The Union campaigned against the University’s proposal to move its entire £14 million package of bursaries and fee waivers into fee waivers alone. We succeeded in our aim of not just changing that proposal but reversing it to create one of the largest bursary funds in England. The campaign achieved this in the two weeks between the Union receiving the proposal and the Board of Governors meeting to make the decision.

This was communicated to the President face-to-face, last minute and with no prior knowledge. The reaction of our President at this moment was absolutely crucial to buy more time and to ensure a strong campaign. She quickly rebutted the proposal using strong reasoning, evidence, human examples and demonstrating the impact this would have on the University and wider sector. From this meeting, we managed to escalate the decision and ensure that there was full and proper Students’ Union and student input into it.

We faced two significant barriers - the short window to run the campaign and the confidential nature of the proposal. This required avery small campaigns group that could quickly influence key decision makers. Led by our President and Vice-President Welfare & Equality the group swiftly identified the key figures to lobby, identified the arguments that would persuade them and and undertook research to strengthen our case. The research combined relevant information produced by the Union, such as the recent halls survey, our Your Union Your Say (comprehensive, large scale survey), practice within other Students’ Unions and universities, external research (most usefully the interim Pound in Your Pocket report) and building case studies using students who had received bursaries to demonstrate the need for this type of support over waivers. The Group also had to quickly firm up knowledge of access agreement legislation. Through this research we built a compelling case that mixed the very human story of the benefit of bursaries for individuals and the student experience with an argument that bursaries advanced the University’s corporate goals by boosting retention, helping widen participation, and supporting recruitment whereby the University could market itself as sector champion with the most generous bursary provision in the UK. Using this mix of arguments allowed us to tailor our approach to each key individual we needed to persuade to succeed.

In terms of communication, we had to keep a tight-knit group that carefully planned and executed the campaign in a manner sensitive to the confidential nature of the issue and the fact that we would more likely achieve success through retaining confidentiality whilst lobbying intensively. At the same time the group needed to contain sufficient numbers and skills to strategise, conduct the necessary research and successfully lobby enough key figures to achieve success when proposals would be considered by the Board of Governors.

On one hand it is easy to evaluate the success of this campaign – it created £14 million of bursaries for students when the opposite outcome would have happened without our intervention. We also have achieved best practice because the University has now internalised this campaign within their own work programmes and it is they who will be closely monitoring the impact but also sharing it with the Union. This ensures the data will be more comprehensive than the Union could provide and owned by the University in respect of future changes or improvements.

The University was initially going to send the proposal for moving funding within bursaries over to fee waivers without an options paper. The impact this would have on students is well-documented. We persuaded the Vice-Chancellor not to put this proposal to the Board of Governors as it stood and initiated our research and lobbying. As a result including arguing at the Board meeting, the University agreed to create a £14million bursary fund. This means 5,000 Northumbria students will receive a means-tested bursary of £1000, £3000 or £4000 every year they study at Northumbria. This will have a huge impact on current students as well as opening up access to prospective students from lower-income backgrounds to attend and remain at Northumbria. As such it will have an impact on social justice within the North East and beyond.

We have already seen in application figures that the number of students from lower-income backgrounds have risen for next year and it is unquestionable that the work the Students’ Union has done has been a cause of this. The North East already has far lower participation rates than other regional areas and not only have we had a 19% growth in regional applications but also significant growth in applications from postcodes we know have lower participation and people from lower income backgrounds. These have increased as much as 45% in some areas and it is not unreasonable to say the bursary win will have impacted upon the applications.

Following our success we have been contacted by other Students’ Unions to discuss the campaign and have provided a case study they can use to aid their lobbying, pressurise their institution to do the same as well as an inspiration to show that an effective campaign could potentially lead to real results in this area.

Our biggest resource was students who could provide vivid descriptions of both financial hardship and the benefit a bursary bought not just in retention but in the greater freedom to focus on their studies. Through them we could illustrate the difficulties in finding part-time work in Newcastle and the pressure it put on all students but particularly those from a demanding course. We also used national research such as Pound in Your Pocket and comparable data from other Universities. This was influential in winning the campaign by dramatically improving governors’ awareness of the financial difficulties faced by students. This has also been interesting in providing us with a base of information and level of awareness that will be valuable in our on-going efforts to address accommodation costs, hidden fees, and other financial issues within the University.