So far, we’ve done an in-depth piece of research – including one-to-one interviews with Full-Time Officers (FTOs) and SU staff members, as well as eight in-depth focus group discussions with students, and an all-student survey.

There’s a lot of data involved in the review, with research such as the all-student survey capturing a diverse range of student voices and conversations with SU staff enabling us to gather experiences and feedback on working in our democratic structures.

In addition to this, we have also run three co-creation sessions and analysed our existing data to provide insight into student opinions and behaviours.

The review so far has focused on three areas: Liberation, Full-Time Officers, and Academic Representation.

The findings of our Review revealed a wealth of insights.

Students told us the current network structure is attempting to fulfil too many functions and it’s not clear how you get involved to campaign if you care about liberation.

As well as a need for more diverse interaction methods, three top barriers to participation in campaigns were reported by students. These were:

1. Time Constraints
2. Lack of Information
3. Financial Challenges

The current structures, therefore, are seen as obstacles instead of supportive. This means that students can’t campaign in the ways that they want to with SU guidance.

Bristol students are passionate about liberation issues but do not want to get involved with the current network structure. Because of this, students have suggested a shift from liberation identities to Liberation issue-focused democracy and expressed a desire for structures that are not tokenistic, and that have agency.

The importance of liberation roles becoming paid positions, to ensure equitable opportunity for marginalised groups to run for leadership roles, has been emphasised.

The data collected in our research told us that representation and campaigning around equality, diversity, and inclusion issues (which we call Liberation altogether) is a priority for our students, with urgent challenges to be addressed.

Currently, our liberation work exists within our Network structure, and we know this isn’t working for all our students, especially those who need it the most. As a result, we’ve focused our initial changes on improving how we campaign and represent students on Liberation-related issues.

Because we have to! No really, we are legally obliged to undertake a review of our democratic structures every 4-5 years.

We know there’s a lot that has changed since our last major review took place, and to make sure our structures are working for everyone and have time to be changed for the next academic year, we’re running the review now.