We welcome the collaboration between the two universities and the City Council to improve the quality, affordability and safety of student accommodation to meet students’ needs, and help make students feel like more of a part of the city.
We do think there is some more work to be done to maintain focus on the goals of the student living strategy, which the partners need to be careful not to be allowed to be interpreted as just an excuse to push students out of the community into Purpose-Built Student Accommodation.
For this Student Living Strategy to be truly effective, it needs to put student voice at its heart, which so far it does not quite seem to have achieved.
Priority 1: Housing:
There is not enough student housing in Nottingham, and lots of the new builds which go up are designed to get the maximum profit for developers rather than to meet student needs, increasing the cost of living as a student. As such, we welcome a collaborative approach to ensuring that there is enough student accommodation in the city, and that it meets students’ needs through comprehensive market research.
However, the Student Living Strategy currently has a significant focus on Purpose-Built Student Accommodation (PBSA), typically private halls of residence, despite the fact that prices can be 20-25% higher than in non-PBSAs (statistic from the strategy itself).
Although we think that the goals of priority 1 are all in students’ best interests, we are particularly disappointed that 3 of the 4 measures of progress towards this priority are limited exclusively to increasing the number of students in PBSAs. We think that the measures should more accurately reflect the goals of priority 1 and the aim of the priority itself.
The goals of priority 1:
- Ensure that new student accommodation schemes, particularly PBSAs, meet the diverse needs of future students;
- Universities will directly invest to increase housing choices available to students;
- Improve the quality of HMOs.
Priority 2: “Neighbourliness”:
We really value the partnership approach taken by the city and both universities towards ensuring that areas of the city with a large number of students are not particular targets for anti-social behaviour or crime, as well as working collaboratively around particular times of year (e.g., moving out to help students avoid sending waste to landfill).
We also welcome the aims to reduce how frequently anti-social behaviour is incorrectly associated with students without confirmation, and the increased focus on restorative justice and education rather than punishment.
Neighbourliness is also a two-way street, and we would appreciate more of an effort from partners to make sure that students are not talked about negatively without being included in the conversation, and especially not to encourage negative reporting around students in the city which ‘others’ them from the community.
Priority 3: Building Community:
Students make up an important and valuable part of the local community, and the appreciation and encouragement of the amount of volunteering students do is really positive. Building more of a community for all the city’s residents, including and especially students, is hugely valuable for all. Whilst it alone will not increase graduate retention without adequate employment and living opportunities post-study, it is an important step in making students want to stay in the city post-graduation.
This commitment needs to be carried through, and more work needs to be done to understand the barriers to student involvement in different areas of the Nottingham community, and where they are specifically excluded or discouraged from participating.
We do think there is an unaddressed tension between Priority 3 and the council’s focus on Purpose-Built Student Accommodation, and we do not yet understand just how students living in PBSAs affects their participation in the local community, but we suspect it does more to isolate them than include.
What else could be in it?
We do not think that the Strategy goes as far is it needs to address students’ place in the City: public transport, for example, is a huge part of student living, and if the council would like accommodation to be distributed more evenly around the city, there needs to be the affordable transport infrastructure in place to enable them to both access their education and the wider city.
There is also much that the strategy misses out because of how limited student involvement was in its development, and we would like to it considered how students will be continuously engaged throughout its life. We also heavily encourage students to submit their own thoughts about what might be missing from this strategy.