New OUSU Campaign: Class Act

We are delighted to announce that last week OUSU Council voted unanimously in favour of establishing Class Act – a new campaign to support working class, low income, state comp educated, and first generation students.

Oxford puts lots of excellent work into helping students we will represent get to Oxford, but this support isn’t continued once students get here, and talking about issues of class, socioeconomic, and educational privilege is often stigmatised. This means that Class Act students can often feel alienated and isolated at university, as demonstrated by Reclaim’s Educating All report, which includes a survey of students from top Russell Group universities, including Oxford. This showed that over 70% of the respondents who identified as working class agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “your class was a barrier when integrating at university”, and 74.8% of respondents who identified as working class felt they did not fit in at university, compared to 27.6% of people who did not identify as working class. This shows that there is a problem, and we want to come together to address it.

We will be providing representation that Class Act students currently don’t have to campaign on issues affecting them, creating networks that previously haven’t existed for students and alumni to meet and support each other, and provide relevant resources to support some of the specific welfare and academic needs of these students.

A fantastic group of students have been working with the Vice President (Access & Academic Affairs) Eden Bailey to make this campaign a reality, and we would like to thank them for their immense efforts and congratulate them on their success.

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Questions? vpaccaff@ousu.ox.ac.uk