Community

Community

It’s students that make the UCLan community so vibrant and full of life. A thriving student community is one where friendships are formed, there are lots of exciting and interesting opportunities to be involved in and students feel a sense of belonging to their Students’ Union and the University.

The three key areas of focus for Student Community are:

  • Build a sense of belonging
  • Encourage friendships to form
  • Offer bespoke services based on year of study

With over 100 Sports Clubs and Societies to choose from, recreational sport and tonnes of volunteering projects and opportunities, we believe there’s something for everybody to feel a part of. What starts off as a fellow member of a group, can turn into a lifelong friendship.

By 2024 80% of students will agree that the ‘Union contributed positively to my welcome to the University’

  • 2023 result: 70%
  • 2022 result: 57%

By 2024 60% of students agree that the Union has a positive impact on their life

  • 2023 result: 64%
  • 2022 result: 61%

Supporting students to find their communities

We launched ‘Get Togethers’ this year for black, disabled and international students specifically. These have been more well attended than expected and proved to be a positive space where students came to feel a sense of belonging, and crucially have fun! These events all centred around food and activity, and they sit aside from the liberation spaces we already have where students can form campaigns. They have proved a useful other space for under-represented groups to feel connected to each other and to UCLan as a whole.

Picture of a large group of students

Creating accessible spaces in sport

We boosted our focus on encouraging disability sport this year through different marketing and direct work with Inclusive Support at the University. We launched Goal Ball for the first time which is being led by a passionate student and has both disabled and able-bodied members signed up and playing. This student won an award for their dedication to getting this off the ground, and it shows that we can foster different opportunities in this sometimes quite traditional feeling sport space.

Picture of Goalball
Photo of Advice

Helping students along their way

Our Advice Service has again been inundated with student cases (1575 cases from students from August 2022-end of July 2023) over the past year representing a 62% increase from 5 years ago prior to the pandemic. The focus of the service has been on providing students with academic advice and representation due to the number of cases we are seeing and current levels of resource. Ensuring we have a clear and targeted offer for students that we are able to fulfil. Our top 3 areas of work are Appeals (1 in 3 cases), Misconducts (1 in 6 cases) and Complaints (1 in 7 cases)

Photo of Students get togethers

361

students attended 6 different Get Togethers

A picture of Students

100

BUCS points were earnt by Baseball & Softball who went from a Give it a Go Activity to BUCS National Finalists in both sports!

Photos of One off Wednesday Event

70

students helped us achieve our most popular One Off Wednesday ever at our Positivi-TEA activity

Photo of outside of building

50%

of Union Survey respondents said that they identify themselves as a member of the Students’ Union - a 6% increase on last year.

 
Read All RSS Feed

Connecting on Umii

On the Umii App, there were over 4500 new connections and over 18,000 messages sent between students. Umii has been a fantastic tool in helping bring students from across campuses and partner institutions together, as well as being a stepping-stone for our international students to build relationships before they arrive on campus. University data has shown that in an email campaign recently sent out to international students the most clicked link was to access the Umii app, showing that this tool is particularly supporting this community of students.

Picture of students playing with a guide dog
Photo of Welcome Week

Welcome Survey

We leaned into planning with the University this year, instead of separately, which allowed us to do more and share activity with students more. This year we improved our score in the post-Welcome survey that is supplied to all students, taking us from 39% to 64% satisfaction with the event and activity programme we produced for welcome week.

Societies’ Events Success

Our Societies have done amazing work this year building friendships, putting on activities and making memories. We have supported Societies to facilitate over 200 events, such as RAG’s Valentines Cards Sale, RPG & Tabletop Board and Card Games activities and Natural Science’s Graduation Ball.

Photo of a sociey

Is there anything wrong with this page? Let us know