This blog post is written by Sophie Atherton, the uea(su) campaigns and democracy officer.

In the 2017/18 academic year, a policy looking into PGR engagement was passed, which you can find here! This allowed multiple PGR focus groups to take place to find out what would improve their engagement. This has been written up into a report and will be posted soon on the postgraduate(su) web pages.

On the topic of this report, a democracy review is taking place. This report has been fed into the review so should see positive PGR involvement in the process. Any of you who have been following my work since the beginning of the year, may have heard me mention this review quite a few times… I wanted to take this opportunity in the Lakeside View to explain the current timeline and scoping exercises that I’ve worked with other student officers on so that you can be up to date too.

Last year’s student officer committee agreed to have an external consultant support us with this work as this review is the largest for the last few years, and they will have visited us for the first time by the time you are reading this.

We will be having a conversation around what works well and could be improved within representation and decision making. This covers school and faculty convenors, as well as full-time and part-time officer roles. We’re going to be looking at lots of meetings that take place from societies and sports exec to Union Council. Fundamentally, we will be asking ourselves the question of should every part of the union have a democratic input?

In October, we ran several focus groups to understand and look into what democratic structures may work for us. Currently, a survey is live where you are able to feed in your own views. You can fill it in here! If you fill in, you are in with the chances of winning an SU Christmas jumper from the SU shop.

I hope to have a rough outline of potential changes by December, which I can update Union Council on and present to the Trustee Board with a steer to know if I’m going in the right direction for you! If you have any questions about the process or how you can get involved further, drop me an email.