Passed: May 2025 (15th)

What is the current problem, and how does it affect students?

In 2024/25 LUU undertook a comprehensive review of its democratic structures to understand how students engage with decision-making and to evaluate the effectiveness and inclusiveness of the current democratic structures. Students told us that LUU’s engagement model needed to change for greater transparency, stronger empowerment, more opportunities for meaningful agency - through a culture of organising, mobilising, and advocacy. 

Over the years LUU’s democracy has centred on its Sabbatical Officer Team carrying the bulk of representation, campaigning and governance. Yet with ever expanding agendas—from housing and the cost of living to liberation and academic issues—the Officers’ capacity is stretched thin. Their efforts to maintain strategic relationships with various stakeholders who can make change often come at the expense of grassroots campaigning and direct student engagement. 

Other student representational structures are inconsistent. Inconsistencies include paid vs voluntary roles, number of reps for each group and how they are recruited. For example Faculty Officers are appointed and paid a stipend, whereas the Activities Exec are elected volunteers. Complicated representation structures create confusion over who represents what, how decisions are made and where students make their voice heard.

There are limited opportunities for student-led change outside of formal forums or elections and no clear pathways of students to take action on issues they care about. Students want more direct influence and agency. Without addressing these issues, LUU risks continuing to rely on a model that does not align with contemporary student expectations around democracy and empowerment. 

What is your proposed change? How will it benefit students?

The recommended response from the review includes expanding rep structures, introducing organising principles, and embedding a feedback loop from students to reps to officers and back. 

The proposed change is to introduce a new democratic engagement model that will rebalance the focus of representation from a small number of elected officers, to a much broader, more accessible network of paid student representatives. It would mirror a community organising model, where students are brought together as a community to take action around their common concerns. It relies upon paid organisers reaching out and listening, connecting and motivating people to build their collective power. 

This model would enable more focus on student issues with a paid representative (the community organiser) on issues such as housing, transport, safety etc. For example the “Housing Rep” would host student assemblies, build student campaigns on the issue and speak with relevant key decision makers on housing. This model would also enable more empowerment and focus on addressing specific liberation groups as a rep would represent different liberation communities. Activities Reps and Faculty Officers would remain similar but as a paid role so they are able to carry out more of the work they wish to do and be empowered to be in more decision making spaces. The key features include: 

● A larger group of paid part-time reps working directly with students by listening to them and organising assemblies on their specific issue and to mobilise campaigns. 

● Refining full time exec officers acting as strategic leads to support the representative network and representing and feeding back rep information to higher levels of the University 

● A feedback loop that ensures campaigns are rooted in student concerns 

● Introducing Student Assemblies, which will create regular opportunities for students to come together, discuss issues, and shape collective action. They will focus on topics that matter to students i.e. housing, safety, liberation etc. 

Benefits: 

● More opportunity for effective campaigning 

● More students engaging in decision making 

● Accessible paid roles which align with issues and identities 

● More transparency because there will be more reps to spread the word of the work being done at LUU and an easier representation structure to understand 

● Assemblies will create vibrant, inclusive and deliberative spaces where student voices can directly shape LUU’s priorities and actions. 

● Officers will be more focused and better able to act as allies, advocates, and facilitators for the wider student body, rather than carrying the burden of all representation themselves. 

● The whole model increases the total representational capacity, enabling broader reach and more meaningful connections with students. This model is designed to better reflect student interests, provide more entry points into democratic life, and expand the number of students who can be actively involved in shaping change at LUU.