There are times where there are a lot of secondary school children in the Hub, and it can be uncomfortable or disruptive to students. What are your thoughts on making The Hub ID card only during regular term times?

The University sees itself as a civic university, so we believe our connections to the community are really important. A number of our buildings are open to the public, and we encourage a number of our buildings to be open. An example is the new Delia Derbyshire building; when that opens fully, part of its purpose is to allow members of the public in to exhibit student artwork and performance.

We definitely see the Hub as a part of that civic engagement and we would absolutely not want to discourage schoolchildren from visiting the University; that’s absolutely our mission with what we stand for as a university. It’s about our connection with the community, it’s about widening participation and opening access – as things stand, we don’t have any plans to restrict access to the Hub during normal opening hours. It’s swipe access between 10pm and 6am, but other than that we want members of the community in the building.

Having said that, we expect members of the public to behave correctly and maintain the facility so that students can use it. We would deal with any disruption on a case by case basis. We have a lot of events at the Hub, which adds to the vibrancy to the place. Now that this has been raised, we can be aware that it’s a problem and make sure we monitor it.

Is it the Universities expectation that most courses are taught onsite and in person? If so, how are students receiving value for money if many of their classes are online and how can students report that they are not receiving enough in person teaching?

Our expectation is that classes, in the most part, are face to face. There are three important exceptions to that. There are some courses specifically online, and clearly they will still run online. There are a number of modules, including some Add+Vantage modules, which run online. This gives the modules more flexibility to allow students to study in their own time. At Postgraduate level, our Chartered Management Institute modules run online specifically, and have the same advantages as the Add+Vantage modules.

However, in the main, our courses should be in person. There may be elements of online learning alongside the face to face delivery. However, if students feel that face to face learning is being replaced by online learning, that’s not our policy. There may be isolated incidents where because someone is ill or due to the ongoing travel strikes, classes are moved online, but as a rule classes should be face to face. If this is not the case, we would like to know about it.

The first port of call should be your course director, or failing that, your head of school. We will look into all cases. We are expecting all relevant courses to be delivered face to face. We have been in contact with Associate Deans of each faculty, and none of them have reported this as a problem. So it’s really important that if that isn’t the case, we need to know about it. If this is a legacy from COVID, where we were forced to move online, and classes haven’t reverted back, we need to know. If it does need to be escalated, we need specific details – not just a faculty or a school. We’ll need module details and specific examples.

What new initiatives have been created to assist financially struggling students through the cost-of-living crisis?

The first thing to say is that we do recognise this as a huge issue at the moment – we’re looking at a number of things to help support students. There is a cost of living group that has been established to look at issues and we’re working closely with Your Students’ Union at the moment. We are looking at increasing our hardship fund, opening the Hub 24 hours a day so that students have access to warm spaces and we’re investigating the practicalities of a low/no cost breakfast on campus. We already do try to assist, with initiatives such as the Flying Start programme and working with Food Banks and the Trussell Trust to try and improve access to that. We are working on this, and should hopefully have some concrete plans and announcements to make in the coming days and weeks.

We will be making these initiatives available group-wide, and all of our support systems should be available to all students. No one will be excluded. For things like the hardship fund, there is a process to understand who is eligible, but it’s open group-wide.

A full video with all questions will be made available in the coming weeks – this will be added to this article.