MA Dissertation - NUS Wales and Student Engagement, submitted December 2012

NUS WALES AND STUDENTS AT WELSH HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS

JEREMY PAUL HARVEY

DISSERTATION SUBMITTED AS COURSE REQUIREMENT OF THE MA IN POLICY, RESEARCH

AND EVALUATION BANGOR UNIVERSITY

2012

Abstract

NUS Wales has been a politically autonomous organisation for nearly 40

years. In that time, and especially in recent years, it has gained a deep

respect from other lead stakeholders in the Welsh Higher Education Sector.

But how does NUS Wales relate to students? The idea of what it means to be

a student has been under significant changes in recent years, as has the

structure of the organisations in the movement. NUS Wales receives some of

its legitimacy from the idea that it is representative of students, and this

project aims to investigate whether or not this is the case.

Through a process of a survey disseminated widely to as many students

within Welsh higher education as possible, I aimed to examine their attitudes

to their local union, the issues that are important to them and their opinion and

levels of awareness and interaction with NUS Wales. The survey also

included a section for sabbatical officers at NUS Wales, as they are seen as

the main link between NUS Wales and the wider student body.

The outcomes paint a mixed picture. Whilst awareness of NUS Wales is

relatively high, engagement amongst the student body is not. There seems to

be a lack of understanding of what NUS Wales stands for, and a lack of

interest in engaging with it. There is evidence that the processes that NUS

Wales uses can succeed, especially when the campaign is relevant to the

everyday lives of students. Ultimately, the relationship between NUS Wales

and students is a two way street, and NUS Wales can only put in so much of

the effort. But campaigns that personalise the issues so that students can

understand the impact they will have on their everyday lives will help re-

engage NUS Wales with the wider student body.

Acknowledgements

This dissertation started life more than four years ago on my return to higher

education. From my first week as a mature undergraduate, I became involved

with the student union and through it I have found a new life and a new

career. The student movement has been a central part of my life, and I would

like to thank all those that have been involved with it.

Special thanks must go to Hannah Pudner and Mike Day at NUS for their

support of this project, both in supporting the project and in providing advice

and resources, and to my family and friends for their support and advice

throughout this project.

Contents

Chapter 1 – Introduction 1 Chapter 2 – Literature review 8

2.1 – Where is the debate? 8 2.2 – The NUS and the Student Movement 11 2.3 – Methodological Background 16

Chapter 3 – Methods 20 3.1 – Web survey vs. other options 20 3.2 – Survey dissemination 21 3.3 – Questionnaire design 23 3.4 – The questionnaire 28

Chapter 4 – Results 33 4.1 – Response rate and demographics 33 4.2 – Students and their Unions 37 4.3 – What matters to students? 39 4.4 – Students and NUS Wales 46 4.5 – Student union officers and NUS Wales 57

Chapter 5 – Discussion 61

5.1 – Methods, dissemination and response rate 61 5.2 – Students and their Unions 63 5.3 – What matters to students? 63 5.4 – Students and NUS Wales 66 5.5 – Student union officers and NUS Wales 73

Chapter 6 – Conclusions 76

6.1 – The Process 76 6.2 – Outcomes 78 6.3 – Recommendations 81 6.4 – Further research possibilities 84

Bibliography 85 Appendix 1 – The Questions 86 Appendix 2 – Screenshots from the survey 95 Appendix 3 – Institution Code Key 97

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Chapter 1 - Introduction

“It is only a few who get involved in the National Union of Students in

supporting dubious causes of no interest to students” stated John Patten in

19921. Mr Patten at the time was Secretary of State for Education, the

Government department then responsible for higher education, and he aimed

to end the ‘closed shop’ of the NUS. Whilst he wasn’t successful in his aims,

he raised a point that had been one of contention since Margaret Thatcher,

when she herself was the Secretary of State for Education, attempted to make

a similar assault on student representation.

Regardless of the failure of their attempts, the quote above raises a question

that many people have had cause to ask; just whom does the NUS exist for? I

do not attempt in this project to ask questions of the validity of the existence of

NUS or NUS Wales; I strongly believe that the work the organisation does is

vital and of real and measurable benefit to students, Universities and the

higher education sector at large. But the NUS is largely presented as an

organisation run by and for students. Is this actually the case? The NUS

leadership is not a directly elected body; as a confederation of constituent

Unions it is not covered by the legislation that requires trades unions to

directly ballot all members. If there is a democratic gap between the majority

of the student body and the leadership of the NUS, can it legitimately claim to

be run by students? As stated above, I believe that what the NUS does is

vital, so does it matter? Is it not largely a matter of presentation and political

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posturing that it claims to be a grassroots organisation? Ultimately, I don’t

believe that it raises serious issues in the validity of the work the NUS does,

but unless NUS can demonstrate the relevancy of itself to students directly

and that the wider student body has a measureable impact on the NUS, how

can it be certain to be relevant?

As well as the student body, there is another group who I aim to canvass the

opinion of. Between the student body and the NUS exist the officers that run

student unions’ local to universities and colleges across the UK. Elected on an

annual basis by the student body as sabbatical officers, often at the end of

their degrees but sometimes part way through, many of them have a larger

democratic mandate than the officers of NUS. Whilst the majority of the NUS

leadership is elected at an annual conference with roughly 1000 attendees,

student union officers are elected at cross-campus ballots any student can

vote in. Whilst the turnout is often in the 10-25% range, this can still amount to

more votes than the NUS elections. Furthermore, they spend their terms of

office at the heart of the student body on campus and are often more closely

linked to the student body than NUS officers, some of who may not have been

a student for some years. The current NUS President Liam Burns, for

example, was last a student in 2006.

NUS Wales, in my conversation with them regarding this project, made clear

that they do not, indeed cannot, aim to directly converse and interact with the

student body themselves. Their aim is to work with local student union officers

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to disseminate information and run campaigns at a local level; NUS Wales

provides the resources and information but the local unions provide the

manpower. They expect this to be a two way street however and rely on

student union officers to inform them of student opinion, either through official

channels or at democratic meetings or more informal conversations. This is

undoubtedly an easier job in Wales than in England. Wales, with a smaller

population and lower number of Universities and Colleges, allows for a closer

relationship between the NUS Wales officer and local officers. Included in the

survey, therefore, is a section for student union officers to express their

opinion on the issues.

Whilst the entire dissertation has been my own work, I have worked with NUS

Wales in the direction of this project, both as ‘clients’ of the project and for

their expert advice. NUS Wales Director, Hannah Pudner, has been of

enormous help in the formation of the survey, whilst NUS Nations Director,

Mike Day, has been a very useful source for literature and background.

However, they have had not any control over the content of the questions

asked or the formation of the results or conclusions, nor have I given them

access to the results or given them the chance to view the final work before

publication.

The basis for this dissertation is evaluating how NUS Wales communicates,

interacts and relates with students in higher education in Wales. I aim to firstly

discover student understanding of NUS Wales, their opinion of its work and

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their interaction with it and finally what student officers, whom NUS Wales

expect to be the ‘middle man’ between themselves and the student body. The

central part of this will be a research project to investigate this, as well as a

literature review to attempt to place this in some context.

The benefits of doing such a piece of work is, I believe, amply demonstrated

by this quote from Michel Crozier (Elman, 1989, 40)2, “People who make the

decisions cannot have direct first-hand knowledge of the problems they are

called upon to solve. On the other hand, the field officers who know these

problems can never have the power necessary to adjust, to experiment, to

innovate”.

NUS Wales is an interesting study in this regard; despite being an

organisation with a democratic basis, staff members control much of the

bureaucratic work. From personal experience, there are two common

complaints from students and student officers; the first that NUS Wales is

always hassling them with pointless information and the second that they

never hear from NUS Wales. These would seem to be mutually exclusive. My

ultimate aim in this evaluation is to ensure that the ‘disconnect’ between the

decision makers and the field officers that Crozier talks about is understood

and solved.

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I should be clear from the start regarding my own involvement. I am very

much one of the ‘few’ that Patten refers to. In 2009 I attended my first NUS

Wales event as a student representative from Bangor. Since then, I have

attended more than a dozen NUS and NUS Wales events, both as a delegate

and as an NUS Wales elected official. Over that time, I have had many

experiences of NUS Wales both as someone involved in the organisation and

as an external stakeholder.

It may also aid understanding of this work to give a brief description of NUS

and NUS Wales and its structures. The NUS is a confederation of student

unions’ from across the country, the main body of which is known as NUS UK.

Within NUS UK, there are a variety of full and part time officers, from the

President to representatives of specific student groups, such as international

students or LGBT students. NUS Wales is a politically autonomous

organisation, with ultimate oversight from the NUS UK Board of Trustees.

Whilst much cooperation takes place between the two, NUS Wales is

politically independent of the main organisation, with its own democratic

structures and full-time, three person sabbatical team and staff.

When deciding what to focus my dissertation and research project on, NUS

Wales was an immediate and obvious choice. The nature of this MA course

encourages practical and ‘real-world’ experiences as part of the course and

therefore I have decided to research and evaluate the manner and processes

by which NUS Wales communicates and interacts with higher education

students at Welsh higher education institutions.

6

There are a few reasons why I have decided to base this study on NUS

Wales. Hall and Hall3 (1996, 16 – 17) state that there are four main reasons

why projects like these are of benefit to the student. Firstly, groups such as

NUS Wales are often in areas of social policy that are very relevant and

applicable to the student. Secondly, these groups are often under-resourced

and would be unable to perform projects like this otherwise. Thirdly, students

benefit from working in a more ‘real-world’ environment, and gain a better

understanding of the practicalities of such a project. Finally, projects such as

this are often of a wider benefit to society at large than a purely academic

piece of work.

This project fulfils all of these criteria. NUS Wales works closely with all the

other major stakeholders within the Welsh higher education sector, and also

works to support students and student officers with their own projects and

campaigns on wider issues that affect students and young people.

Furthermore, NUS and NUS Wales have a very limited resource base,

especially financially. NUS Wales would certainly be unable to carry out a

piece of work like this at present. In practical terms, this project will hopefully

feed into an on-going process of reform of how it interacts with the roughly

500,000 further and higher education students it represents.

One area that I have already touched on in an earlier section is regarding my

own relationship with NUS Wales. Being as involved as I have been with the

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organisation and the sector, I have been very conscious that I do not let either

personal feeling or bias enter into the design of the project at all. Brace (2008,

3) 4 is very clear on this topic. “We are not, or should not be, trying to obtain

particular answers to support our position or our client’s position. The role of

the researcher is to be as objective as possible in order to provide the ultimate

decision makers… with the best, most accurate picture we can paint”.

Ultimately, I would be doing NUS Wales, an organisation I want to see make

as positive an impact as possible, to be in the strongest position it can be. Not

giving them as honest a picture as possible would be to do them a disservice.

1 Goodwin, S and Macleod, D 1992 Patten set to end NUS ‘closed shop’ The Independent, October 8th 2 Ellman, M 1989 Socialist Planning Cambridge: CUP 3 Hall, D and Hall I 1996 Practical Social Research London: Macmillan 4 Brace I 2008 Questionnaire Design London: Kogan Page

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Chapter 2 - Critical Review of the Literature

2.1 Where is all the debate?

One of the most interesting and from my perspective alarming outcomes of

this project has been the revelation that remarkably little has been written

about the student movement, student unions or the NUS in the last decade.

This is perhaps not surprising. After a long period of direct action and activism

in the 1960’s to 1980’s, there has been a period of comparative quiet in the

student movement. The issues surrounding this are worthy of much further

investigation, and are beyond the scope of this dissertation. However, it has

had an impact on the amount of relevant literature to inform this discussion.

From the time I decided to focus on this issue for my dissertation, I have been

searching through out the Internet, University libraries and many other

sources for relevant literature, but have largely drawn a blank.

Widening my search to involve similar groups such as trades unions,

community groups, charities and other groups also drew a blank. Despite the

enormous changes that have impacted society in the last 30 years (including,

for example, the advent of technology, changing demographics, changes in

political engagement) little has been written on how mass-movement groups

interact with their core membership. The academic focus on these groups has

been largely concerned with how they have dealt with their relationship with

the changing political landscape. For trades unions, this has largely involved

9

their changing relationship with the Labour Party and the tensions between

them and the New Labour leadership.

Widening my search to include student movements in other countries was

equally unrewarding. More is published by scholars from the UK regarding the

student movement in China or Ethiopia than in the UK. This is also

understandable. Students have often been at the forefront of social and

political upheaval globally, and areas where the student movement is most

vibrant tend to be those areas going through the most change. There is

another important difference as well. The UK is exceptional and almost unique

in having only a single national student body. Generally speaking, the student

movement at a national level tends to be fractured along political lines; the

student wings of political parties and movements. Whilst these groups do exist

in the UK (Labour Students, National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts,

Student Broad Left, Union of Jewish Students to name just a few), they all

engage, to a greater or lesser extent, with the National Union and utilise the

democratic processes within it. This leads to some positives and negatives.

Whilst there is perhaps more internal strife at work within NUS than if it was

more ideologically cohesive, it does ensure that it is a generally united body to

external groups. This places the NUS in a stronger position within the UK

higher education sector, with more influence than similar bodies

internationally. Again though, for my purposes, this reduces the interest in the

organisation as a focus for academic study; hence the situation where more is

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published by UK academics on the Mexican student movement than the UK

student movement.

The situation is beginning to change however, as the current turmoil within the

HE sector increases the amount of academic focus on the area and as the

student movement becomes more active, and arguably more fractured. As

stated, throughout the year or so I have worked on this project, I have been

able to discover very few sources.

As well as utilising online resources (Google Scholar, Google Books,

contacting editors of HE blogs and websites) and the library here, I have

searched the libraries of Liverpool, Goldsmiths, Kent and Manchester

Universities, as well as the library of the Institute of Education. These are the

institutions with the most academic engagement with mass-movements and

higher education.

It was not until very recently (November 2012) that I have discovered any

useful resources. Through chance, I met the NUS Assistant Director for

Nations, Mike Day, at a conference. I discovered that he had recently finished

a book on the history of the NUS, as part of the 90th anniversary of the

founding of the organisation. Very kindly, he made his bibliography available

to me. Sadly, much of it is also irrelevant. Only nine of his references have

been published in the last decade, and some of these are histories of the

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student movement or autobiographies of those involved. However, I have

been able to make use of a few.

The upshot of this is that, aside from the research carried out specifically for

this project (which would regardless of the quality and quantity of literature

make up the majority of my evidence base), some of what I will argue will be

based on inference and indicative and abductive reasoning, as well as my

own knowledge base developed over my four years of involvement with the

student movement. This is regrettable, as the literature search would normally

provide the basis for a dissertation; in the case, however, the majority of my

evidence base will be from the research project.

2.2 – The NUS and the student movement

One of the documents Mike Day provided me included an article of his

recently published in the European Journal of Higher Education5 (2012: 15),

which states,

“The relationship between a student and NUS-UK is described in the 1949-50

Yearbook (NUS-UK 1949): a student raises a matter at Student Council; they

mandate their delegates to bring the issue to NUS National Council who

debate and give instruction to the NUS National Executive Committee which

carries out the instruction through sub committees and permanent staff. Sixty

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years on, this process has essentially remained the same. (Rhodes 1968,

105).”

Thirty years after Rhodes wrote that, and ninety years after the formation of

NUS, this process is still the primary route for the general student body to

engage with NUS. Despite numerous changes to the structures within NUS

and a variety of new initiatives to encourage student activism, little has

changed from the perspective of students; there is still a gap between the

student and the organisation that is in theory bridged by the students union.

How the democratic principles of a member-led organisation works alongside

the increasingly professionalised staff within NUS is summed up by McVitty6

(2012). She discusses the difficulties for staff within NUS to balance what they

believe to be the right course of action with the wishes of the National

Conference. It is, she states, difficult enough to formulate policy without,

“handing the decision over to a thousand-strong student rabble with a three-

day hangover. Who know significantly less than you do about any given policy

issue in higher education”. Whilst she goes on to claim support for the

democratic principles of the organisation, it is arguable that this reveals a

deep sense of a divide between the staff of NUS and the idea of the student

movement. Dr McVitty is head of Higher Education and Research for NUS,

and as such is a key staff member in the development of policy guided by the

wishes of conference. She goes on to state that, “Our job as staff supporting

the work of NUS is to work in the spirit of conference policy, not require a

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formal vote of the entire membership on every single policy issue”. But this

surely undermines the principles of student leadership.

Against this perspective, Kumar (2011, 134)7 argues that in places such as

France and Italy, the fact that there were a variety of groups at work allowed

for a greater upspring of student unrest. “In these instances, strikes were

promoted by coordinated action through a united demand, founded through

direct democratic processes – such as mass assemblies – which was a

critical feature lacking in the UK… This may be related to the fact that the

National Union of Students (NUS) has long been seen as the only ‘legitimate’

and ‘democratic’ body for students in the UK”.

Kumar (2011, 135) also discusses some of the failings he sees of the NUS’s

approach to engagement with the wider student body. “The NUS has seven

million members, but it also has a deep cultural inability to engage or mobilise

its membership into something tangible”. He compares it to the changes that

occurred within the Labour Party in the 1990’s. “The NUS has overseen a

monumental decline in grassroots activism as its politics have moved towards

the centre. The languages its leaders speak is the same language that the

Blairites perfected concerning the need to ‘modernise’.”

He argues that the NUS has moved form being a democratic representative

Union to a service-based organisation, and identifies this as the main cause

for the failings he perceives within it. “In recent years, the NUS has positioned

14

itself as a national level lobbying group with local unions as service providers,

members as consumers, and democracy as expendable. Some unions no

longer even have general meetings and the leadership of the student

movement has spiralled away from the activists who used to sustain it.”

(Kumar 2011, 136).

Kumar’s (2011, 137) dissatisfaction with what he sees as NUS’s

abandonment of its roots in the student movement and direct action reached a

fever pitch under the Presidency of Aaron Porter, with accusations of

careerism being made on a regular basis. “The widespread dissatisfaction

with the NUS on many campuses cut deeper than questioning the integrity of

the NUS’s democratic decision-making structures, with all eyes looking

towards the actions and comments of the NUS President, Aaron Porter.

Students grew increasingly tired of the NUS’s inability to keep up with the

‘movement’ that had galloped ahead of it. While the movement called for over

half a dozen forms of direct action over several months, the NUS leadership

refused to back all but one in the name of preserving its precious reputation

against so-called ‘student thugs’.”

Other criticisers of NUS have claimed that it is at risk of making itself

irrelevant to students and the student movement. Michael Chessum8, a

student activist well known in left-wing groups, argued that, “The leadership of

NUS have for months been outsiders to their own movement. The campus

occupations that sprang up over last term; the mobilisation of 130,000

15

students on 24 November; the mass demonstration on the day of the

parliamentary vote; and then a revival of the movement, unexpected from

some quarters, on 29 January – all were organised independently of, if not in

defiance of, the NUS leadership… With or without the NUS, the movement

will continue”.

Which of these two viewpoints is correct? They are seemingly mutually

exclusive; Kumar and Chessum represent arguably a more historical view of

the student movement, whilst the NUS has the validity of democratic backing.

For all that the left (and it should be noted that amongst students, almost all

criticism of how NUS works comes from the left of the organisation) make

complaints about the failure of the NUS to be a democratic organisation,

every change that has occurred to NUS procedures has had the backing of at

least one NUS conference, a fully democratic event. Descriptions of students

that vote for these changes as ‘sheep’ are as at least as insulting to them as

McVitty’s comments that students are a drunken rabble.

Regardless of the occasional apparent lack of respect for the general student

body, both sides arguably have valid arguments regarding the way in which

NUS interacts with students, as they represent the twin strands of any

representative organisation: active campaigning and passive policy creation.

Whilst NUS has indeed moved closer to a service-provision model, there are

valid reasons for this. The changing nature of national politics and increased

16

financial pressures has meant that a process of centralisation has been

required. However, arguably the left are correct in their assessment that there

is now far more of a gap between the student body and the leadership of NUS

and the student movement. However, the problem the left has is that their

events are far less well attended than the NUS events and cannot at all claim

any validity in being the new voice of students. Society has changed too much

for that to be the case, as have student expectations. The question of who, if

any, speaks for students is the focus of a far more broad-ranging and wider

project.

2.3 Methodological background

One area in which there is a wealth of information available is the

methodological approach I have used for this dissertation. The approach was

not a difficult one to decide upon. Despite the warning from Black (1993, 20)9

that, “a researcher to begin a project with no question formulated but with a

research approach already chosen, like a case study, survey or statistical

model, is roughly equivalent to opening one’s tool box, grasping the favourite

hammer, and dashing about to see what needs fixing”, the options in terms of

methodology were fairly limited.

It was clear very quickly in planning this project that an online approach would

be the only sensible approach for reasons of cost, time and the target

respondents. Brace10 (2008, 31 – 33) discusses some of the advantages and

17

disadvantages of using online surveys. At a basic level, one of the main

advantages is that “respondents can complete the questionnaire in their own

time, going away from it if they are uninterrupted, and returning to it later”.

This was certainly a consideration in using online surveys. As well as the

benefits intrinsic to being web-based, online surveys also have advantages

over paper surveys. “A disadvantage of paper self-completion questionnaires

is that the respondents can look ahead. With web-based questionnaires the

questions are presented in the sequence that the researcher wants them to

be”. This was also something I wanted to ensure. I needed to gather first of all

data on students experiences with their own unions and their priorities before

gathering the information regarding NUS Wales.

The major disadvantage though, is true of, “all self completion media… not

having the interviewer on hand to clarify questions or to repair

misunderstandings”. This is, however, more simply rectified with online

surveys than paper surveys. With an online survey, a contact email can be

more easily included and signposted to, and is easier for a respondent to

utilise if needed. As well as this, none of the data I was collecting required

much complex thought, simply recollection of experiences and opinion.

A central part of my decision to make this survey online was that the target

respondents were students. As Hooley et al11 (2012, 1-2) state, “The current

generation of internet users are connected through social tools, and access

online spaces through phones, televisions and gaming consoles as well as

laptops and desktop computers. This generation would probably not describe

18

themselves as belonging to online communities… Rather, they would see

their online interactions as part of a wider, more inclusive, sense of the social.

For most people Facebook does not foster the creation of an alternative

online community, but rather supports the building and maintenance [of

them]”. Where as before there was a gap between those who regularly used

the internet and the ‘mainstream’, this gap is no longer as big as before, and

is arguably non-existent when it comes to young people and students.

It is not simply the ease of gathering responses but also the dissemination of

the survey via social media such as Facebook or Twitter. No longer do

researchers have to disseminate the survey itself; only the information that it

exists and providing a very simple, one click signpost as to where that survey

is.

One key area of debate exists regarding basing surveys online as opposed to

other forms of self-completion surveys. Babbie12 (2012) points to the work by

Kaplowitz, Hadlock and Levine at Michigan, arguing that online surveys

“appear to have response rates approximately comparable to mail surveys”.

He also points to the lower costs and complexity in using online surveys.

However, Fan and Yan13 (2010), whilst agreeing that the lower costs and

complexity that web surveys offer is a consideration, points to a meta-analysis

by Manfreda et al (2008) that states, “It is estimated that the response rate in

the web survey on average is approximately 11% lower than that of other

survey modes”.

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5 Day M 2012 Dubious cause of no interest to students? The development of National Union of Students in the United Kingdom, European Journal of Higher Education April 6 McVitty D 2012 Dispatches from a wonk’s nightmare WonkHE Blog Available at http://www.wonkhe.com/2012/05/02/dispatches-from-a-wonks-nightmare/ Last accessed 03/12/2012 7 Kumar A 2011 Achievements and Limitations of the UK Student Movement in Bailey M and Freedman D 2011 The Assault on Universities London: Pluto Press 8 Chessum M 2011 Under Porter, the NUS risked making itself irrelevant The Guardian Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/21/aaron-porter-nus-student-movement?intcmp=239 Last accessed 03/12/2012 9 Black T 1993 Evaluating Social Science Research London: Sage 10 Brace 1 2008 Questionnaire Design London: Kogan Page 11 Hooley T, Wellens J, Marriot J 2012 What is Online Research? London: Bloomsbury 12 Babbie E 2012 The Practice of Social Research Belmont: Wadsworth 13 Fan W and Yan Z 2010 Factors affecting response rates of the web survey Computers in Human Behavior 26:2 132-139

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Chapter 3 - Methods

3.1 – Web survey vs. other options

The methodological approach I have taken for this dissertation is relatively

simple. Once I had established that I would be investigating students, it

became clear that an online approach for the research project would be the

most appropriate. This is for a variety of reasons, both theoretical and

practical. One of the main practical reasons was that it was by far the simplest

and cheapest approaches to use. Being limited by budget and transport

meant that the ease of dissemination of the survey and gathering of results

meant that an online approach was the only practical approach.

As discussed in the literature review, simplicity was a guiding principle. The

nature of the survey and the target respondents pointed to online surveys, but

there are a variety of options within this area to consider. Firstly, there was the

option of using one of software packages available to create my own survey

and then to host it myself online. However, this option would require learning

a variety of new skills, as discussed in Brace (2008)14.

I decided to use the other option of using an online survey run by one of the

many internet-based companies offering this service. Having had experience

of Survey Monkey before, I was very tempted to use this but established that,

whilst generally a free service for small surveys, they do charge when the

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number of responses goes over a certain amount. I discovered that Google,

as part of their new package of cloud based programs, offer a similar, but free

program. As a regular user of their other programs, I decided to use this. The

program was very easy to use; I was able to write questions, easily control the

dissemination and receive responses in a useful and useable format.

There was another benefit I discovered once the survey closed. As well as a

spreadsheet of all the responses, the software also automatically created a

variety of graphs and a summary of responses. My intention initially was to

utilise SPSS to analyse the data. However, the summary provided by Google,

provided all of the results I required to analyse the outcomes. With simplicity

as the by-word for this project, I decided against using SPSS. Whilst the

program is unmatched in its range of tools the researcher can use, it also

adds a level of complexity to the project that the potential outcomes of using

SPSS did not justify.

3.2 – Survey dissemination

The central part of this project was a questionnaire aimed at all students

within Welsh HEI’s (Higher Education Institutions), roughly 140,000 possible

respondents. Babbie (2012)15 states that online surveys have approximate

response rates of postal surveys, at most about 70%. Bilton et al (2002)16

gives a drastically different standard response rate of closer to 30-40%. These

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are, from my own experience working in market research, far higher than I

would expect for a survey of this type.

Another practical consideration was the distribution of the survey. Costs

associated with alternative approaches meant that I had to rely on social

media rather distributing directly to all students at Welsh HEIs. This was done

primarily by contacting the controllers of Facebook accounts and Twitter

pages for student unions and universities, and posting it myself in other areas

where students might see it, including not just the locations mentioned above,

but also University online notice boards, student forums and relying on word

of mouth. I was pleased with the response I got from my appeal for help from

others in sharing the survey. Officers and students disseminated the survey to

their friends and areas of the online community I didn’t have access to (such

as email lists). I estimate that using this approach allowed the survey link to

be seen theoretically by about 50% of the student body in Wales, although it

must be noted that this is very little more than an educated guess.

This more than replicates the theoretical reach of directly contacting students

themselves. What will impact responses in surveys such as this is not so

much the reach of the survey, but the interest the respondent has in the topic

under investigation.

One way some researchers have approached this is by offering rewards or a

prize for responding. Again, reasons of cost prohibited this approach for me,

but if I were able, I would have certainly looked at this possibility more closely.

23

It is another area where being online has another advantage. Generally,

prizes or rewards for completing an online survey consist of online vouchers,

which are exceptionally easy to arrange and transfer. Again, Fan and Yan

(2010)17 discuss this issue more deeply, and state that there is a consensus

in the research that in general, incentives can boost response rates. However,

they also point to a study by Bosnjak and Tuten (2003) that states that only

pre-paid incentives have a measureable impact on response rates, and that

this impact diminishes amongst members of an organisation.

Whether or not students feel a part of the NUS Wales organisation is of

course a key part of this project. The response rate the survey gathers will be

a key indicator of this. Ultimately, I am not expecting anything like the

theoretical 30-40% response rates the literature would suggest. If anything, I

believe a 5% response would be exceptional. Ultimately, I have had to make a

set of decisions that have all somewhat reduced the likelihood of people

completing the survey, in part to increase the number of people likely to see it,

but also for issues of cost and simplicity.

3.3 - Questionnaire design

The most important part in designing a questionnaire is to ensure that the

respondent is able to give you the information you are seeking. It is difficult to

transfer the researchers understanding of the project into the minds of the

respondent, so the best way to ensure that the respondent can fully engage

24

with the project is by ensuring that the questions asked are direct and

relevant.

As Bilton et al (2002, 451) state, it is “necessary to translate the broad

abstract issues under investigation into more concrete issues that can be

explored by means of interviews and questionnaires. In other words, it is

necessary to condense broad research topics into precise, researchable

questions”.

Fulcher and Scott (2007, 79)18 agree and state, “Unless a question is carefully

worded, there will be scope ambiguity and misunderstanding on the part of

the respondents. As a result, the answers that they give may be difficult to

interpret”.

To ensure that the questionnaire did this effectively, I followed the simple flow

chart Fulcher and Scott (2007, 80) use to demonstrate the process.

Define Topics

Design Questions

Evaluate Questions

Revise

Questions

Disseminate Survey

25

The process of defining the questions had already occurred, but it was helpful

to draw up guidelines and areas I wanted specifically to target. It also allowed

me to more clearly lay out how I wanted the questions and sections to flow.

The evaluation process of the questionnaire was the key element, and

Fulcher and Scott break it down into three areas: the pre-test, the test and

pilot. Pre-testing involves an assessment of the questions themselves. This is

to ensure that the questions relate to the topic being investigated, but more

importantly that the questions make sense and are answerable by

respondents, without assuming any particular knowledge.

Testing is similar, but covers the entire questionnaire. It is less concerned with

the question content, although issues can still be discovered at this stage, and

more about ensuring that the question and section order make sense, and

that the respondent can understand it.

Finally comes the pilot, which they define a ‘dress rehearsal’ of the

questionnaire. However, they state that, “In some small surveys, a pre-test

and test will be sufficient to allow the survey to proceed”. This was the case

here, as the software I used, Google Drive Forms, allowed me to release the

survey privately to some for testing purposes.

The questionnaire took two weeks to finalise, from the drawing up of

questions to the survey being ready for launch. The series of pre-testing and

testing was the most time consuming aspect. Pre-testing included involving

26

Hannah Pudner of NUS Wales, as well as a few students. This was not for to

allow the client to have any right of censor over any questions they may not

appreciate but to ensure that all areas were covered. As well as being the

main point of contact, she had also recently completed an MA in social policy

research, so was ideally placed to offer constructive criticism on the survey.

The process of pre-testing most helped with the key issue, the use of open-

ended and/or fixed choice questions. Generally, I leaned towards fixed choice

questions, in part because of the advice from Fulcher and Scott 2007, 81).

They discuss the “differences between ‘open-ended’ and ‘fixed-choice

questions. In a fixed-choice question, the respondent must chose one of the

alternative answers provided on the questionnaire. This has the advantage

that the results of the survey can be easily followed up”. Whilst open-ended

questions may make it easier for the respondent to answer with flexibility, it

increases the complexity for the researcher.

Ultimately, as Iphofen et al (2009, 194)19 state, “The form of responses must

be appropriate for the chosen methods of analysis. For example, closed

questions produce data that is suitable for quantitative analysis, whereas

responses to open questions might need to be coded”. This meant that I relied

largely on fixed-choice questions for the survey, as I wanted to ensure that the

data was as easily analysed as possible.

27

As well as this, I generally used Likert scales throughout the survey as the

main tool for measuring awareness and opinion levels. Kumar (2011, 145)20

discusses the advantage of these. Their simplicity, wide applicability, reliability

and the ability for respondents to grade their responses make respondents

more comfortable.

The disadvantage though is one I experienced myself. Because the scale is

necessarily somewhat subjective, I found myself coming back over and over

again to the design of these questions. This was especially of the middle of

the scale; what phrasing was appropriate to distinguish the occasionally fine

distinctions between, say “rarely”, “somewhat” and “occasionally”. I attempted

several different approaches, and ultimately settled on the final form after

taking advice from the pre-testers. This was the area I was most unhappy with

in terms of the question design; however, I believe that ultimately I came to

the right conclusion. I was also careful to ensure that the final system was

across the whole survey; it is vital that a standardised system is used across

survey to avoid confusing respondents and potentially getting weak data.

The testing period was also important, though I found it easier to group

questions into sections and make sure that the flow of the sections made

more sense. How I made these decisions is discussed below.

28

3.4 The questionnaire

N.B. - a copy of the questions can be found in Appendix 1 and screen shots of

the questionnaire as respondents saw it can be found in Appendix 2.

The first area I want to discuss is the demographic information I gathered

during the survey. I had no need to gather standard demographic information

more normally gathered, but wanted to ensure that I was able to properly

separate particular student segments.

One of the more commonly heard complaints regarding NUS Wales is that

they are much better at engaging with students in institutions closer to their

base office. If true, this is somewhat understandable. Transport links between

North and South Wales are poor, and the majority of HEI’s in Wales are, like

NUS Wales, based in the South.

I also wanted to discover if there was any link between course studied (are

those studying a social science more involved), as well as year of study.

These questions were largely for the purposes of comparison across different

groups.

The first section after this, ‘You and Your SU’ is related to this. Being able to

compare engagement rates between students and their SU against students

and NUS Wales was important; if the process of expecting local student

29

unions to be the ambassador for NUS Wales was working, places where

students were more engaged with their SU should also be more engaged

with, or at least aware of, NUS Wales.

Student engagement levels with their own student union could be gathered in

the demographics section with one question, but this was an area I felt

needed more detail. Therefore, I included questions to better define the

involvement type. Many students take part in volunteering, societies or athletic

clubs during University. For some, this can be a route to more engagement at

a political level with Unions, but not always. This is also true of involvement

with student media or academic representation systems. Involvement with

democratic bodies within SU’s should, theoretically, show the highest levels of

awareness or engagement with NUS Wales.

The difference between awareness and engagement is an important area,

especially with regards to student unions. There is currently a focus on

attempting to increase engagement with students, by many of the

stakeholders in the HE sector: from student unions to Universities to sector

wide bodies such as the OIA (Office of the Independent Adjudicator) and

OFFA (Office For Fair Access).

I don’t necessarily agree with this approach; it is arguably more important to

ensure awareness levels are high rather than to focus on engagement levels.

However, I felt it important to measure both aspects so I included separate

questions to measure awareness and engagement.

30

The next section examined the areas that students felt were most important to

them in their lives as students, how much influence they felt they had over

these areas and who they say as the best source of support on these issues.

This was to get an understanding of how the relevance of the work that NUS

Wales was doing for and amongst students. It also included a question on

levels of involvement with campaigns on the issues they said were important

to them. I felt this was an important question as if it revealed that students had

low levels of involvement with any campaigning but high awareness levels of

their SU and NUS Wales, it points to deeper issues with student

representation than simply ineffective communication methods on their parts.

The third section focused on investigating student opinion on NUS Wales,

their awareness and involvement with it and, arguably most importantly, their

awareness of the campaigns NUS Wales runs. I asked NUS Wales to provide

me with a list of their most recent campaigns and events that they had been

involved with, and used this as the basis for a question. A key aspect of NUS

Wales’ approach to engagement is through focusing attention on their

campaigns, events and projects, rather than on themselves. This is standard

behaviour for organisations such as NUS Wales, and a sensible route

forward. However, I wanted to have a measure of this to compare against

awareness of NUS Wales. I also felt it could be useful to measure this against

student opinion of what issues were important of them; I would hope and

31

expect to find a similarity between the two. If there is a variance between

customer expectations and the provider’s perceptions of these expectations

then a gap develops between the two. Gap analysis is an important tool in

customer satisfaction research and would clearly apply to the relationship

between students and their Unions.

For students, this was the final section. However, as mentioned previously, I

also wanted to discover the opinion on NUS Wales of officers in student

unions. There was an extra demographic question at the start of this section

regarding what remit their position covers. Every students union in Wales has

different officers covering different remits; I wouldn’t expect to find much

difference in the numbers of sabbatical officers being aware, but I would in

terms of levels of involvement.

This section mainly looks at satisfaction with amount of contact, content and

materials for campaigns, and relevancy of the materials and campaigns NUS

Wales produces. This is an important measure; if sabbatical officers – those

NUS Wales most relies on to disseminate their work – are unsatisfied with any

area of this, it points to improvements being needed in this system.

This was the only section that included an open-ended question on the

matter. This was because I felt that issues of ease of analysis were less

important, as the number of full-time officers is roughly 30. Coding responses

to this would not be overly complex, and I wanted to be able to include quotes

32

from respondents on this issue, as I felt this would be an area where NUS

Wales would most want specific details.

I was happy with the final design of the survey. As mentioned, the only area I

wasn’t entirely with the mid-ranges of the Likert scales, but aside from that I

felt that the questions were at an appropriate level, avoided jargon (especially

thanks to pre-testing) and the flow of the different sections made sense. As

well as this, sticking to fixed-choice questions and Likert scales kept the

survey simple – both for respondents and for myself when it came to

analysing the results.

14 Brace I 2008 Questionnaire Design London: Kogan Page 15 Babbie E 2012 The Practice of Social Science Research Andover: Cengage 16 Bilton T, Bonnett K, Jones P, Lawson T, Skinner D, Stanworth M, Webster A 2002 Introductory Sociology Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 17 Fan W and Yan Z 2010 Factors Affecting Response Rate of the Web Survey Computers in Human Behaviour 26:2 132-139 18 Fulcher J and Scott J 2007 Sociology Oxford: OUP 19 Iphofen R, Krayer A, Robinson C 2009 Reviewing and Reading Research Bangor: Bangor University 20 Kumar R 2011 Research Methodology New Delhi: APH Publishing

33

Chapter 4 – Results

One thing to note prior to starting this chapter is that whilst standard practice

would be to convert results into percentages, owing to the fact that there were

102 final respondents, this stage seemed somewhat redundant. Therefore all

figures are, unless explicitly stated, left in their original format.

4.1 – Response rate and demographics

The first thing to note is that the response rate was far below what I had

hoped or expected. 103 responses were received, one of which I discarded,

as it was clearly not a serious response. There are a number of possible

reasons why the response rate was so low, including a lack of respondent

interest, failures in the dissemination process and a lack of any incentives

offered. It is difficult to say if one of these was more important than the others.

I don’t believe that within the framework I was working in I could have much

improved the response rate. The survey was open for a period of several

months (from the end of June to the end of October), and I repeatedly directly

contacted student union officers, University staff and others, asking them to

disseminate the survey. Uptake was not particularly high, though it is telling

that where Unions that did disseminate the survey or where it was included in

all student emails a higher response rate was seen.

34

In terms of where respondents came from, I have decided to redact the

specifics, and refer to each institution by a number. A short summary

description of each institution can be found in Appendix 3.

Graph 1 – Respondent numbers by Institution

First of all, we note that one respondent failed to give a reply to this question.

This is surprising as the rest of their responses were comprehensive, and full

assurances on anonymity were given at the start of the survey.

Two institutions between them provided over 60 of the responses. Both

institutions, whilst geographically separate have many similarities in the

activeness of their SU’s and the SU’s involvement with NUS Wales. Both

institutions were very supportive in my efforts to disseminate the survey and I

believe this played a role in the higher response rate.

35

The third highest response rate came from Institution 5, with 18 responses.

Again, it is similar in some ways to Institutions 1 and 2, although I received

less support from the SU in the dissemination. However, I did receive support

from a student at that institution, and I believe this was the reason for the

higher response rate.

Next came Institution 3 with 11 responses. I received very little support,

neither from the SU at this institution, nor from any student there. However, it

is by far the largest institution I received responses from, so this was perhaps

to be expected.

Institutions 4, 6, 7 and 8 provided only 7 responses in total. These were all

small institutions, and it was considerably harder to make contact with anyone

at these institutions to aid in the dissemination of the questionnaire. Next, we

shall look at respondents by subject area.

Graph 2 – Respondents by subject type

36

Again, two respondents failed to give any response to this question, though

the rest of their responses were comprehensive. Again, I can provide no

explanation for this.

I have grouped those who did respond to this using the Higher Education

Statistics Authority Joint Academic Coding System (JACS)21, and then coded

again into the traditional subject areas of STEM (Science, Technology,

Engineering and Maths) as the 19 separate codings that JACS was still too

detailed, I believe, for this basic study of the results.

The humanities provided the highest number of responses, which is to be

expected as Welsh HE has had more of a focus on the humanities than other

subject areas. The ratio of roughly 2:1 of humanities and social sciences to

STEM subjects is to be expected.

Nearly 70 respondents were undergraduates, nearly 30 were postgraduate

students, and 3 were sabbatical officers (more on this later). There was a

roughly equal split between first, second and third year students (including

those on first/second/third years of postgraduate courses), with 8 being fourth

year students. This is roughly representative of the student population in

Wales.

37

4.2 – Students and their Unions

The first section of the questionnaire focused on students and their student

unions. First of all, student awareness of their Union was measured.

Graph 3 – Student awareness of their Union

Student Unions will be relieved to know that all bar one student is apparently

aware of their student union, and that the majority of students are very aware

of them.

38

Graph 4 – Student involvement with their Union

Student involvement with their SU also seems to be high. Over half of

respondents were in the top two boxes, with very involved being the highest

response. Only 15 students were not involved with their unions at all.

Graph 5 – Student involvement with their SU by Institution

39

Graph 5 shows us the level of student involvement with their SU by Institution.

As expected, those institutions with the highest response rates (Institutions 1

and 2) as shown by Graph 1 above, have the highest levels of students

involved with their student unions.

One thing to note however is that there are two reasons why these two results

may not be entirely reflective of students generally. Firstly, the dissemination

process meant that students engaged with their students union through social

media were far more likely to see get the opportunity to take the survey.

Secondly, even if students not connected to their student union or the student

movement had the exposure, they would be more unlikely to fill in the survey,

as they would question its relevancy to their daily life.

4.3 – What matters to students?

The next section dealt with what issues mattered most to students.

Respondents were given seven fixed choices, as well as the ability to write in

others they felt were important. They were allowed a maximum of three,

however, some did not stick to this. As this does not affect any important

totals or percentages, I have included them in the final count.

40

Graph 6 – Issues Important to students

The three top results for this was perhaps to be expected. Learning resources

(53), personal finances (60) and essays and exams (58) all scored at least

higher than 50% from respondents. The question was phrased “Which of

these are the most important things to you as a student?” as I wanted to be

specific to student life, so the focus on academic and financial issues was not

surprising. Perhaps more surprising was that nearly half of respondents (46)

stated that their social lives were one of the three top issues in their life as a

student. A third of respondents selected housing and welfare issues (33), with

union issues (26) and wider student politics (18) making up almost all the rest

of the responses. Two students used the option of writing in their own

comments, with one mentioning quality of supervision and one citing

friendliness of staff and students.

41

Next, students were questioned on how much influence they felt they had on

these issues.

Graph 7 – Student influence on issues important to them

The majority (66) of respondents agree/strongly agree that they have

influence on these issues, with only 25 disagreeing/strongly disagreeing.

There are a variety of reasons for this. For instance, those who selected

financial issues or social life may believe that they have direct influence on

these issues. As well as this, as I stated earlier, it is likely that the survey is

weighted somewhat towards those that are more engaged with their student

union and its representative structures, and thus the respondents are more

likely to feel they have some influence.

42

The respondents were then questioned on how much involvement they have

with campaigning on these issues.

Graph 8 – Student involvement with campaigning on issues important to them

The majority of respondents have had some involvement with campaigns on

these issues, with only 22 students saying they were never involved. 46

respondents were involved or very involved, and only 3 responded that they

had no interest in being involved with them. It is interesting to note that whilst

given the option to say that they weren’t interested in campaigning on this,

nearly a quarter responded that they had no involvement with campaigns on

these issues. Is this because campaigns weren’t provided that they were

43

interested, a lack of time or perhaps just that they hadn’t read the question in

full?

The next question deal with the adequacy of support they felt there was

available to help them to campaign on these issues. The question was,

“Would you agree that adequate support exists to help you make changes you

want to see in your life as a student?” and was phrased in this way to

encourage respondents to think about their life generally, not just with

reference to their union. I also did not want to limit responses to ‘campaigns’,

as this is a word that can have different meanings for different people.

Graph 9 – Do you agree there is adequate support for change on these issues?

44

The majority of students (60) either agreed or strongly agreed that there was

adequate support, with only 23 disagreeing or strongly disagreeing.

Graph 10, below, shows the comparison of between respondent opinion on

the level of support available and their level of involvement with campaigning

on these issues.

Graph 10 – Influence compared with involvement

Interestingly, the levels of disagreement and strong disagreement that there is

enough support available for students is relatively balanced across the

spectrum of involvement with campaigns although these were still relatively

low levels. As involvement increases, however, there is a trend to more

agreement that enough support does exist.

45

The next graph then looks at levels of influence students believe they have by

institution.

Graph 11 – Student influence by institution

The main issue with this graph is that there is not enough data from most of

the institutions to give a full understanding of student opinion. Where the data

is most populated (Institutions 1 and 2), the picture suggests that respondents

generally believe that there is enough support, and even where there is very

little data (Institutions 7 and 8 for example) this is replicated.

These results suggest one insight: that when students are more engaged with

their student union, they believe there is more support available. Again, this

can perhaps be put down to the weighting of the survey dissemination to

those already involved, but I think that there is some truth to this.

46

4.4 – Students and NUS Wales

We come now to the central focus of this research project. Graph 12 shows

the general awareness level of NUS Wales amongst respondents.

Graph 12 – Awareness of NUS Wales

Fewer than 10% of respondents had not heard of NUS Wales, which can be

seen as encouraging. For our purposes though, it is important to understand

in what context they are aware of it.

47

Graph 13 – Awareness of aspects of NUS Wales

Unsurprisingly, the most well known aspect of NUS Wales is the NUS Extra

discount card. Sadly, NUS Wales has little to do with the promotion or

organisation of the card, it being an NUS UK offer run through local student

unions. However, it is not a bad picture. 60 respondents were aware of the

campaigning and protesting done by the organisation (though perhaps this is

linked to the press coverage of the 2010 Demonstration that included the

events at Millbank). Nearly half (47) of respondents were aware of the

democratic conferences run by NUS Wales, with at least of a third of

respondents being aware of the other aspects of NUS Wales.

These are somewhat better results than I had expected. Again though, this

may be the working of the weighting of the dissemination of the survey than

actually reflective of the student population.

48

Graph 14 – Student Involvement with NUS Wales

This is a much more revealing graph. Over half (54) of respondents said they

were not involved at all with NUS Wales, with 32 either rarely or occasionally

involved. Only 14 were involved or very involved.

There is an interesting feature that relates to the perhaps unexpectedly high

awareness of the various issues shown in Graph 13. The fact that

respondents are not involved with NUS Wales but are still aware of its

activities is encouraging as it implies that the union is able to communicate

effectively with the wider student body as well as those more active with the

student movement. Next, we shall look at what issues impact involvement

with NUS Wales.

49

Graph 15 – Involvement with NUS Wales against involvement with SU

Unsurprisingly, the more a respondent is involved with their local student

union, the more likely they are to be involved with NUS Wales.

Graph 16 – Involvement with NUS Wales by Institution

50

As with other graphs using the institution data, this suffers from a lack of data

across institutions. Little can be drawn from this, except to say that Institutions

1 and 2, where the survey was disseminated more widely to the general

student population more closely reflects the general data on NUS Wales

involvement than that from Institution 5, where the survey was disseminated

largely by one individual with fairly high levels of involvement and

engagement.

The survey then asked respondents to state the extent to which NUS Wales

reflects their views as students.

Graph 17 – How much does NUS Wales reflect student’s views?

51

This graph shows a key problem for NUS Wales. It is not so much that 39

respondents believe that NUS Wales doesn’t represent their views at all or

only a very little, or that only 3 respondents believe it very much represents

their views but that 20, nearly 20%, are unable to say whether or not NUS

Wales represents their views. If we accept the picture that seems to be

building regarding the weighting of the survey towards those more involved

generally with either unions or NUS Wales, this is not a particularly

encouraging sign. Either people don’t believe that NUS Wales represents their

views because they are uncertain what views NUS Wales holds (because

they are uninvolved) or they are involved and simply disagree with NUS

Wales.

The next graphs shall look at how involvement with both student unions and

NUS Wales affects respondents’ views on how much NUS Wales represents

their views.

Graph 18 – NUS Wales reflecting student views by Union involvement

52

Amongst the two groups most involved with their unions, who make up the

majority of respondents, there is generally a fairly even split. Amongst those

most involved, 13 state that NUS Wales either doesn’t represent them at all or

only represents their views a very little. This is the same number as for those

somewhat or occasionally involved. We also see a general decrease in the

numbers who couldn’t say whether or not NUS Wales represents their views

as respondent involvement with their union increases.

Graph 19 – NUS Wales reflecting student views by NUS Wales involvement

Like above, this graph suffers from a weighting towards those not at all

involved in NUS Wales because of the response rate. However, unlike the

previous graph, this seems to indicate that higher rates of involvement with

NUS Wales is linked to higher rates of agreement that NUS Wales represents

53

their views. However, this is more probably because people who think NUS

Wales reflects their views are more likely to become involved with NUS

Wales. It is not necessarily the case though, and more investigation would be

needed to discover whether this was the case. Occasionally

Respondents were next asked to rate how important they felt NUS Wales was

to students.

Graph 20 – Importance of NUS Wales to students

The above graph again shows again, a somewhat negative picture for NUS

Wales. 38 respondents stated that NUS Wales was either not at all or of very

little importance to them. Only 20, roughly a fifth, stated that it was either

54

important or very important. The highest rated response was that NUS Wales

was somewhat important to them. It is not necessarily a bad picture however.

Unlike the previous question, far fewer respondents were unable to say

whether it was important to them and whilst the majority seemed to be, at

most, lukewarm regarding NUS Wales, nearly a fifth felt that NUS Wales was

either important or very important.

I shall next look at how this is affected by involvement with NUS Wales and

local unions.

Graph 21 – Importance of NUS Wales by involvement with SU

As with the graph relating to NUS Wales representing student’s views and SU

involvement we looked at in Graph 18, whilst the numbers who consider NUS

55

Wales either important or very important as SU involvement increases, the

numbers who view it as not at all or very unimportant tends to remain level

across the spectrum. This is, again, in part because of the weighting towards

higher involvement rates, however, it does seem to suggest that there is a

barrier to understanding what NUS Wales does, even amongst those involved

with the Union.

Graph 22 – Importance of NUW Wales by involvement with NUS Wales

As with Graph 19, there is an inherent weighting towards those not at all

involved with NUS Wales, with over half the respondents (54) being in this

category. Whilst there is a slight trend to viewing NUS Wales as more

important as involvement with it increases, those seeing NUS Wales as

somewhat important remains the dominant opinion. As with Graph 19, at least

some of the trend can be put down to people becoming involved with NUS

Wales because they see it as important.

56

The final question in this section asked respondents to select from a fixed-

choice list which campaigns run by either NUSUK or NUS Wales in recent

years they were aware of. Due to the close links between NUSUK and NUS

Wales, they often run tandem campaigns, so it is likely that not all the

awareness will be due to NUS Wales. Another reason for this is that

campaigns such as the Student Led Teaching Awards and the WISE/Have

Your Say project are only partly due to NUS, with many other stakeholders

being involved.

Graph 23 – Awareness of NUSUK/Wales campaigns

This graph indicates that awareness especially for the campaigns solely run

by NUS is low. The highest rated campaign, the Student Led Teaching

Awards, is fast becoming a sector-wide event, run by student unions or

57

Universities. Awareness of it is far more likely to come from it being held at

their institution than through work done by NUS Wales.

Third highest, from nearly a third of respondents, was that they hadn’t heard

of any campaigns. Whilst some campaigns are certainly aimed lobbying

others in the HE sector or the Government, it is a concern that awareness is

so low. Many of them, especially the first four, rely on student involvement in

some way. NUS Wales relies on local unions to disseminate these campaigns

to their students; the fact that awareness is low indicates problems with this

approach.

It should be noted that two respondents named other campaigns that they

were aware of. One respondent mentioned the Global future campaign, not

included in the list as it is aimed at International Students as opposed to the

wider student body, and one respondent named the Keep FE Free Campaign

(not included as it was an FE campaign, not HE) and the I Am The Change

campaign, which had not been launched at the time of writing the

questionnaire.

4.5 – Student union officers and NUS Wales

Unfortunately, I received very few responses to the survey from sabbatical

officers, only three in total. There are a variety of possible reasons for this.

Only a very few unions responded to my appeals for support in the

58

dissemination, clearly for some reason the survey failed to grab their

attention.

It is also possible that there was some confusion in who was supposed to fill it

in. Whilst I made it clear that the survey was for students and sabbatical

officers, it’s possible the message wasn’t clearly understood.

As well as this, whilst support from NUS Wales was often offered, there was

little in terms of actual outcomes. As far as I am aware, no email was sent to

officers and, whilst it was occasionally “shared” on the organisation’s

Facebook page, this was a very occasional occurrence. It is possible that if

more was done by NUS Wales to disseminate the survey, more sabbaticals

may have completed the survey.

One other reason could be that being a sabbatical officer doesn’t necessarily

preclude an involvement or interest in NUS Wales or national politics; indeed

for some positions such as those involved with student activities they are far

more likely to be so focused on these issues than other matters that have little

impact on their time as a sabbatical, such as NUS Wales. This though points

to a potential imbalance with the few results gathered – those most interested

are those most likely to respond.

In spite of these issues, some information was gathered although it can only

be discussed in a qualitative approach. Unsurprisingly, the three respondents

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are from the two institutions with highest response rates in general,

Institutions 1 & 2. I shall refer to them as Sabbaticals A, B and C.

All come from a background of the humanities, and all are relatively positive in

terms of their opinions on the amount of influence they have (perhaps

unsurprisingly) and the amount of support that exists. Interestingly and

usefully they all have different levels of involvement with NUS Wales and

different opinions on how much it represents them and how important it is.

Sabbatical A reports that they have been ‘somewhat involved’ with NUS

Wales and that it ‘somewhat’ reflects his views, and that it is ‘important’ to

their life as a student.

Sabbatical B states that they have been ‘very involved’ in NUS Wales and that

it represents their views ‘a fair amount, and also that it is ‘important’ as well.

Sabbatical C states they have been only ‘rarely involved’ and that it

represents their views ‘very little’. They see it as ‘not at all important’.

In terms of their contact with NUS Wales, A and B both state that they have

‘occasional’ contact with NUS Wales staff and officers, with C stating they

‘rarely’ have contact. A and C both neither agree nor disagree that they are

satisfied with the amount of contact they have, though B states that they

‘somewhat disagree’ with the statement.

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In terms of the relevancy of what is produced by NUS Wales, A feels it is the

‘right amount’, disseminated well and ‘somewhat relevant’. His only comment

is that it is “generally good”.

B and C both state that there is ‘not enough’ content, not disseminated well

and also state it is ‘somewhat relevant’. C offers no supplementary comments

on the material or information, but B states that, “Usually not that useful.

Housing Advice Cards were great, but they took months to come, then we had

to print them ourselves anyway. Apart from that, I haven't used any other NUS

Wales materials to my knowledge”.

A stated that they would like more one-to-one contact in terms of contact and

information dissemination, B stated that they would like more online content

available, more of a focus on email updates and again, more one to one

contact. C, who it should be remembered, has almost no contact with NUS

Wales, states that it is fine as it is.

In general, the picture is not positive. The most positive responses from

Sabbatical Officer A hardly add up to a ringing endorsement of NUS Wales,

and the opinions and comments from the other two are critical, either of what

NUS Wales does, or how it performs.

21 HESA (2002) Joint Academic Coding System Version 1.7 Accessed online, available at http://www.hesa.ac.uk/dox/jacs/JACS_complete.pdf

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Chapter 5 - Discussion

5.1 - Methods, dissemination and response rate

As discussed in the previous chapter, I was very disappointed with the low

response rate. Some discussion for why this may be the case has already

occurred, so I shan’t focus on it overly. In terms of what I could have done

differently, I don’t believe that there is much within the framework I had that I

could have done to improve things. However, if I had been able to act outside

these constraints, there are certain things I would have liked to do, and

different approaches I would have tried.

I believe that if I had been able to visit campuses and hold some in-depth

focus groups, I would have seen a higher response rate. It would have also

had the benefit of raising awareness on campus regarding the survey. As well

as this, there are areas within the survey, which I shall discuss later, where I

feel more in-depth information could have gathered some key insights into the

issues at hand.

There are two further things I would have liked to have done differently. I

would have liked to have been able to offer incentives - a prize draw or similar

- to respondents. As discussed in the chapter on the methodology, this has

been shown to have a measurable impact on response rates. Secondly, I

would have appreciated more support from NUS Wales during this survey.

Whilst it is true that I did receive support from Hannah Pudner during the

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earlier stages, I feel more support during the dissemination of the survey

could have done a lot to encourage student unions to get more behind the

survey. As part of the agreement with NUS Wales, in return for some support

on disseminating the survey, I agreed to draw up a summary report of this

project, to aid them in reviewing and reforming their processes. I don’t feel

that NUS Wales fully lived up to their end of the bargain as much as I would

have hoped or expected.

One of the key issues with this piece of work is that, unintentionally, it was

weighted towards those already involved or aware of NUS Wales or their own

student union. Whilst their opinion is important, it is not a representative view

of the wider student body. There is a wide-ranging debate within the student

movement at present regarding how it might be possible to increase

engagement and awareness of the various representatives systems at work. I

fell into the same trap that many others before me have, and one I should

have been aware of. It is very difficult to discover what students who are not

engaged with a topic to spend time thinking about that topic. It is not just a

case of making them aware of what it is you want them to be aware of, but to

have them engage with it as well. Sending a survey to students asking them

what their opinions are of something they are not engaged with was unlikely

from the beginning to generate the level of response I was hoping for.

I will discuss in more detail changes I would have liked to have made as I

discuss the findings of each section below.

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5.2 - Students and their Unions

Awareness and involvement of respondents with their student unions was

relatively high. This is a key measure, as the reliance of NUS Wales on

student unions in disseminating their campaigns and events is a central part

of their process. The theory seems to be sound in this regard. However, as

noted, the weighting of this survey was unintentionally towards those already

involved.

There is relatively little to say about this section in terms of analysis, as most

of the questions were purely to act as a measure for later questions regarding

NUS Wales. There was little else I wished to ask, and in fact as you can see

by referring to the questionnaire in Appendix 1, some of the questions were in

fact unused during the analysis. However, it was difficult at the time of

designing the questionnaire to plan exactly how to carry out the analysis.

More analysis could have been done in theory, however I don’t believe it

would significantly add to our understanding of the issues.

5.3 - What matters to students?

The applicability of this section is not immediately obvious in the context of the

research project, nor may it be from the results section alone. However, I felt it

was important that a measure was taken of what issues were important to the

respondents in their lives as students. A part of the work an organisation like

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NUS Wales does is always going to seem unimportant to perhaps the majority

of students (for example, the work done on Key Information Sets will be

irrelevant to the majority of current students as they are aimed at prospective

students) because the organisation is based at least as much in the

environment of policy and decision making by Government as it is in student

life. However, if an organization like NUS Wales was entirely irrelevant in the

work that it does, despite good work done in other areas, it would difficult to

claim legitimacy. This is at the heart of the discussion in the earlier chapter

regarding the point of the NUS.

In terms of the question that was asked of students, I feel no improvement

was necessary. However, in hindsight, I would have included a follow up

question asking them to identify which of the three they selected was the most

important, and perhaps a question asking the respondent to judge how

important the three issues were in relation to one another.

As it is, the top three results being ‘learning resources’, ‘essays and exams’

and ‘personal finances’ is not a particular surprise. Academic concerns and

financial pressures are only to be expected as the top issues for students.

There is an issue here. Aside from campaigning on the issue of student

fees/loans/maintenance and on academic issues within institutions, there is

little NUS Wales can do, except act as a central place for the sharing of best

practice and networking. In fact, this is one of the things that NUS Wales does,

65

and does well. However, it means that there is a disconnection between the

student body and the organisation.

On student opinion regarding their influence over these issues, the majority of

students agreed or strongly agreed that they did have influence. Whilst largely

included on the questionnaire to use as a measure against later questions,

the high response rate can be seen as a positive. However, if I were able to, I

would have liked to have been able to gather more specific data regarding

which of these they feel they have the most control over. Better yet, a

qualitative approach could have given more insight.

Graph 8 is an interesting one, and begs for more in-depth investigation. What

does the respondent consider campaigning to involve? Have they signed a

petition (or perhaps in the age of social media, posted a Facebook status or

Tweeted their MP) or is it more involved? The considerations of not creating

an overly large questionnaire and that of time and money for focus groups or

other approaches meant that I was unable to more fully assess the case here.

As it stands, it reveals little except that the vast majority of students expressed

at least some interest in campaigning, even if they haven’t been involved

before.

Graph 9, again largely included to act as a measure against later questions,

shows that students seem to generally agree that there is enough support to

help make the change they want to see in their lives. The supplementary

graphs to this, 10 and 11) seem to suggest that whilst the institution tends not

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have much impact on whether students feel they have influence, there is a

link between how involved a student is with their local union and how much

influence they feel they have. The weakness is again that the lack of

responses from more institutions means that it is difficult to build up a reliable

nationwide picture.

5.4 - Students and NUS Wales

We come now to the main part of this research project, students and their

opinions of NUS Wales. Whilst unawareness amongst students of NUS Wales

is slightly higher than of their own union, this is somewhat to be expected, and

the fact that less than 10% are unaware of its existence can be seen as

something of a positive. However, the more useful data is to be found in the

next graph, Graph 13, exploring what aspects of NUS Wales they are most

aware of.

Completely unsurprisingly, the nation-wide student discount card was what

students were most aware of. This can be seen as a positive in some ways,

as it reinforces a positive message that NUS is there to help students.

However, it also may reinforce the view that NUS is little more than the

discount card. I would have liked the chance to continue this area of

questioning - probably in the form of a focus group - as there is something of

a debate of whether or not NUS is ‘just a discount card’ occurring at the

moment, and discovering student opinion on it would be useful.

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Awareness is relatively high for other aspects of NUS Wales. With 60

respondents demonstrating awareness of the campaigning and protesting

aspects, around 40 of the lobbying and representation work and nearly half of

the democratic events, this is fairly high. However, if the weighting is towards

those more involved with aspects of the student movement already, these are

not particularly high numbers. This is why more in-depth work is necessary,

as we can’t hugely rely on the data produced. Another reason is that there is a

difference between ‘awareness of’ and ‘engagement with’. The next graph,

Graph 14, is far more revealing.

Over half of respondents have not been involved with anything NUS Wales

done, and a further 32 have only been rarely or occasionally involved. This is

evidence of a significant gap between awareness and engagement.

Graphs 15 and 16, because of an assumption I made when designing the

questionnaire, fail to provide much in the way of useful data. In part,

especially in the case of Graph 16, this is due to the low response rate.

Because of this, it is impossible to answer one of the original questions of this

project, of whether or not there seems to be a bias away from institutions

geographically distant from NUS Wales.

The assumption I had made when designing the questionnaire was that there

was a variety of opportunities to get involved with NUS Wales available to the

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general student body. My view has been shaped by four years of involvement

with the student movement at a variety of different levels, and I am therefore

far more aware of current events than the general student body. If given the

chance to do redo this survey, I would have approached this very differently

and formed the questions without this assumption, perhaps by asking what

blocks, if any, they see in engaging with NUS Wales. This would have given

far more useful data, and would almost certainly have emerged during

preliminary focus groups.

Over half are aware of the more political aspects of NUS Wales, yet over half

have never been involved with these aspects. Does this demonstrate that

students are uninterested in the work that NUS Wales does? Does it show

that there aren’t enough opportunities for them to get involved? Or simply that

students don’t feel they have the time to get involved? It points to problems

with the assumption that the most effective path to students is via student

unions. Engagement with students unions is far higher than engagement with

NUS Wales. It also means that NUS Wales faces the same issues that

student unions do; how can you engage with the student body if they are

unaware of your purpose or even existence?

Only more in-depth research will answer these questions, but it is essential

that this gap between awareness and engagement is addressed. Awareness

without engagement risks accusations of irrelevancy.

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The responses in the next part of this section give weight to this argument.

Over a third of respondents feel that NUS Wales either does not reflect their

views, or does so only a very little. That figure rises to well over half of

respondents when you include the mid-point. Only 16 students in total felt that

NUS Wales represented their views a fair amount or very much. This is a

serious problem for NUS Wales. If the majority of students do not feel that

NUS Wales represents their views, then the legitimacy of NUS Wales comes

into question. It is not that simple though. Do students believe that NUS

Wales doesn’t represent their views because they disagree with particular

stances of NUS Wales or because they don’t know what NUS Wales’ views

are?

We also see with the supplementary graphs that involvement doesn’t have a

particularly strong effect on this. Graph 18 shows that aside from a decrease,

and not a particularly large decrease at that, in people who couldn’t say

whether or not it reflected student opinion, numbers saying it fails to represent

them stays relatively steady. In fact, as people become more involved in their

union, the belief that NUS Wales fails to reflects their views increases. A

furthermore, the largest group of those who say NUS Wales doesn’t reflect

student opinion comes from those most involved in student unions. Again, this

is representative of a failure in the strategy to rely on local unions to act as the

link between the student body and NUS Wales. But there are still questions. Is

it because the message from NUS Wales doesn’t filter to even those involved

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in student unions or, more worryingly, that it does and for some reason they

disagree?

We have seen that increased involvement is linked to increase agreement

that NUS Wales represents student opinion. This is not at all surprising, as I

stated, as those who are likely to agree with the organisation are more like to

get involved with it.

These questions speak to a deeper issue. Students are not members of the

NUS, students unions are. It is not the same as a mass-membership

organisation like a political party or a single-issue pressure group. Students

are an exceptionally diverse range of people, some of whom will be members

or supporters of organisations that NUS campaigns against or unsuccessfully

lobbies. The very political nature of the debate within the sector, especially at

the moment, means that there will always be a part of the ‘membership’ who

don’t support your approach, from different wings of the political spectrum.

Furthermore, this political involvement will always be off-putting to other

sections of the student body.

In short, how can an organisation represent a diverse group? More

engagement could, counter-intuitively, lead to a further fracturing within the

organisation.

We move on to another important part of this section. How important do

students consider NUS Wales to be? The results are not particularly

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encouraging for NUS Wales. Over 80 respondents did not rate it as either

important or very important to students. That is less than those who say it was

only very unimportant, and when you include those who see it as not at all

important, the numbers are particularly bad. The impression that this graph

gives is not that it’s important or unimportant, but perhaps simply irrelevant,

especially in the light of the previous paragraphs.

Graph 21 seems to bear this out. Whilst across the spectrum the numbers

who see NUS Wales as either not at all or not very important remains roughly

level, the numbers who see it as important increases with involvement. This is

perhaps surprising if we look again at Graph 18. There, we saw student

opinion of whether students were accurately represented by NUS Wales

increase as union involvement increased. Yet here, we see that more thinking

it is important. When we looked at Graph 18, we were left with the question of

whether or not students view NUS Wales as not reflecting student opinion

because they actually disagree with NUS Wales or because they are unaware

of what NUS Wales stands for. This is hinting towards an answer. Is it the

case that students don’t know what NUS Wales is for, aside from a vague

idea that it is important? Is it some worthy cause that they don’t want to be

involved in but are pleased exists.

As with Graph 19, there seems to be a trend between involvement and

respondent opinion. What is important however is that the largest single group

is those who aren’t involved with NUS Wales who view it as ‘somewhat’

important - 19 respondents are in this group, nearly a fifth of all respondents.

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This more than anything suggests what I referred to in the previous paragraph

and almost certainly at the root of the issues that NUS Wales, indeed

probably the wider student movement; that students don’t understand what

NUS Wales is for.

One note regarding the methodology the original question in this part, relating

to Graph 17. It is only at this point I have noticed a mistake in the

questionnaire design. As I said in the chapter on methodology, I spent a lot of

time considering the appropriate designations for the Likert scales. On other

questions, the designation “somewhat” had been used to designate a 4 out of

5 on the scale - for this question, I made “somewhat” the designation for 3 out

of 5, the midpoint. This is an oversight. With hindsight, I feel the mistake was

to set “somewhat” as the designation for 4. This failure to use a standard

scale is an issue, and a mistake that shouldn’t have happened. I don’t think it

has caused much of an issue, as the questions were relatively simple and on

different pages. However, it is a potential area of weakness in the

methodology. A better approach would have been simply to define the top and

bottom scales and allow the respondent to give a numerical score.

Some discussion has already taken place regarding the final part of this

section, concerning Graph 23. As we saw, the highest rated response doesn’t

have NUS Wales’ direct involvement, and the third highest response was that

respondents hadn’t heard of any of the campaigns at all. However, there is a

ray of light. The second highest response, the ‘Student Survival Guide’, is an

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NUSUK/NUS Wales guidebook for new students, with advice on settling into

their new lives. It is distributed to new students via student unions at the start

of the year, and the fact that it has remained in respondents minds is an

excellent sign. This is real evidence that the current system can work in some

circumstances. However, this is a campaign that is relatively outside of the

world of politics and higher education policy and jargon: it directly benefits the

general student body. Campaigns among the wider student body that involved

these things scored far less high, sometimes not even double digits. This is at

the heart of the issue. With the current process, NUS Wales has to rely firstly

on student officers wanting to or being able to be engaged with the campaign

and then that they are then able to pass it on to their students but this is far

from the case. Union officers have their own campaigns that they wish to run

and rather than seeming to barrage students with information and campaign

information, they ignore campaigns originating elsewhere.

So what is it that student officers think of NUS Wales? They are the key link in

the chain between students and NUS Wales, and their opinion is all-important.

5.5 - Student union officers and NUS Wales

As mentioned previously, I received a very small number of responses to this

section. I’ve explored some of the reasons why this might be the case in the

previous chapter and won’t restate what I said there. There are certainly

different things I could have done to approach this part of the survey. If I had

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been able to, I would certainly have liked to do more in the way of in-depth

questioning of this group. As they have far more contact with NUS Wales than

the general student body they are more likely to have useful insights into it

and their processes. I don’t accept that the response rate was so low simply

because of problems with the dissemination of the survey or a lack of

understanding of the survey. The response rate is too low for that.

The very fact that the response rate was so low, lower than I certainly

expected even conservatively, points to something alluded to earlier. If

student officers are unengaged to the extent that they won’t even complete a

survey to help improve it, something is very definitely wrong. NUS Wales

relies on student union officers to be engaged and help with the dissemination.

If the primary link is broken, the whole process fails.

However, this data is not unusable. The three respondents are actually a

good cross-section of the 50-60 sabbatical officers in Welsh institutions. One

respondent, Sabbatical A, is a new sabbatical officer, with little experience of

the sector or NUS Wales before being elected. Sabbatical B is an

experienced officer, in their second term with experience of the movement

before becoming a sabbatical officer and has worked closely with NUS Wales,

and Sabbatical C is in their second term but with little contact at all with NUS

Wales at any point.

The analysis of their answers in the previous chapter is fairly comprehensive.

In summary, none of the three rate it in the top response for reflecting student

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opinion, and bar Sabbatical C who is uninvolved; they report problems with

how NUS Wales disseminates information. If those NUS Wales relies on to

disseminate information feel that the process is flawed and don’t feel fully

engaged, this points to a need to change the process. How this can be done

will be discussed in the final chapter.

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Chapter 6 – Conclusions

6.1 – The Process

Clearly, there were significant issues with the response rate to the survey.

Whilst I was not expecting particularly high responses, I am disappointed that

the results were so low. The reasons behind this have been explored at

different points in this dissertation, and I will not go over them here. Suffice it

to say, that whilst I must accept some of the responsibility for this failure in

terms of how the dissemination occurred, the response rate in itself is an

indication of some of the problems that NUS Wales faces in their interaction

with students, and student union officers.

That is not say, however, that I think the outcomes of this are unusable. It

should be remembered that only 40-50 attend the NUS Wales Conference

and elect the President and Deputy President of the organisation and debate

and set the political direction of the organisation. Much of this policy comes

from with NUS Wales itself and few motions are submitted from member

unions. If 40-50 delegates at a conference are sufficiently representative of

the student body of Wales for these purposes, then 101 responses to a

survey certainly carry some legitimacy.

Aside from the low response rate, I am relatively pleased with this piece of

research. Of course, there are things I would like to have done differently

given the opportunity and with hindsight, as I’ve discussed in the previous

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chapter. The main issue has been discussed there, but it’s worth reiterating as

it again demonstrates something about the problem NUS Wales faces. I made

an assumption regarding students and how they see NUS Wales; one that I

suggest is probably made by many others involved with NUS Wales. We

assume that students are a) already aware of the organisation and b) wish to

be engaged. We should know from experience that this simply isn’t the case,

and yet every time attempts are made to investigate why this might be, we

start from a position where we still make these assumptions and fail to reach

those we are aiming to. The reasons behind why students think as they do will

be considered in a moment, but it in part explains why the response rate is

lower than I had hoped. And while the response rate was low, there were

sufficient answers for me to use and thus demonstrate how a survey can be

used for this type of investigation.

One other area that may be contentious is my decision to not use SPSS (or

even something well known but simpler like Excel) for my analysis. The

Google program I used is relatively new, however I was exceptionally

impressed by it. Whilst very simple to use at every stage, it seemed to be able

to replicate everything I would require SPSS to do, without the associated

problems SPSS can lead to (for example, Google automatically saves your

work as you make changes, ensuring peace of mind. SPSS, notoriously, has

no such capability). Whilst there may be some raised eyebrows at using this

program, I have no such qualms. It simplified almost every aspect of the

research project, and saved a significant amount of time and hassle. If there

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were one part of this project I wouldn’t change, it would be the use of this

program.

Overall, despite some of the disappointments and the oversights, I am

satisfied with this piece of work methodologically. Despite the difficulties that

were encountered, I believe I have been able to address the central question

of this project and arrive at some useful conclusions, which we shall look at

now.

6.2 – Outcomes

The picture I believe that emerges from this piece of research is that, in many

ways, the current process that NUS Wales relies on to connect and interact

with students is unworkable. There are a variety of reasons why, and whilst I

have discussed some of these in earlier chapters, I think it would be beneficial

here to put them in some order.

Firstly, there is the assumption regarding students, that they have some

interest or engagement with the wider student movement. As Graph 19

shows, the largest group of students can perhaps be summed up as the,

‘Don’t know and don’t care’ group. Those, like myself, who have been

involved with NUS Wales and who view it as a vital organisation that does do

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good for students, have wrongly assumed that because we see NUS Wales

as a positive force, others either do or should see it in the same way.

A better way of understanding how students view NUS Wales, and indeed the

student movement at large, is a term from the world of marketing. A “grudge

purchase” is one in which, “customers’ behavior [sic] is on autopilot and they

are going through the service motion without paying much attention to the

surroundings. This type of relationship typically reflects a grudge purchase,

such as paying for gasoline or bills, and tends to be focused on accomplishing

a simple task. The typical persona in this type of relationship is focused on the

need to complete the task in the least amount of time and at the highest level

of convenience” (Lacroix, 77)22.

Whilst there are obviously some issues in this definition (for one, students

don’t even have to make the effort of going through the ‘purchase’, they are

members automatically and have to opt-out), the above quote sets out the

position very clearly.

There are a number of other analogies. Individual workers may also belong to

a trades union but often the only direct contact with the union comes in the

case of a dispute, where assistance is needed.

Professionals often need to belong to a specific in order to practice, for

example, solicitors and the Law Society, while businesses feel that they may

join trade bodies to enhance their reputation and status. It is the “belonging”

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that is important to them; the other services offered by the professional/trade

body may or may not have any application or appeal. Such ancillary services

are often termed ‘benefits’ by the organisation but often uptake is small.

The general student body do not view NUS Wales in the same way as people

like myself do. They see it, and their own student union arguably, as

something akin to insurance. In general, it is something not thought about or

engaged with, but when pressed, agree is important. This is one of the two

main issues.

The other main issue is the claim that NUS Wales can have to being a truly

representative organisation. With such low levels of involvement or

engagement with the general student population, how can organisation be

truly representative? The argument here from NUS Wales would be that the

route from NUS Wales to students via student union officers is a two way

street. Whilst they rely on union officers to disseminate information to

students, they also expect officers to feedback the opinion of the wider

student body to them. Whilst I have no data on this, my experience is that this

somewhat more successful than the process working the other way. It could,

however, be argued that Parliament and the Welsh Assembly work in much

the same way and that this model is the best practical option.

So if NUS Wales isn’t representative, is it useful? I would argue yes, and there

is data to support this. Whilst there was only one standout campaign by NUS

Wales recalled by students, the other campaigns that were included in that

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question were successful. NUS Wales certainly played a role in the decision

by the Welsh Government not to raise fees for Welsh domiciled students,

though there was arguably a natural inclination amongst the politicians of

Cardiff Bay not to follow the English example in this area. Regardless, there

have been measureable success from NUS Wales in recent years for

students – does it matter whether or not a significant number of the student

body was fully engaged or even aware of them?

6.3 – Recommendations

Ultimately, there is a central fact that is regularly ignored by NUS Wales,

student officers and those engaged and involved with the student movement,

and this is true of NUS UK as well as NUS Wales. Constitutionally, NUS UK

and NUS Wales are not truly membership led organisations, though they

could argue to be membership driven. The organisation is a confederation of

other organisations, which are themselves membership led.

This fact is usually glossed over. Aside from a period in late 1980’s and early

1990’s under the Thatcher and Major Government, as discussed in the earlier

chapters, the legitimacy of NUS in representing students to the highest levels

has never been seriously challenged. The success of NUS in representing

students can be seen in the fact that the closest the Blair Governments ever

came to a defeat in the House of Commons was over the introduction of top-

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up fees. And this from an organisation that it’s detractors claim is a stooge of

the Labour Party, run by careerists.

It can be fairly argued that the question of whether or not NUS Wales is

successful in engaging students is somewhat irrelevant. Students seemingly

do not wish to be engaged, and the increasing numbers of professional staff

within the movement is evidence that it is more and more unnecessary for

them to be so. But it is a two-way street. Decisions, as the saying goes, are

made by those who turn up. If students don’t wish to be engaged, then they

miss out on the opportunity to have their say. There are some issues with this,

not least that unless there is a fundamental change within the structures of

NUS Wales, the opportunities for students to become fully engaged with NUS

Wales will remain low.

This project has demonstrated that there are areas where the strategy under

which NUS Wales attempts to engage and interact with students is successful.

Where students are able to personalise the campaigns that NUS Wales runs,

there are higher levels of engagement and awareness. More campaigns that

personalise the issue would lead to higher levels of engagement and

awareness of the campaigns, and ultimately NUS Wales.

The other key area that NUS Wales needs to make changes is to its

relationship with the officers in NUS Wales. Whilst the response rate for this

section was low, both the respondents with any involvement with NUS Wales

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both stated that they wished for more engagement on a one to one basis with

the officers and staff of NUS Wales. There was also a request for more

reliance on online approaches in the dissemination of materials.

The problem here though is that student union officers also seem to face this

“grudge purchase” issue, though to a lesser extent. The entire student

movement needs to look at ways of reengaging with students in new ways;

the changing attitudes of students and their relationship with their institutions

could mean that they come to see the student movement as some form of

consumer’s organisation. And it is true to say that this is a problem faced by

many other organisations, such as trades unions and professional/trade

bodies, which exist to represent and protect individuals and companies within

their sphere of interest. NUS Wales is by no means alone.

I said earlier that the question of whether or not NUS Wales is successfully

engaging students is somewhat irrelevant. This is true, but the important word

in that sentence is ‘somewhat’. NUS Wales has been a strong defender of

students, their rights and their experience, without the need to fully engage or

interact with the student body. But we have seen that when NUS Wales is

successful, the campaigns are more successful. And that should be what

NUS Wales aims for. They don’t need to; but that’s no reason why they

shouldn’t.

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6.3 Further Research Possibilities

As I said in the introduction, the student movement of the past decade is an

area that has been exceptionally under researched. This research project has

shown that there are areas where more research is both necessary and

possible. The changing nature of the ‘model student’ and their relationship

between their institution and the representation structures at work mean that it

is important for organisations such as NUS Wales to know more about how

those changes will impact them and how best to respond to them. It also links

strongly into the changing nature of society generally; has our society lost its

capability to protest, do we need representation or do we need activism?

These are questions that are relevant. The most public of recent direct action

groups has been UK Uncut. This organisation has a large number of students

within it, but it did not come from the mainstream student movement, as it

would have done 40 years ago. In fact, would an organisation like UK Uncut

exist if the student movement hadn’t changed in the way that it has?

22 Lacroix, J-P 2010 Belonging Experiences: Designing Engaged Brands Bloomington: iUniverse

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Bibliography

Babbie E 2012 The Practice of Social Science Research Andover: Cengage Bilton T, Bonnett K, Jones P, Lawson T, Skinner D, Stanworth M, Webster A 2002 Introductory Sociology Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Black T 1993 Evaluating Social Science Research London: Sage Brace I 2008 Questionnaire Design London: Kogan Page Chessum M 2011 Under Porter, the NUS risked making itself irrelevant The Guardian Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/21/aaron-porter-nus-student-movement?intcmp=239 Last accessed 03/12/2012 Day M 2012 Dubious cause of no interest to students? The development of National Union of Students in the United Kingdom, European Journal of Higher Education April Ellman, M 1989 Socialist Planning Cambridge: CUP Fan W and Yan Z 2010 Factors Affecting Response Rate of the Web Survey Computers in Human Behaviour 26:2 132-139 Fulcher J and Scott J 2007 Sociology Oxford: OUP Goodwin, S and Macleod, D 1992 Patten set to end NUS ‘closed shop’ The Independent, October 8th

Hall, D and Hall I 1996 Practical Social Research London: Macmillan HESA (2002) Joint Academic Coding System Version 1.7 Accessed online, available at http://www.hesa.ac.uk/dox/jacs/JACS_complete.pdf Hooley T, Wellens J, Marriot J 2012 What is Online Research? London: Bloomsbury Iphofen R, Krayer A, Robinson C 2009 Reviewing and Reading Research Bangor: Bangor University Kumar A 2011 Achievements and Limitations of the UK Student Movement in Bailey M and Freedman D 2011 The Assault on Universities London: Pluto Press Kumar R 2011 Research Methodology New Delhi: APH Publishing McVitty D 2012 Dispatches from a wonk’s nightmare WonkHE Blog Available at http://www.wonkhe.com/2012/05/02/dispatches-from-a-wonks-nightmare/ Last accessed 03/12/2012

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Appendix 1 – The questions

Please note that this is the questions and introduction as in the survey seen by respondents. Each section was on a new page. Some example

screenshots from the survey can be found in Appendix 2. This questionnaire aims to understand how students at Universities in Wales interact with and communicate with the National Union of Students, Wales. It is hoped that this research will help NUSW to strengthen this relationship and help continue to improve the lives of students across Wales. It is part of an MA dissertation being carried out by a student at Bangor University, with support provided by NUS Wales. Any questions, complaints or concerns regarding this questionnaire, or the project in general, can be emailed to [email protected]. These first few questions are demographic questions about yourself, so we can better understand the responses. All data is held securely and will not be passed onto anyone else, including Bangor University and NUS Wales. Sabbatical officers completing this questionnaire, please leave blank any questions that don't apply. Year of birth Are you an undergraduate or postgraduate? What year of study are you in? What course are you studying? Which university are you at?

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NUS Wales and Students You and your SU A few questions about how you and your students union interact with each other. How aware are you of the students’ union at your University?

• Not heard of them before • Have heard of them • Very much aware

How involved are you in the students’ union at your University?

• Not involved • Rarely involved • Occasionally involvement • Somewhat involved • Very involved

Which of these groups are you a member of or active in? Please tick all that apply

• Societies • Sports clubs • Student volunteering • Democratic bodies • Student-led media • Course rep bodies • Other:

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NUS Wales and Students What matters to you? This section is looking at what is important in your life and how much control and influence you feel you have over it Overall, which of these are the most important things to you as a student? (max of three)

• Personal finances • Learning resources • Essays and exams • Union issues • Wider student politics • Social life • Welfare and housing issues • Other:

"I feel that I have influence or control over the areas I have selected" Would you agree with this statement?

• Strongly disagree • Somewhat disagree • Neither agree nor disagree • Somewhat agree • Strongly agree

Would you say that you have any involvement in any campaigns on these issues?

• Not involved • Rarely involved • Occasionally involvement • Somewhat involved • Very involved • Not interested in being involved

Would you agree that adequate support exists to help you make changes you want to see in your life as a student?

• Strongly disagree • Somewhat disagree • Neither agree nor disagree • Somewhat agree • Strongly agree

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• Couldn't say Which of these support services are you most likely to make use of for support on these issues?

• Student services • Lecturer/Tutor • Students’ union • NUS Wales • Family/friend • Not applicable/couldn’t say • Other:

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NUS Wales and Students You and NUS Wales This section aims to explore how much you know about NUS Wales, and how much interaction and communication between students and NUS Wales occurs. How aware are you of the National Union of Students in Wales?

• Not heard of them before • Have heard of them • Very much aware

How involved are you in the National Union of Students in Wales?

• Not involved • Rarely involved • Occasionally involvement • Somewhat involved • Very involved

Please tick any and all of the following aspects of NUS Wales that you are aware of. Please include any others you feel aren’t listed here.

• NUS Extra Card • Campaigning/Protesting • Lobbying/Representation • Democratic conferences • Training events • Liberation/Student Sections • None of these • Other:

Overall, how much would you say NUS Wales reflects your views as a student?

• Not at all • Very little • Somewhat • A fair amount • Very much • Couldn’t say

How important or influential do you think NUS Wales is to your life as student? Not just in terms of any direct contact you may have had with the organisation, but also with regards to wider issues affecting students.

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• Not at all important • Very unimportant • Somewhat important • Important • Strongly important • Couldn't say

Which, if any, of the following NUS UK/ NUS Wales campaigns have you heard of?

• Hidden Costs • Come Clean • Access Agreement • Deepening Participation • Be A Champion • Student Survival Guide • Student-Led Teaching Awards • WISE/Have Your Say • Other:

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NUS Wales and Students *Required Part two - for sabbatical officers If you are a sabbatical officer at a Welsh SU, there are a few more questions left for you. These answers will help make a more direct impact on your work and interactions with NUS Wales, and is definitely to your benefit. Please answer the question below to head to your next section. Are you a sabbatical officer? *

• I am a sabbatical officer • I am not a sabbatical officer

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NUS Wales and Students Sabbs and NUS Wales If you are a sabbatical officer at a Welsh SU, there are a few more questions left for you. These answers will help make a more direct impact on your work and interactions with NUS Wales, and is definitely to your benefit. This section is looking at how you currently interact with NUS Wales, and the best ways to go about improving things. Please limit your answers as much as possible to NUS Wales only, not NUS UK. What remit does your position cover? How much contact would you say you had with NUS Wales staff and/or officers, in the last year?

• Never • Rarely • Occasionally • Several times a month • Once a week • More than once a week

Would you agree that you are satisfied with the amount of contact you have with NUS Wales staff and officers?

• Strongly disagree • Somewhat disagree • Neither agree nor disagree • Somewhat agree • Strongly agree • Couldn't say

How do you feel about the information and materials NUS Wales produces?

Is there too much or not enough?

• Too much • Right amount

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• Not enough Is it disseminated in a useful and accessible manner?

• Yes • No

Is it relevant to your work?

• Not at all relevant • Somewhat relevant • Very relevant

How would you improve dissemination of information and materials to take place? You may choose more than one.

• Fine as it is • More focus on online accessible content • More focus on email updates • More focus on one-to-one contact • Other:

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Appendix 2 – Screenshots from the survey

Screenshot 1 – Page 2, You and your SU

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Screenshot 2 – Are you a sabbatical officer?

Screenshot 3 – Final page as seen by all respondents

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Appendix 3 – Institution Code Key

0 No institution given

1 Medium sized institution, geographically far from NUS Wales HQ. SU active and SU is active role within NUS Wales

2 Medium sized institution, geographically close to NUS Wales HQ. SU active and SU is active within NUS Wales

3 Large institution, geographically close to NUS Wales. SU active and SU members is active within NUS Wales

4 Small institution, geographically somewhat far from NUS Wales HQ. SU relatively inactive, with little role played in NUS Wales

5 Medium sized institution, geographically far from NUS Wales HQ. SU active, with little role played in NUS Wales

6 Small institution, geographically somewhat close from NUS Wales HQ. SU relatively inactive, with little role played in NUS Wales

7 Very small institution, geographically somewhat close from NUS Wales HQ. SU relatively inactive, with little role played in NUS Wales

8 Small institution, geographically far from NUS Wales HQ. SU relatively inactive, with little role played in NUS Wales

Table of respondents by institution

0 1 1 33 2 31 3 11 4 2 5 18 6 3 7 1 8 1