Sort out the funding for sports societies across the university.
Anonymous submitted on
Tuesday 5th November 2024
Complete
Hello,
Over the past couple of years the level of support for each sporting society, big and small, has been grossly and unjustly reduced.
Last year an additional fee of £45 was implemented to the already expensive subscriptions for societies so that the STUDENTS could actually play the sport that they have chosen. That in itself is unnaceptable given that the university in 2022-23 had a net clash inflow of ~£92 million. In short the university is certainly not struggling to generate money.
Well where is all this money going you may ask? The university will tell you that the money is going towards the brand new jubillee sports centre and the 'vast' improvements to wide lane. However, as many students will know, they are the ones that are actually paying for both of these.
How can the university justify this?
To take The University of Exeter as an example, some of their sporting societies on their own have a budget that far exceeds the combined budget of all the societies (non sporting societies included).
The fact that we have to pay for a sports pass to play sport at wide lane, a location that is owned by a partner company of the university, is frankly appalling, not only this the lack of transparency is also extremely disturbing.
I appreciate that SUSU has very little control of this matter but there again seems to be a lack of support from our own student union in fighting the students case. The costs alone to join a society in addition to the cost of equipment is surely enough to turn people away from playing any sport or participating in any extracurricular activity whilst at the university. Do we really want to go to a university where all anyone does is wake up, study, eat, go to sleep, repeat?
Furthermore, the incompliance of the SU to listen to concerns regarding the additional 50p fee for members to pay weekly match fees and any other money they are required to pay their respective club for socials etc. is unacceptable. In some cases this is an additional 10% from each member of the club/team that the club does not recieve.
Please sort this out ASAP.
Responses
Here, you can view the complete set of official responses from the sabbatical officers regarding this submission.
Students' Union replied on
Wednesday 27th Nov 2024 9:28am
Dear Student,
Thank you for sending in your detailed You Make Change. I understand the frustrations around rising costs and the added financial burden of ‘hidden costs’ that come after joining a club or society.
Last year Marina did a lot of work on keeping the sports pass to the lowest fee possible. Her efforts, in collaboration with the all-student vote, and club presidents, meant that the sports pass was fixed at £45. This would be in place for 3 years, and only rising each year in line with the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The proposed fee was going to be somewhere in the region of £110, as it was pre-covid.
The conversations about where this money would go, came up also in these conversations. Southampton Sport made it very clear that this money would go towards improving facilities and their offering for students. There are always plans to redevelop and evolve the current facilities that the University have, which in a normal 3-year cycle of a student, may mean that some clubs will benefit from funding, and some may not. If there is anything that is of concern with anything that Southampton Sport offers, please feel free to reach out to me and I can pass on your query to their team.
I have been researching and contacting members of The University of Exeter, which has revealed many positives for how our sports community is set up in Southampton. The fee to join their clubs, across the board, are substantially higher than what our current student-run clubs set membership fees at. In addition to this, The University of Exeter has a model which heavily funds 13 individual sports, and not necessarily all of the teams in those sports. At SUSU we are here to give each student an equal opportunity at participating in sports, and do not want to follow this model. Speaking to some students at The University of Exeter the other week, they all explained how our facilities were of a great standard compared to their own, which doesn’t just include the new Jubilee extension and in fact all of the facilities Southampton Sports offer to our clubs and students.
The sports pass is a fee which goes towards paying for your usage of the Southampton Sport facilities. In comparison to any other facility provider, whether it is a university facility provider or one for the general public, members of clubs get a lot more from their sports pass than if they were to book any other facility on a week-by-week basis. Southampton Sport are a department of the University, which now sit under the Estates and Residences team, if you would like to find out more transparency on where this money goes, please feel free to reach out to me and I can see if this information can be passed on. Alternatively, we will be holding another facilities forum with Southampton Sport in March, which is open all students. Please feel free to come along to this and raise any questions directly to their team. We hold these twice a year, in Semester 1 (held on 15/11/24) and in Semester 2 (arranged to be held on 07/03/25).
At SUSU, we are here for our student body at the University of Southampton, and to lobby the University to be student-led and to evolve in a way that benefits students. In terms of how our clubs and society’s structure works, this is student-led by committee’s that get voted in by members of each respective group. The SUSU Activities Team works with committee to make sure that they do not set their membership fees too high (or too low), to increase accessibility for students and to ensure that the club is financially sustainable. We are always here to listen to students and fighting the students’ case, as you mentioned, we have this You Make Change system for this and you can also contact any member of staff at SUSU to help with any issues you may have.
The 50p fee for members using our Box Office platform is due to the company who processes these payments, just like how you would use sites like Fatsoma or FiXR for instance. Due to the number of transactions that go through this platform, SUSU are not financially in a position where we can take on this cost as this would take money away from other SUSU run initiatives. Clubs have been advised to not do weekly match fees, and to rather include this in the membership fee a student pays at the start of the year (or per semester). Clubs have their own autonomy over their finances, and we are always pushing them to make their hidden costs known before joining, as well as simply minimising them.
I will leave this submission open, as I understand there are quite a few points in here you may want to ask more about. Otherwise, I will close this submission within a couple of weeks. Please feel to also contact me via my email address vpsports@soton.ac.uk and I will be happy to work through any questions/concerns you may have.
Thanks,
Conor White (he/him)
VP Sports 2024/2025
Actions
Forwarded to Vice President Sports
Monday 11th Nov 2024 10:07am
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