Area Updates

Is your work impacted by disputes between students? If so, we’re interested in talking to you. We’ve had 4 interesting cases recently, where disputes and issues between students have escalated to formal investigations into non-academic misconduct. As part of these cases, we’ve seen some interesting developments in the University’s approach to dealing with disputes informally (before they reach the stage of formal investigation). Some of the questions students have been asking us are:

• If an informal no-contact agreement (rather than a formal no-contact order) is recommended between myself and a housemate, what happens if I disagree with this?
• If I ask for a no-contact agreement and the other person appears to breach this, must they leave the location immediately?

We’ve also seen the impact of no-contact agreements in student group settings, which is why we’d be interested to hear your experience.

Bars & Events: Supporting the Beat of Campus Life!

Hey Team!

We’ve been busy bringing the buzz to campus, and there’s so much to celebrate! Here’s the lateston how the Bars & Events team has been making waves by supporting some fantastic student-led events:

Student Societies Take the Spotlight

This month, we’ve teamed up with some incredible student societies to help their events shine.

Check out what we’ve been up to:

Karaoke Society: Mondays have never been this fun! Our spaces came alive with solos, duets, and plenty of crowd singalongs. The turnout and energy have made it a night to remember.

Music Society: From intimate acoustic sets to electrifying performances, we’re proud to have provided the stage and support for their amazing talent.

Model UN: After intense debates, discussions, and diplomacy, our team provided the perfect venue for members to kick back, relax, and connect.

DJ School: A huge shoutout to the budding DJs who’ve been learning the ropes (and the beats). We can’t wait to see them spinning tracks at future events!

Raising the Bar

We’re not just supporting events—we’re keeping our own offerings fresh and exciting!

This year’s new cocktails and mocktails have been a big hit. We’re already brainstorming ideas for the new semester, so if you’ve got suggestions, send them our way!

Team Shoutouts

A massive thank you to everyone who helped make these student events such a success. Special applause to Izzie, Connor, and Lochlann for their hard work during Freshers Week—you absolutely smashed it!

Looking Ahead

There’s no slowing down! Here’s what’s coming up next:

Masquerade Ball & Snowball Events: These are just around the corner, and we’re gearing up to make them unforgettable.

Welcome to the Team: We’re thrilled to announce that Suzanne Snook has joined us as the new Events & Engagement Manager. This is an exciting step forward for our team, and we can’t wait to see Suzanne’s vision unfold.

Finance have now settled in our new office space, and feel very welcome, its as if we have always been here, although the doorbells are very confusing!

Audit has officially been ticked off the list, Helen and Emily can now focus on interviews for the new finance staff member hopefully starting in the new year!

Facilities and Transport are “chugging” through their to do lists but are currently very busy as in just one weekend they had 9 trips planned.

For something a bit fun from us, we have done some facts about our November to the tune of ’12 Days of Christmas’

“In the month of November,  we’ve been busy with…

84 Card Transactions

46 Berkeley Coaches

33 Christmas Meals

22 MPV trips

18 Sum Up Machines

8 ISB Trips

6 Team members

5 DAYS A WEEEEEEK!!

4 Finance Staff

3 Months ‘til baby

2 Facilities and Transport

And 1 semester nearly done!”

Authors: Geraldine and Chloe

Marketing are busy as ever promoting everything he SU has to offer. There have been many new schemes that have needed new artwork as well as existing projects that we have needed to work on. We are about to enter SU Officer Election period so are working to wards planning for this. We have signed up to a new social media content management planning tool, this should enable us to schedule more and plan more effectively as well as show to staff the full breadth of what we have to communicate. We will be introducing marketing briefs moving forward to help with prioritisation of tasks and to ensure we are considering impact and evaluation when planning. We are working on some big projects such as ‘Together we shape tomorrow’ and support the communication around the SU Top Ten. We have told some lovely stories from student successes and want to do more of this, so please keep sending them through. We have a Festive market this week and already working on Refresh Week.

We have launched festive food and drinks deals in the bars and supporting the area to promote these alongside the big flagship events such as the SnowBall and Masquerade Ball

The Peer Support Team have continued to be very busy in November. With Academic Pal reaching over 1700 students participating and Language Pal reaching over 100, plus the first very successful language café with a record number of attendees!

November has seen the start of a new scheme called SUPPlement, run by our first student trainer Anna alongside Annette and Gemma. This was in response to the demand we saw for additional English support and 24 students have attended so far, each session working on reading, writing and conversing in English through letter writing.

Adela and Sophie have done tremendous work with the website, creating pages and updating the content with their good friend (also on speed dial) Will to support.

Gemma has persevered with Education Awards and despite getting the feeling that Ryan Lucas maybe does not like her ( first ditches education awards because of a baby and now he has a new job-sigh) has indeed found a glorious new location for this next year.

We are also very proud of  Pia who is presenting an abstract in early December at a symposium, because she isn’t busy enough with Peer work, she also does her PHD too

Arts

The show season is in full swing and we have been busy supporting our students’ shows and events both on and off campus. DanceSoc’s Winter Show in the Edge Theatre this weekend is already sold-out, whilst ChaOS are holding 3 Christmas concerts over the next couple of weeks. If you are ever interested in attending show – please let us know!

Speaking of Christmas, we’ve got a great range of festive workshops lined up including mini wreath making and bauble painting. We’ve also teamed up with Winter at Bath and Community to put on activities for students staying for the winter break, they can enjoy festive films in the Events Space, practice their instruments, or even learn to crochet a blanket for Bath Cats and Dog’s Home with Crochet & Knit Soc. Our Edge Christmas tree is going up on 2 December and CeramicsSoc and Crochet are hand-making the decorations!

Recruitment is underway for our Arts Administrator and with over 40 applicants we have high hopes of getting a great new team member – watch this space.

Author: Susie Canning

Community

Things are still rather busy for community. We successfully trained all 60 hall reps over the first week of November and the reps are now busy submitting their events for semester one. The PG Hall reps in the city have been really successful so far in engaging the PG community. Tomorrow 60 PG students will be going ice skating together to Victoria Park, a great community building event! We also have plans submitted from 6 other on-campus halls ranging from Christmas Quizzes, Bingo, and board games (with Pizza of course).

On 16th November 57 students travelled to Oxford for the day, this trip included a 90-minute tour and free time to explore. We also had one of our student content creators attending the trip, she is pulling together a vlog and story about SU trips and how great they are, keep an eye on the website for her story.

Our first housemate finder event of the year is happening tomorrow at the Edge. We have pre-printed stickers so students can fill out whether they are looking for a group to move in with or one or two other students to join their groups. We will also have a ‘quiet’ area and we’ll be doing some badge making so students can see each other’s interests. We’ll update how this went next month!
Author: Sarah Williams

Societies

The Societies area is still very busy with many event planners coming through every day. Some of our bigger events coming up include Ace Christmas ball, Caledonian society ball and Arab society’s Palestine festival. Last weekend we had the model united nation society’s Conference, welcoming students from across the country to Bath. The conference had 175 attendees.

Our student staff members have been supporting with event planners and all the associated paperwork, processes for students, Society of the month re-launch and updating our main committee spreadsheets. They have been a great help to the area for the past 8 weeks!

Alongside event planners, Hannah has been finalising plans for the Masquerade ball which will take place on Tuesday 3rd December. All 300 tickets sold out within a couple of hours, and we’ll have staff, officer’s, student staff and exec’s all helping out on the night! We’re looking forward to performances from our very own ChaOS big band, Caledonian society and URB providing some great dancing music.
Author: Sarah Williams

Sports

November saw the weather turn and this impacts our delivery and workload. We don’t like, cold, wet or snowy weather in Sport as it always creates work.

We saw a successful 2 days of team photos with 44 sports clubs signing up and all slots filled. We are sure your experience of the staff photos showed what a well oiled machine team photo days are.

This week we in sport hosted the BUCS regional meeting, which saw the biggest attendance for anumber of years. We were also joined at the meeting by the BUCS CEO and BUCS Governance Manager.

26 days until Christmas break!
Author: Jo Dixon

Volunteering & Fundraising

The Volunteering & Fundraising Team have had a very proactive month. Beckie has set up a men’s wellbeing pizza-making project with Dough Bros and sessions have now been taking place to raise awareness and highlight the need for men to seek support if they are struggling. Hazel continues to be busy with Movember, including supporting with sports challenges and setting up an art installation in the SU building, showing the number of men who die from suicide each month.

The second campus Repair Café took place where students (and staff!) can get items repaired. Students find this a fantastic way to live a more sustainable lifestyle and get help with the cost of living. Student volunteering group V Repair, who run the Repair Cafes, have also done incredible work in expanding their activity, collaborating with Sustainable Fashion Soc to run extra activities.

Most recently, the Volunteering Team have had their first event in the Scala building, working with the University to run a popular Christmas gift wrapping event for Ukrainian children in Bath.

We love celebrating the impact student volunteers have and in November we recognised our second Volunteer of the Month for this academic year. See our website for more info and past winners.

Next month we’re looking forward to getting both festive and active with the 5k Santa Dash around campus! Students will also be volunteering to support the University’s annual carol service in the beautiful Bath Abbey - amongst other wintery volunteering roles.

Author: Katherine Everton

Academic:

Significant progress has been made on the rep review with support from interim Student Voice Consultant Heather Doon. Grounded in research, data and feedback, initial concepts were developed and refined with stakeholders. An operational model is being developed to assess the impact on the SU and University.

We have run a total of 30 events as an area this semester. We are in a very healthy position with 92% of undergraduate, 83% of PGT and 47% of Doctoral roles filled, and exceptionally high levels of training (all over 75%).

George, Taibah, Amber and Zuber have all done a sterling job, the success of the area is fully due to their ongoing commitment and hard work.

Insight:

Student insight was gathered through an all-student survey (over 850 responses) and focus groups to support Mike with decision making and development of the Edge Café. Student Data and Insight Assistants supported this work and were vital in turning this around in a tight timeframe.

Change & Inclusion:

Work has been underway to prepare and plan for the Officer Elections (nominations open on 2nd December) to ensure all information is up to date and resources are available to interested students from the off.

The first meeting of the new format of SUmmit took place and saw the highest ever attendance of a SUmmit meeting with 39/44 members attending (even on a cold snowy evening!) to discuss engagement monitoring policies. The Officers and student members were all engaged and we look forward to the second meeting on 2 December where fossil free careers, trans student inclusion, and late assessment submission penalties will be discussed.

Two Diversity and Support Groups have restarted after a 5 year hiatus ensuring representation and community building for students on exchange at Bath and mature students (just student parents to go then we have the full set operational again!).

Big thanks to all in the Voice Team for getting through the first term and already achieving so much.