Your Students' Association is committed to empowering our students to express their voice and ensure that it is acted upon to create an impactful and positive student experience. We have been working hard since the start of 2025 to review and propose how student voice can look at Arden to meet the needs of our diverse and amazing student population.

Student Voice Project

Our student voice project was set up to evaluate, discuss and propose the future of student voice. This has already led to:

• Creation of two new full-time officer roles
• Creation of our Student Partnership Framework - which is designed to help build voice initiatives that get you more involved in decisions.

And there is more to come:

• We will be piloting a new Academic Representative scheme to ensure you have a say on the development of your programmes.
• Proposing a democractic structure so you can have a say in what your association prioritises and what stances students have on topics like sustainability
• Introducing accountability scheme so you can hear from your elected student leaders and hold them to account.

Our decision on Unitu

The student voice project initially didn't look at systems as we wanted to hear from students how they want voice to work. Once we had our future approach we evaluated the systems we use to determine if they still meet our needs. Many factors were considered including engagement, costs, and our future approach and it was decided that Unitu no longer met our needs. This is why we have decided to deactivate the platform.

You will be able to find out more information about our decision and what will be happening next on our Unitu page.

Visit our Unitu page

What will be replacing this system?

Currently, we do not have a replacement platform that is ready to launch. However, the Students’ Association operates a system, that supports the website, that provides the functionality and flexibility that we hope would be the solution.

We could have replicated the Unitu system, but we felt that this would simply transition the same concerns from one platform to another. Therefore, we intend over the next couple of months to work with students and university stakeholders to custom build areas of the site that meet the needs of departments, campuses, and other areas engaging in student voice initiatives to ensure students have a platform that gives them a say.

You can sign up to be part of this development work through our Unitu page.

Where can i raise questions, issues, and ideas in the meantime?

Whilst we are working on our next platform you are still able to:

• Questions: direct questions to the Student Hub teams or relevant services. We have a handy page that gives your the details of the various support teams here.
• Issues and Ideas: you can still raise issues and ideas with us. In the meantime we ask that you do this by emailing studentvoice@arden.ac.uk where a member of the team will get in touch. 

We are doing this to ensure that you are actively involved and so this is not a disinvestment in student voice but a refocus of resources to make things work for you.