Your Students’ Association is here to empower, advocate, and support you, to ensure your student journey is positive, transformative and impactful. We recognise that Arden has grown significantly in the last few years with well over 40,000 students with diverse needs studying across 8 campuses as well as online.

It is important to us that the collective student voice is strong and effective in representing and acting on the diverse needs and academic interests of students. We felt that the current opportunities for students to harness their voice was not reflective of the size and needs of our students. This is why we launched the Student Voice Project to help shape the ways that you can have a say and create impactful change in the future.

The project is still ongoing, but we have already started to make changes with the first relating to your student leadership team. Currently you have one student leader, your president, that is tasked to represent all students on all matters. As a result of student input into the project we are pleased to announce that your student leadership team will be growing by not just one, but two additional roles.

Moving forward your new student leadership team will consist of:

• Your Student President,
• Vice President (Education)  
• Vice President (Student Needs).

These roles will be available in our upcoming Student Leadership Election that will see a new student leadership team start in October. Read on to learn more about the project and the reasons why we are enhancing your Student Leadership team.

About the student voice project?

The student voice project was set up to evaluate and transform how your collective student voice is heard and acted on. The project was tasked to look at four areas:

• Academic Interests: how you can have a say in how your course and university works and ensuring your voice is acted on to make improvements to the overall student experience.
• Democratic Voice: how you can discuss as a student community what matters to you, what your Students’ Association prioritises and what the collective student view is on particular topics.
• Student Leaders: what opportunities there are for students to step into leadership roles and actively work to represent, advocate and act on the needs and interests of their fellow students.
• Tools for change: look at various ways that you can engage, and lead projects designed to create positive impactful change within the student community.

The project has recently finished its discovery phase where we heard from hundreds of students, through surveys and focus groups, about the four areas. We want to thank all students that got involved and provided some great insights into the wants of students in these areas.

The project is now using these insights to make a series of proposals to the university on how we are going to empower your student voice in the future. The first of these proposals focused on your student leadership team.

You can read more and stay up to date with other outputs from the student voice project through our student voice project webpage.

Access our Student Voice Project page

What you told us about Student Leadership?

You overwhelmingly told us that you did not feel that one student leader was enough and when we asked you on what your leaders should focus on you said:

• Student Community
• Communication
• Education
• Career Support
• Diversity and Inclusion
• Events

This is what helped inform the new roles with the Vice President (Education) focusing on education and career support and your Vice President (Student Needs) having a focus on community, diversity and inclusion. All your student leaders will look at communication and events with your President taking a lead on how the association develops to better support these areas.

You also told us that you wanted to see more part-time representation with multiple leaders that represent their groups of students from different campus representation to course-specific leaders. These are areas we are continuing to investigate as part of the Student Voice project but we didn't want to delay in getting your full-time leaders in place which is why our first action was your new full-time student leaders.

More student leaders are coming

As we stated earlier, we are pleased to announce that we are introducing not one but two new roles to your student leadership team. This means that next year your full-time student leadership team will be formed of:

• Student President: is the senior representational leader of the Students’ Association and plays a fundamental role in advocating for the needs of students, championing key challenges and providing a student-focused voice in various committees or with senior colleagues.
• Vice President (Education): represents and advocates for the academic interests of all Arden University students. Being the primary student leader on the educational experience of students they will organise, and support students engaged in academic representation to make impactful changes for their students.
• Vice President (Student Needs): is the student representational leader of the Students’ Association, responsible for leading on advocating for student's fundamental needs, championing inclusive student services & opportunities and developing student community & sense of belonging at Arden University.

These roles will represent all students across all our campuses on their role's areas of focus.

However, we do recognise that you also expressed a desire to have student leaders that represent particular groups of students, such as distance learners, or those at particular campuses. This is something that we are continuing to look into and hope to have an update in a future announcement.

What’s next?

Now that we know your full-time student leadership roles it is down to you, the collective student body, to now decide who you want to be your student leaders. In May, we will be launching the 2025 Student Leadership Election where you will vote on who will be your President, Vice President (Education) and Vice President (Student Needs).

These opportunities are open to all eligible students and who know you could be one of our new student leaders for 2025/26. Once you have elected your next leaders they will start their roles in October.

Moving forward we will also be looking into the introduction of part-time officers as well as the structures that will support your student leadership team to be the best they can and how you can hold them to account.