merits of each idea and how it might best work or how it could support the maximum number of students. To do this, they’re given packs of information and evidence submitted by students. They can make minor changes to an idea, approve it or reject it. If they can’t decide between them, they can pass an idea on to an all-student vote.

This term, the Jury discussed two ideas, and decided on the following:

1. A student submitted an idea to encourage the union to do more for the environment, including to ban paper coffee cups and to increase the price for plastic bags in Central. The Jury decided not to ban coffee cups but to make it easier and more appealing for students to use reusable ‘keep cups’, such as discounts and a deposit scheme. They also decided not to increase the price of plastic carrier bags, but to set up recycling or plastic-bag-swap points. The union should also run more recycling awareness campaigns and work with the University to provide more recycling points around campus.
2. A student submitted an idea to restrict the union’s political campaigning to just higher education and cost of living issues. In the evidence pack, the original proposer clarified that they only wanted the union to focus on these issues, and the Jury received information about the legal restrictions the union already has, for example to not support political parties. They decided to reject the idea.

The outcomes from this Jury will now go to the Executive Committee to carry out.

Don’t forget, if you have any ideas to make the union, your campus, university or community better, you can easily submit them online!