This year your Vice-President of Sport, Ben Morris (2018-19), has lobbied the university into changing the policy on Wednesday afternoons and ensuring undergraduate students are free to take part in activities outside of their course. The lobbing started 3 years ago by Ben’s predecessor Philippa Williams and has finally got the outcome that is a success for students.

The new policy clarifies the previous misunderstanding when students are defined as undergraduates: “Undergraduate students may be studying towards, or enrolled on, a first degree including foundation degree and integrated masters’ programme such as MEng. Postgraduate students include Postgraduate Taught and Postgraduate Research programmes”.

Also, the new policy has been amended for Wednesday afternoon timetabling for the 1^st time since the start of this campaign: “Teaching for undergraduate students should not be scheduled after 1pm on Wednesdays to allow for extra-curricular activities such as sports, volunteering and other participatory activities unless exemptions are authorised by the Dean”

The full policy can be found here

Quote from Ben Morris, VP Sport- “This success has taken a lot of time to get to this point but I am so happy that it has been changed and was good to collaborative working with the University to the advantage of students. We are looking at still setting a reporting tool over the summer for September so students can ensure the this policy is adhered to by staff at the University”

Quote from Simon Fox, Associate head of school of Biomedical Sciences- “As undergrads most academic staff benefitted from free Wednesday afternoons. Protecting this traditional opportunity for our students will enable them to benefit from the opportunity to participate in life-enhancing sports, societies or voluntary work.”

Quote from Julie Lakey, Head of timetabling- “The Timetabling Team welcome the opportunity to work with the SU and teaching staff to ensure Wednesday afternoons are kept free from teaching for undergraduate students”      

The university have commited to progressing the 'Keep Wednesday Afternoons Free' campaign next year!

The Deputy Vice Chancellor Education and Student Experience, Julian Chaudhuri had this to say;

"The University of Plymouth fully supports the need for students to participate in extracurricular activities to enhance their university experience, for their wellbeing, and to support their outcomes on graduation. Throughout the past academic year, I have been working in partnership with Philippa Williams, Vice President Sport on the campaign ‘Keep Wednesday Afternoons Free’.  Plymouth consistently strives to give students the best possible university experience and we have been considering best practice from across the sector and conducting our own research to inform this campaign.  

Over the past year, Philippa has been compiling feedback from students and raising awareness of this issue across the University. In principle, we recognise that keeping Wednesday afternoons free for undergraduate students’ extracurricular activities should be sacrosanct and we will be working towards ensuring that as many students as possible are able to access the opportunities available to them, both through the University, UPSU and externally."

On the 1st May, VP Sport submitted a proposal to union council regarding the campaign ‘Keep Wednesday Afternoons free’. I have been running this campaign throughout this year, to raise awareness of the importance of students having Wednesday Afternoons free: to enable your time to be free in order to participate in extra-curricular and co-curricular activities; to volunteer; to work a part-time job and to practise self-care, to name a few.

Having Wednesday afternoons free is common across higher and further education institutions, although through your feedback, it was highlighted that the student experience at Plymouth is not the same. I wanted to find out why this didn’t happen at Plymouth University (!?) And what I could do as a sabbatical officer at UPSU to change this.

Throughout this year I have been working hard to inform University stakeholders, including the Vice Chancellor and Deputy Vice Chancellors, about the current experience of students studying at Plymouth and what issues you face, and this has gained momentum. The principle of Wednesday Afternoons Free is now being embedded within the new university timetabling project. However, as this is an ongoing project, the purpose of the Keep Wednesday Afternoons Free proposal was to mandate the future Sabbatical Officer Teams of 2018-2020 to keep up the driving force behind the campaign and to ensure it is fully implemented throughout the timetabling changes.

We are happy to announce that the proposal was approved at union council and your Sabbatical Officers will continue to fight to Keep Wednesday Afternoons Free!

Following the Student Life Committee, Julian Chaudhuri, Deputy Vice Chancellor and Student Experience then invited the Vice President of Sport to present the same presentation as previous at the Timetabling Committee. Prior to this meeting, they collated research from other Universities around the country. Read the findings here. Timetabling on Wednesdays was then discussed with representatives from all faculties and members of timetabling. The issue of Wednesday afternoons had previously gone largely un-noticed and this presentation aimed to highlight the challenging areas. This presentation was hopefully quite timely, as the timetabling committee are looking to review timetabling across the University.

I wanted to take this matter to student life committee, although I unfortunately ran out of time to write a report; as a result Alex and myself presented our findings via a presentation. This presentation covered financial barriers and the barriers of Wednesday afternoons timetabling to taking part in UPSU activities. You can view the presentation here.

In order to prepare for this campaign, we first wanted to get a full understanding about the scale of the issue. We posted on Facebook, Twitter and on the UPSU App. On the Facebook post, we asked students to comment or email with their experiences on Wednesday afternoons. This feedback was then collated into a document which you can view here. The twitter poll asking Plymouth University students ‘to what extent are your Wednesday Afternoons Free for extracurricular activities?’ gained 134 responses with the results as follows:

• 25% Never
• 24% Sometimes
• 27% Mostly
• 24% Always

In addition, 669 students responded to the UPSU App, Have your Say question, which asked ‘do you have lectures, seminars or tutorials timetabled on Wednesday afternoons?’ The responses were as follows:

• 32.6% Yes
• 62.6% No
• 5.2% Not sure