Monday 22-12-2025 - 14:49

 

Written by your 24/25 FTO Team

6 months in the life of four FTOs – the Director’s Cut.

 

Blimey! We’re one term down already, and the full-time officer team is halfway through our year at LUSU – as the well-known saying goes, time flies when you’re having meetings every day…

So, 6 months in the job, and what have we got to show for it? Well, let us tell you through the medium of a bumper-length LUSU article.

Summer training had us a blast

Thinking waaaay back to July, while you might have been sipping piña coladas on a beach somewhere (or more likely working your socks off in summer jobs to afford your first term of rent), the team were undertaking a period of training and induction.

Look at how bright eyed and bushy tailed we all were!

As well as getting acquainted with each other, we got lots of opportunities to network and build connections with other officers from Students’ Unions from up and down (and to the left) of the UK.

The first field trip of the year was to sunny Leeds for the Northern Regional SU Reception in July. Y’alright cocker!

Next up, off to exotic Birmingham we went for the NUS (National Union of Students) Lead & Change week. The original schedule of workshops was forced to change as students demonstrated the power of protest, occupying the Birmingham Guild building over NUS’s stance (or lack thereof) on the conflict in Isreal and Palestine.

What started as disruption to what the NUS had planned ended up making the week all the more valuable; we were freed up to focus simply on talking to other unions, and it enabled other student voices to shine through. The real highlight of the week was a fantastic session delivered by University of Lancashire officer, Avery, on how we can support our trans students in light of the Supreme Court ruling earlier this year.

Education Officer, Liz, was thrown into the deep end mid training period when an open letter about the Post-Graduate Researchers (PGR) in Faculty of Humanities Arts and Social Sciences (FHASS) being moved to a communal working space was brought to her attention. You can read about the initial situation here!

This led to her (still) ongoing campaign on PGR study spaces. You can read about what she’s been doing this whole time here!

And so, we were all buckled up to officially start our first term of meetings, emails, writing articles, and doing our absolute best to make student life a little bit better!

Do you remember the every night of September (and the run up to Fresher’s week)

We were getting into the swing of things by September, but with no one about, the cabin fever was starting to set in – thankfully, all of you coming back was on the horizon to keep us going! We do miss the empty Greggs queue though ☹

LUSU President, Rory, got his first win! After a month of tackling the University’s new policy on parking, we gained some ground in an out of hours price reduction. Keep an eye on this one, as it’ll be popping up again later 😉

Wellbeing Officer, Leah, started meeting with the Head of Student Wellbeing to open up conversations around creating a more accessible mental health service. They talked about targeted intervention for marginalised groups, as well as touching on student suicide prevention and ways to improve early engagement with support services. This is a fairly common theme in a lot of Leah’s meetings with university staff.

Activities Officer, Emily, hosted the pre-freshers Week training for sport execs, and covered topics such as neurodivergence inclusion, accessibility and sustainability.  In addition to also holding the elections for Sports and Societies Committee!

The gang got back together towards the end of the month to finally fulfil their lifelong dream – training Welcome Reps! With nearly 400 Reps and JCR execs trained up, we were ready for Freshers’ Week, we were not, however, ready for freshers’ flu…

FRESHER’S WEEK!!

In Fresher’s Week we hosted the Active and Discover fair for everyone to get to know our amazing student groups! We had 12,000 students come through the fairs and over 200 groups at the fairs. Don’t worry if you missed out as we have Refresher’s Fair coming up on the 14^th of Jan.

The Sugarhouse blasted the dust out of its speakers after a summer spent prepping for this week and beyond. The team made sure to contribute to trade in what was a mega busy week, and Rory tried interviewing some Lonsdale Smurfs in the queue giving us footage that we don’t think can ever see the light of day (glad you all had fun though)!

But of course, Freshers’ Week is really in the hands of our fantastic JCRs and Welcome Reps who volunteer countless hours to putting on event after event in the week, and our student groups who turned out to fill our Freshers’ Fairs with the diversity and vibrancy of student activity there is on offer at Lancaster! Thank you to everyone involved <3

October……………….BOO!

FTO DJ Night – we came, we entertained, we looked like wallies on the Sugar stage for a few hours. Nuff said.

It’s been a bit of a cliché in the last 6 months, but the uni is going through a period of big change, and seemingly not consulting anyone about it… We weren’t a fan of this, and neither were the UCU (spoilers!), so we set about a way of demonstrating to the University Executives the value of student consultation by collecting students in a room to discuss “College Redesign”. This work started conversations with the uni that look to be opening doors for us for into next term.

For Leah, October was a very exciting month indeed! Over summer, the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) for Lancashire put out a survey asking women across the county about their experiences of gender-based violence and harassment. When the PCC refused to extend the deadline of their survey to allow for the experiences of students to be heard, Leah decided that the only route forward was to gatecrash the upcoming Senior Roundtable event on the prevention of Violence Against Women and Girls. Catchy, right? Immovable object meets unstoppable force.

In October, Emily was focused very heavily on lobbying for an access fund for the year ahead. Luckily the university listened and she was able to secure £15,000 from them!

Nationwide work was also on agenda for October; Emily published an article on WonkHE (education-y newsletter) on how we can make sport more accessible to neurodivergent students.

Also launched in October was Leah and Emily’s Trans+ Access to Sport campaign working with Nyxon (Women+ In Sport President) and Siven (LGBTQ+ Community Liberation and Campaigns Officer). This was in direct response to the supreme court ruling and subsequent NGB (National Governing Body) responses to gender eligibility in sports.  Work was done to highlight the inclusive sports we have at Lancaster, particularly during the Active Fair in Fresher’s Week.

“Make Wednesday afternoons free” has been in every Activities and Education Officers’ manifesto since the age of dinosaurs. And this year we have made significant progress! Since departments have been able to move students to repeated timetable sessions, given that there is no clash, we have seen a significant reduction in in the amount of teaching sessions and fixtures missed. In fact, we have not been notified of any repeated teaching or lab sessions at Undergraduate level on our report form. There are still a few clashes here at there with exams and field trips, however the progress this year has been astronomical.

This year we have a whopping 492 academic reps! With 305 attending training. We held a rep conference in early November to wrap up our rep recruitment where we discussed rights through strikes, did department rep elections and launched rep projects. Rep projects are a new way of getting reps who are passionate about certain topics (ie Artificial Intelligence or Timetabling) to work with university staff directly to input student voice and seek an outcome that improves student experience at Lancaster.

November was a striking month

We’d be amazed if you missed all the buzz around strike action in November, as the UCU balloted to take action, and then won in their battle, against compulsory redundancies. Through this saga, we prioritised our comms to keep students informed about what was going on.

For Leah, the nights drawing in and Lancaster feeling darker by the day meant only one thing… a big ol’ map of course!

Getting information from students about where they felt street-lighting was poor in Lancaster, ironically, a highlight of the term. Turns out you’re never too old to love a sticker!

This campaign tied in neatly with the 16 days of activism against violence against women and girls (who names these things?!) that takes place in November.

What’s this, another car parking win?? Oh yes, and we have the out of hours parking permits to prove it – find out more in another linked article!

The university finally caught on to how consulting students is actually incredibly helpful in informing decision-making and invited our Liberation officers, postgrad representatives, and students from widening participation backgrounds to share their thoughts on the redesign of student-facing services. The university hasn’t quite got the hang of how to engage with students just yet, but baby-steps I guess...!

Now for a bit of a #throwback for Liz to when she received an email in July telling her that approval panels for new programmes as part of the Curriculum Transformation Programme (CTP) were paused due to the Universities LU Future programme. In November these panels were finally unpaused and programme approvals are back on the road, with paid(!) student consultation remaining.  CTP will be going ahead as planned in the 26/27 academic year.

A nice way to end the month was by celebrating the work of our JCRs at the JCR awards and elections result night! Nearly 200 students gathered in Sugar to find out who had won in hard fought elections, and also who had earned the coveted title of JCR Executive of the Year 2025 – very well done to Lonsdale College JCR Exec for winning this accolade!

December – t’is the season to write a whopping article that no one will read

You might have seen us looking festive (soggy) at the LUSU Christmas Markets. This was all a rouse, we were in fact on business collecting your Christmas wishes to the incoming Vice Chancellor, Steve Decent! We got some really impactful insights from you which we have hand delivered to University House – merry Christmas Steve!

Leah and Siven (LGBTQ+ Community Liberation and Campaigns Officer) met with the university’s EDI team to discuss the Gender Inclusion and Expression policy which is currently under review – we wanted to ensure it accurately reflected the needs of our trans students and kept our campus as inclusive as possible.

In December Emily continued talks with the University about the access fund sustainability. We managed to secure £146,000 for the access fund for years to come!

We have also managed to secure support for building a sensory decompression space on campus, when Liz thought that there was no harm in asking the Interim Vice Chancellor for one.  The accessibility community have been working on quiet spaces, so this is great progress for us to collaborate on! We are now in the early stages for exploring ideas for this. Keep an eye out for next term where we want you to tell us what you want!

Just when we thought we could take our foot off the pedal in week 10, we were descended upon by students’ unions from across the North West, as well as NUS President, Amira Campbell, to catch up on the year so far, and plan for the next 6 months.

Throughout the term, we’ve been meeting monthly with the Interim Vice Chancellor, Rebecca Lingwood, to make sure that the problems affecting students were being heard all the way at the top of the command chain. December was our last meeting with Rebecca in her capacity as Interim VC, but we’ll be seeing her (and Steve) again in the new year. Can’t get rid of us that easily!

If you’ve made it this far – well done, and thank you for your support through the year so far! And, with that, merry Christmas, happy holidays, and have an amazing new year!

 

Lots of love,

Your LUSU FTOs 25/26 xxx