Extra Information:
A student charter was created for this academic year. It appears to be a tick box exercise as there was no mention of it to new students; it's on the website: https://www1.uwe.ac.uk/students/charter.aspx I'm not sure who was involved in the consultation but it is missing a few things. First of all, it needs to be made accessible to all of our students to represent the rich diversity of the UWE student body and of the wider community: video and audio versions; and multilingual versions.
Other improvements needed:
* the students' union section needs to mention sustainability, something which the SU is passionate about but for some reason has no mention in the charter
* the students' union section needs to either elaborate on the student representation structure or link to a handy diagram
* in the students' union section, sporting, political, social, and cultural activities and events could do with linking to relevant pages on the SU website: socs and sports pages, the SU website, and UWE What's On page
* no elaboration on 'environmentally responsible behaviour' in the teaching section - no link to the Green Team
* no mention of support with extracurricular activities in the teaching section
* no mention of mental health in the teaching section
* in the students' section, extracurricular activities needs to be emphasised and links to relevant societies and sports pages on the SU website; perhaps examples of activities and links to testimonials and reflections from students
* it places the onus on students to know when things aren't going well - if you are having a mental health crisis, you might not be able to. The university needs to be more proactive in this. Also, the charters should be individualised for each campus - not all campuses are the same!
Overall, I believe this charter was rushed through to tick a box and our wonderful student body was not used to inform the creation of this. We can do so much better than this. I vote for a student consultation on this - not just council but all students from across the campuses. We could include so much more - the university needs to be promoting physical and mental health.