Liberation Campaigns

UBU is committed to equality of opportunity. We support NUS's Liberation campaigns and have elected, self-defining student officers in each of those areas to co-ordinate the campaigns. These campaigns are run by students with support from the Vice-President when and where necessary.

• Black & Minority Ethnic
• Disabled
• LGBT
• Women
• Mature
• International

These campaigns each run open assemblies (‘Equality Forums') throughout the year which are a chance for students to come together, raise any issues they have and direct UBU's campaigns and policy in each of those areas. They will also elect delegates to National Conferences.

This highlight of our activity this year will be the Diversity Week in January, centred around our annual Global Fiesta. Stay tuned for more info!

For more information contact Ruth Jackson.

HMO Lobby

Local government want to restrict where students can live within the community. This means ghettoising them into student communities out in Fishponds or Easton, a good six miles from our university campus. UBU, along with NUS, are running campaigns against this action, sending a clear message that our students will not stand for this sort of treatment; can you imagine the hellfire that would rain down of local government if they suggested doing the same to black people, or gay people? We are equal members of the community we live in, and have a lot to offer - how many little businesses in Clifton would survive without the student clientele which so often keep them afloat? How many groups of people donated over 100,000 hours of service to our local community through our SCA volunteering programme, or £200,000 to charity though our RAG (Raise and Give) charity fund-raising scheme? Who else if not students make the place in which we live an exciting, colourful and vibrant place to live?

Make sure your voice is heard, send a clear message that the student community will not take this lying down.

For more information, email Tobin Webb.

Broke and Broken

In 2009, the government will launch its review of Higher Education Funding and will be putting together a new model for the future. As it stands, students are paying thousands for their time at University, and leaving with an average of £25,000 of debt. All that will probably change after the next review with the call for higher fees getting louder and louder.
But with the problems of widening access for poorer students still unresolved - is a massive fee increase really going to make for a fair system of Higher Education? I don't think so. You only have to look at the inequalities that the current system has created to know which direction we are headed
Take by way of example, the bursary system, implemented to help students and widen access for those from poorer backgrounds - last year £19million of student support money went unspent, and nearly half a million of that was at this institution.
A recent report by the Higher Education Policy Institute, calling for a nationalised bursary scheme for students, is a breath of fresh air for those of us who have long argued that the current system of individual bursaries is bureaucratic, confusing and deeply inequitable. Predictably, those universities that benefit from the inequalities of the current system are up in arms. But that position is hypocritical.

Dr Wendy Piatt, director-general of the elite Russell Group of universities, to which Bristol belongs, claims that a national bursary system would "create many losers and few winners." But forthcoming research by Professor Claire Callendar at Birkbeck shows that in 2006-07, the average annual needs-based bursary at Russell Group universities was £1,791, while in the Million+ group of modern universities this was just £680. Not only do Million+ universities educate half of the UK's population of students each year, they are also the most successful at widening access to students from the poorest backgrounds.
Some, such as the Russell Group and the 1994 Group of universities, argue that this system can be justified as a golden carrot to entice students from poorer backgrounds to apply to socially elite universities.But there is no actual evidence to suggest that bursaries are having this effect. In 2006-7 the Russell Group and 1994 Group spent around £31m on bursaries, but applications by students from the poorest backgrounds increased by just 0.1%.
As a tool for recruitment, the market in bursaries has failed. The all-singing, all-dancing solution to the Russell Group's difficulties in widening access, promised to Labour backbenchers to buy them off ahead of a close vote in parliament, is shamefully punishing those students at universities most successful at opening their doors to working-class people.
Bursaries are effective, however, as a means of alleviating student hardship. Research published by the NUS and the TUC shows that between 1996 and 2006, the number of students undertaking paid work to support their studies increased by 54% and the number of students studying full-time and working full-time rose by a staggering 86%.
The reintroduction of the grant and increase in its availability this autumn is welcome, but with the economy entering turbulent times, students from the very poorest backgrounds won't be the only ones struggling to make ends meet.
The last time parliament debated a national bursary scheme, the Russell Group lobby was successful in derailing the idea by making promises on which it has subsequently failed to deliver. MPs cannot allow them to get away with it again. Campaigning for the national bursary scheme is the start of a wider plan to take action on the issues of student debt, widening access and the future of student fees. See how you can get involved, by signing our model letter to your MP and much more by emailing Tobin Webb.