Priority Campaigns

Our Priority Campaigns are the broad areas where the Full-Time Officers have decided to focus their efforts for the 2019-20 academic year. We are running 4 priority campaigns this year which can be found below.

Reduce Single Use Plastics On Campus

As part of the campaign to reduce single use plastic on campus

We will aim to:

Reduce single use plastics in our outlets, including water bottles
Research alternatives for single use plastics
Raise awareness around using reusable bottles/coffee cups and provide these alternatives to students
Research how to remove plastic from free menstrual products in the SU
Lobby the University to reduce single use plastics
Find a way to encourage students to use hard plastics/recyclable products in food outlets i.e. by providing a partial refund

All I Want For Christmas Is... Fair Rent!

Seven top universities have cheaper accomodation than UEA


UEA	Nottingham	Oxford	Newcastle	Leeds	Cardiff	Cambridge	Edinburgh
£4,642	£4,598	£4,598	£4,349	£4,142	£3,940	£3,800	£3,427

Shown above: 38-week cost of cheapest En suite accomodation at UEA and cheaper 'Russell Group' universities

UEA's prices for student accomodation have become a joke.

Each year campus accommodation has been going up in price and has done better than the Uni predicted. But when it’s done well, instead of putting a brake on the price increases the Uni has been banking the good performance and carrying on putting the price up by more than inflation - every year, for the past eleven years.

And what’s gone from a mild surplus is now a massive figure of £5.8million per year - a figure so massive, in fact, that it is now ploughed into the University’s overall budget. That’s effectively a University Fees Top Up Fee of £1200 per student.

Over 10 years, by stealth - with no-one ever stopping to think about the consequences - we’ve ended up in a situation where student loans and grants barely cover the excessive cost of UEA accommodation, but somehow a surplus from that accomodation is bankrolling conferences, Executive Team wages and Christmas lights. Student grants are now, in effect, subsidising the university academic budget - not helping students eat and live. Meanwhile, most students now have to work alongside their studies just to get a roof over their head.

This is unacceptable. And it has to stop.

It's not even just about UEA. Across the city of Norwich, landlords look to UEA as a benchmark for setting student rents - but UEA monthly accomodation prices (£489) are now much higher than the average monthly student rent in the city (£330). This drags up rents across the city and is bad for students and residents alike.

That's why we're campaigning for UEA to -

Freeze rents in 2018/19
Do proper research into the costs that students face at uni
Draw up a proper strategy on student costs to bring down prices

In the meantime, you can check out our advice pages for info about housing, and our Welfare Officer's recent blog about finding a good house.

Responsibility for Accessibility

This campaign will focus on accessibility on campus.

We will aim to:

Improve assessment accessibility
Continue working with the University to expand lecture capture
Campaign to raise awareness for invisible illnesses
Raise awareness of signposting and lived experience i.e DSA
Lobby the University to make buildings on campus more accessible

We Will Be Heard

This campaign will focus on mental health at UEA.

We will aim to:

Assess the functionality of the GP centre at UEA and highlight medical practices in the local area to help students access a practice that works for them
Work on creating more inclusive accommodation options as well as forming a housing strategy to inform students of the work conducted for those who live off campus
Improve inclusivity and tackle loneliness, via creating a variety of events. In particular provide support for minority groups on campus
Continue and update work from the original We Will be Heard campaign, making progress visible to students

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