We're half way through on our four year strategy, we wanted to give you an update on how we're doing!
Hi London Met!
Two years ago we at London Met Students’ Union launched our new four year strategy, created to give us our direction how we felt we could best represent you, our members.
As we’re halfway through our strategy, we thought it might be worth reviewing how we’re doing, and any challenges we’ve found on our way to delivering it, because one of our values is being ‘Open’. No organisation is perfect, but we think we’re doing pretty well all things considered.
We based our strategy on quantitative and qualitative research conducted with our research partner Alterline, with responses from hundreds of students and focus groups with a more select group.
TL;DR
We’ve achieved 17 of our 21 targets this year, and 8 of these have already surpassed our 2025 goals. However some of our key enablers are not achieved, which means we have to reduce the scope of our strategy and what we can deliver to students for the forthcoming year.
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The Promises and the Enablers
Our strategy is made up of four promises and five enablers. The promises are what we said we’re going to do for you, and the enablers are what we think we need to have in place so that they can be done. Dead simple.
The promises say what we were going to do, how we’ll measure ourselves to check we’re on target, and what we thought you would say about us if we’re doing things right. So, how’s it going?
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Promise 1 - We promise to help you feel part of a community at London Met
We know that if you feel part of a community at London Met, you’re going to be a better and happier student. It’s why our logo is made up of circles in fact, because there’s hundreds of communities at London Met with the ultimate community being you as a London Met student! So, how’s it going?
By 2025 we will have:
- 30% of students engaging in union activities and events
- Goal for 2022/23 – A clear idea of the percentage of students engaging in union activities and events - Missed
So far, we don’t know this because we’ve not had a single method of recording attendance at every single event and activity the union runs. There are reasons for this, it’s an extra barrier for our student leaders to set up an event every time they run something, it’s a pain for staff to spend time setting up, and until we have new students data sent over to us by the University (only received once you enroll), it’s fiddly for you, our members. But it’s a big gap for us, so for the year ahead we’re committing to ensure that every single event, every single activity, every single student group uses our ticketing system delivered through Native so that we can track and evidence how large our reach is. You can see what that looks like at https://www.londonmetsu.org.uk/ents/, if you want to attend our welcome fairs this September you will need to get a free ticket. We’ll be rolling out training to all our student groups soon to show them how to do this, with the expectation that all of us use it so we can evidence our value to the University. This is going to be hard, but really important for the Students’ Union.
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- 100 student groups in place and active - Baseline 50 (2019/20 total)
- Goal for 2022/23 – 45 Active Societies – Achieved – 48 Active Societies
Before Covid we had 50 active student groups, which were made up of Societies, Sports Clubs and Verve Media, and then almost all of them disappeared, so we’ve had a big job trying to get this back up and running. Last summer the Students’ Union chose to stop running sport clubs, because we simply couldn’t afford to run them anymore. We were very sad about it, but sport is really expensive, and you’ll see how we compare to other unions in terms of funding later. We’re sticking to our goal though of having 100 student groups by the end of the 2025 academic year because we’re confident that we think we can get lots of you to start up new societies over the next year years. You absolutely should, and if you want to know why and how, click here - https://www.londonmetsu.org.uk/studentgroups/startagroup/
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- Original Goal - Be recognised by the University as the lead organiser for cross campus social activity and student community building.
- Updated Goal for 2025 - Hold 10 events at both campuses that help students feel part of a community at London Met
- Goal for 2022/23 - Run 6 events at both campuses that help students feel part of a community at London Met – Achieved - Welcome Fairs, Elections, Boat Party, End of Year Prom, SU Awards, Let's Get Together and Feel Alright
We bit off way more than we could chew when we set our original goal! London Met University has lots of different departments that run social activity and build student communities. There’s an Estates team who run The Rocket and host events as well as the Sports & Fitness team there, the brilliant Centre for Equity and Inclusion develop liberation communities with us and each School at London Met also runs its own activities. So, we decided to take on a more realistic goal which is simply to hold 10 events by 2025 that help students feel part of a community. This year our goal was to hold six, and we did that!
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How you will know we have been successful by 2025?
- 65% of students will agree that the Students’ Union has given them the opportunity to be part of a community
- Goal for 2022/23 – 65% - Missed - Welcome Survey Term 1 - 22/23 - 40.7% Welcome Survey Term 2 - 22/23 - 57.2%
We’ve missed this goal for this year, with a couple of provisos, we did much better than we were expecting last year with this question, so we decided to try and achieve our goal for 2025 two years early. No bad thing. The other problem is that we think we’re asking you this question at the wrong time. We’ve been asking you this in the University’s welcome survey which takes place a few weeks after you start or return to London Met, and that’s probably too early in the year!
We’ll be asking you this question again this year, because we think it’s important, but we’ll be asking you at the end of the year rather than at the start, because by that point you’ll have had more opportunities to really get a sense of the Students’ Union.
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- 50% of students will agree that the Students’ Union has had a positive impact on their social life - Local Baseline 26%, National Baseline 28%
- Goal for 2022/23 – 42% - Achieved - 63% - University End of Year Survey 22/23
Ooh we were pleased with this one! Only 26% of students felt the union had a positive impact on their social life when we asked this question in 2021. That needed to change dramatically. Thanks to the hard work of all the officers and staff over the last three years, 63% of students asked in the University’s End of Year Survey felt that the Students’ Union’s had a positive impact on your social life.
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Promise 2 - We promise to help you be more employable
In our surveys back in 2021 we heard loud and clear how you wanted to gain skills so that you could get jobs once you finished at London Met both through skills development opportunities and through jobs. So we made it one of our promises.
By 2025 we will have:
- Original goal - Created 5000 hours of jobs for students
- Updated goal – Created 4000 hours of jobs for students
- Goal for 2022/23 - Created 3100 hours of jobs for students paid at the London Living Wage – Achieved – 3402.5 hours between August 2022 and May 2023
We messed up slightly when we set our original goal, because we discovered last year that the figures we based our original target on were wrong, we thought we’d given students 4131 hours of work between 2019/2020, however the correct number was 3071 so we needed to reduce our 2025 target.
We’re pleased to say though that we absolutely blasted our target for this year of 3100 hours. 3402.5 hours of work means around £45,000 which has gone directly into London Met students' pockets. We know it’s hard at the moment, so we’re going to keep doing the best we can to support you.
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- 800 students actively taking part in leadership roles
- Goal for 2022/23 - 730 students actively taking part in leadership roles – Just Missed – 713 students were actively taking part in leadership roles
If you’re a student leader at London Met Students’ Union, you’re making yourself more employable. That’s a simple fact. The skills you gain through running a society, or being a student rep, or being a liberation officer all help you to be a more rounded student and will be vital evidence you can use at interviews when you graduate from London Met which is why we’ve set a target. We were nearly there this year, but not quite! We still think we’ll be able to achieve this goal by 2025 with the increased numbers of courses starting a London Met which will mean more course reps, and also by having more Societies.
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How you will know we have been successful by 2025?
- 60% of students will agree that the Students’ Union has given them the opportunity to develop skills to make them more employable.
- Goal for 2022/23 - 45% of students will agree that the Students’ Union has given them the opportunity to develop skills to make them more employable – Achieved - 65.5% agreement - End of Year Survey 22/23
Hardly any students thought they had the opportunity to develop skills through the Students’ Union back in 2021. Now in 2023 over 65% of you do. We’re incredibly pleased that we’ve hit our 2025 target two years early!
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- 80% of students actively involved in Students’ Union leadership roles will agree that they have improved their confidence in their own leadership skills.
- Goal for 2022/23 – 80% agreement – Achieved – 80.5% agreement
Another goal we were hoping to achieve by 2025, achieved far earlier than we expected! We asked all of our existing student volunteers if they felt they had improved confidence in their own leadership skills and this was the response. If you’re not already a student leader at the Students’ Union, get involved, because huge numbers of our existing leaders think it’s been a great move!
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Promise 3 - We promise to support your wellbeing
You told us back in 2021, that you want to have more support with your mental health and overall wellbeing, and so we made that one of our promises to you that we would deliver on. How are we doing?
By 2025 we will have:
- Expanded our advice service to offer support and guidance in a wider range of issues so we can support more students
- Goal for 2022/23 - Students can book appointments with the Advice Service online - Missed
Sadly due to staff illness we’ve not been able to implement an online appointment booking system, but 436 students have been supported this year through the Students’ Union’s Advice Service with guidance given on an incredibly broad range of areas. The union’s advice service is a unique advocacy service available to students which no area of the University offers.
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- ?100 students engaged in liberation groups
- Goal for 2022/23 - Liberation groups will run events and students attend them – Achieved
Liberation groups are different from societies, think of them more like a group of students who are from a liberation area such as LGBTQ+, Black, Women, or Disabled who can come together and agree areas of work to who come together to exchange ideas and views on issues that are relevant to that group.
This could involve campaigning on an issue affecting students who belong to that liberation group, undertaking representative work in partnership with an elected officer/the elected officer team or organising socials and peer support networks. It's entirely up to each group what they decide to focus on. This year we just needed to get these groups off the ground, and we did it.
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- Supported our student leaders to advocate effectively on welfare issues affecting our members.
- Goal for 2022/23 - Equity and Welfare Officer will run 5 campaigns or events on welfare issues affecting students, including liberation events – Achieved - Disability History month, LGBTQ+ History Month, Women's Week, Sexual Violence Campaign, Sexual Health Campaign
It's important for us to campaign on issues relevant to our students, and so we made it a goal this year for our Equity and Welfare officer to run at least 5 campaigns or events on welfare issues. Kerrie our Equity and Welfare Officer did that!
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How you will know we have been successful by 2025?
- 60% of students will agree that the Students’ Union has a positive impact on their wellbeing
- Goal for 2022/23 - 50% of students will agree that the Students’ Union has a positive impact on their wellbeing – Achieved - 72% - University End of Year Survey 22/23
As you can see, we’ve smashed our 2025 goal two years early. We’re thrilled that so many of you agree that we’re having a positive impact on your wellbeing, and we’re going to keep working hard to make sure you think so.
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- ?60% of students will agree that the Students’ Union acts on the welfare issues affecting the student body.
- Goal for 2022/23 - 52% of students will agree that the Students’ Union acts on the welfare issues affecting the student body – Achieved – 70.2% - University End of Year Survey 22/23
And again it’s clear that you think we’re acting on the issues affecting the student body. Both these results have come from a survey which the University conducts and these questions were answered by over 1200 students, so we know it’s pretty representative.
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Promise 4 - We promise to give you a strong voice at London Met
Our final promise to you was that we are going to make sure you’re able to shape both your educational and wider student experience. This is core to any students union, and so we’ve made it one of our core promises.
By 2025 we will have:
- Increased our election turnout beyond the national average (16.1% in 2020)
- Goal for 2022/23 – 12% turnout – Achieved – 14.7% turnout (also higher than the national average for 2023 which has been confirmed by the National Union of Students at 13.14%)
Not only did we achieve our goal both for 2022/23 as well as achieve our goal for 2025 because we’re higher than the national average, but we did this during a week where the University experienced IT issues meaning that not all students were receiving e-mails during the week of the elections! We treated ourselves to a nice glass of fresh Orange juice with the bits in when these results came in.
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- 4 SMART priority goals for each full time officer, with staff support to achieve them
- Goal for 2022/23 - 4 SMART priority goals for each officer, with staff support to achieve them - Achieved
We’ve realised that each officer having four SMART goals by itself isn’t the be all and end all, having staff support for each officer’s goal means that an elected officer is able to feel like they’ve got help to work through their plans. We did that this year and we’ll keep doing it.
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- 40 student representatives on university and school level committees
- Goal for 2022/23 - 40 student representatives on university and school level committees – Achieved - 43 representatives on University and School Level Committees
You know that song about being in the room where it happens? They weren’t making it up, it’s quite important. That’s why we’re really pleased we’ve already achieved our 2025 goal to ensure that students are getting represented across multiple meetings has been achieved early.
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How you will know we have been successful by 2025?
- 25% of students will have taken part in a democratic process
- Goal for 2022/23 – 12% of students will have taken part in a democratic process – Achieved – 14.7%
Our elections aren’t the only way to engage in democracy at the Students’ Union, we also have our student council, annual all members meetings and if enough students want it, we can have referendums. Our goal by 2025 is to have 25% of students take part in a democratic process, next year all our societies will have their leadership elections taking place at the same time as our main elections so we’re hoping to take this % even higher.
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- 80% of students will agree that the Students’ Union effectively represents students’ academic interests
- Goal for 2022/23 - 65% of students will agree that the Students’ Union effectively represents students’ academic interests – Achieved – 77% students answered ‘well’ or ‘very well’ in the National Student Survey “How well does the students' union (association or guild) represent students' academic interests”
This is a big one for us, if a Students’ Union should be doing anything it’s ensuring that we’re effectively representing your academic interests. It’s also one of the few questions which we can compare ourselves directly to other Students’ Unions on, and we’re doing really well. 77% is the 3rd highest score compared to other Students’ Unions in London and putting us right in the top tier of Students’ Unions nationally.
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- 90% of reps will agree with the question “my role enabled me to contribute to improving the student experience at London Met”
- Goal for 2022/23 – 82% of reps will agree with the question “my role enabled me to contribute to improving the student experience at London Met” – Achieved – Of the course reps who answered our annual volunteer survey “Being a volunteer has - Allowed my voice to be heard and given me an opportunity to shape how things happen at London Met” - 85.7% agreement
We have hundreds of student reps, and we want to make sure that the vast, vast majority of these reps feel that they’re doing meaningful activity. That’s why we were so pleased to see that nearly 86% of them feel that their role is helping to improve the student experience.
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Not every union actively sets itself a KPI of officers achieving their goals, because it can be a bit out of our control sometimes. But we thought this was important, and we were pleased to see that we’ve done it!
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So that means, of our strategic goals this year…
We’ve achieved 17 of our 21 targets, and 8 of these have already surpassed our 2025 goals. Nice.
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Enablers
Enablers are what allow us to deliver our strategy, if we don’t have the enablers, it’s hard to do what we want to do. We identified five different enablers to deliver our strategy, and set ourselves a number of goals, with KPI’s to say if we are achieving those goals.
Equality, Diversity & Inclusion (EDI)
London Met University is one of, if not the, most diverse University in the country. As such for the union to be able to effectively represent our members, we have to reflect that student body, and take steps to deliver that.
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We will…
In the first year of our strategy we developed a full Recruitment and Induction Process which outlines our process from beginning to end, and which we feel is a process which any organisation would be proud of.
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- Measure student engagement in services, activities and functions to see if they are reflective of our student body – Not Yet Complete
This is linked to our first strategic goal. We know who our student leaders are, which means we can analyse this, however we don’t know who our members are who are attending activities and events, we hope that we can do this for the year ahead.
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Done, and we’re very proud of it! Jacqueline our Deputy CEO has led on this work, if you’d like to see our strategy for EDI (aimed for completion with our main strategy in 2025) and action plan for this year, you can see them below.
EDI Strategy
EDI Strategy action plan 23-24
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KPI's to demonstrate we have achieved our enablers (to be achieved by 2025)
Following our own internal analysis, we know where we’re overrepresented and underrepresented compared to the London Met Student Body compared to our Staff. This means we can undertake targeted work to improve it.
Headline levels of underrepresentation within our Data (More than 10% disparity):
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Asian - Staff 0% - 22/23 Uni Student Population 25.3%
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Black - Staff 11% - 22/23 Uni Student Population 21.6%
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Male - Staff 14.8% - 22/23 Uni Student Population 35.9%
Headline levels of overrepresentation within our Data (More than 10% disparity):
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White - Staff 48.1% - 22/23 Uni Student Population 37.6%
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Mixed/Multiple Ethnicities - Staff 33.3% - 22/23 Uni Student Population 7.6%
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Disability or Long Term Health Condition - Staff 33.3% - 22/23 Uni Student Population 14%
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Student engagement in our services, activities and functions reflects our student body – Not Yet Complete
Once the University’s Powerbi data analysis service is up and running, with the data we’ve provided we’ll be able to see how our student leaders compared to the student body, however we can’t yet tell what our overall student engagement when compared to the student population looks like, we hope to be able to analyse our student leaders soon, and our broad student engagement in our services by next summer.
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Communication
If you our members don’t know what we’re doing, then it doesn’t matter how well we do it, you won’t know about it! That’s why we put communications as one of our enablers.
We will…
We’re now part of the process for when students enroll. Students are asked as part of the process if they would be willing the share sensitive data such as Ethnicity, Religion and Disability status so that the Students’ Union can do targeted messaging to students from particular backgrounds to enable to proactively be a representative organisation. Last year around 50% of students agreed to share this data with us.
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Do you remember our old website? I hope not. We relaunched ourselves with an entirely new brand and website to go with our strategy in 2021, and updated our social media presence across Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Not quite got to Tiktok yet but we’ve got time yet!
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We send out a monthly newsletter to our members during termtime with around a 45% open rate (this is extremely good), as well as our social media and website posts, we’ve also started to introduce Go Out and Talk sessions with our members. Is it working? If so the KPI’s for this Enabler should be looking good…
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- Have a Marketing and Communication Strategy – Complete
Our strategy is ready, and you can have a nosey here, the next step is to develop a concrete action plan to deliver this strategy.
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KPIs to demonstrate we have achieved our enablers (to be achieved by 2025)
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In the University’s welcome surveys for term 1 starters 45.5% of students agreed with this statement, and in term 2 it was 61.7% of students. So not there yet, but heading in the right direction. The question we have to ask ourselves is, is right at the start of the year for students the right time to ask this question, or should we be asking it at another time?
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Last year when we asked this question, 48.3% agreed with it. This year it was 64.9%. It’s amazing work which means this KPI is already hit, two years ahead of schedule. Our challenge now will be maintaining this whilst seeing how high we can get it!
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Resources
Simply enough, we can’t do all the things we would like to do without the resources to do it!
We Will…
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KPIs to demonstrate we have achieved our enablers (to be achieved by 2025)
Based on publicly accessible data from 2021/22, on a Full Time Equivalent basis our £ per head funding is £54.75, compared to our comparator institutions of £71.20 resulting in a notional funding gap of just under £187,000. We will base our future comparisons on those unions which don’t run sport after the Students’ Union stopped running sport last Summer, but we think there will still be a significant gap between us and our friends across the sector in terms of funding, our estimate of the gap in 22/23 is just over £165,000.
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- Generating at least £50,000 of additional commercial revenue – Off Target
This has proven really difficult for us. There are very few low risk revenue generating options for the union without generating significant amounts of additional workload for the union, and higher risk options are largely out of the question because we only have one month of reserves (in line with our reserves policy).
We’ve secured £12,500 of new income since starting our strategy, however we have lost a small amount of TOTUM discount card income as TOTUM has decided to no longer work with unions that don’t generate enough income for them.
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People
The Staff, Officers and Volunteers of the union are our absolute beating heart. Nothing, and we mean nothing would happen without them. To make sure the union can deliver, we need to make sure we look after all of them, which is why we made it one of our enablers.
We Will…
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Ensure all staff and officers have a learning and development plan in place - Complete
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Ensure all our volunteers receive the training and support they need to undertake their roles effectively - Complete
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Aim to have a reasonable workload for every staff member with no more than 5 key objectives every year - Complete
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Have a People strategy and action plan – Not Started
Three of our four deliverables have been completed with a people strategy to come. We know though that workload for staff is still far above where it should be, partially linked to our resources enabler, so for the next year we’ve reduced the key objectives for staff to a maximum of three.
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KPIs to demonstrate we have achieved our enablers (to be achieved by 2025)
Last year 67% of staff agreed with this statement, and this year it was 81%. This is well on course for delivery. 81% puts us exactly in line with the median of every Students’ Union that did the same survey this year (42 unions did the survey this year). This is brilliant progress for a union that not long ago was in real difficulties.
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- Investing in Volunteers Quality Mark achieved - Complete
Thanks to the exceptional work of Jacqueline our Deputy CEO leading the project and all the staff involved in volunteering work, we were successfully accredited as an Investors in Volunteering organisation in December 2022!
You can see the IIV standard here and our volunteering policy here along with the Volunteer Recruitment and Selection Policy and procedures?for the union.
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- A clear annual objective setting process linked to our strategy in place – Complete
Each year, every staff member is now required to set goals linked to our strategy and enablers, with clear targets and milestones for achievement. These are shared with everyone internally at the Students’ Union so everyone knows what they’re working towards and how they’re doing.
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Governance
Governance is the kind of thing that makes my socks roll up and down but perhaps might make you yawn. That’s ok! It’s how we make sure we’re run properly, that the leadership of the union is properly held to account, and to make it easier for you to get involved. Simple as that.
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We Will…
We completely gutted our Articles and Bye-laws in 2021 because they were incredibly long and far too complicated. They’ve now been reduced right down to five bye-laws (or to put it another way, from 63 pages down to 16) and our Articles represent the union we are rather than one that existed years ago. Have a read of them if you like - https://www.londonmetsu.org.uk/about/ourpolicies/
We think this is done if you look at the KPI below.
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KPIs to demonstrate we have achieved our enablers (to be achieved by 2025)
We hope so for this one, but we haven’t actually agreed a metric for what this would be with the board. Definitely on the to do list for this year.
This framework would only be able to be undertaken if we felt confident our other key enablers are in place, especially in terms of resources so as it stands this isn’t a KPI which we would be able to deliver.
In our 2022 staff survey, 100% of our staff agreed that they understood how the Students’ Union is run, which is important because if they didn’t it wouldn’t be very fair to expect you to understand it.