SU21 - Katie Ní Chléire for President

When I ran for Welfare Officer last year, student mental health was already side-lined, ignored, and deprioritised by the university. Even before Covid-19 hit, we knew that 78 per cent of students struggled with their mental health.

Over the last year, I have seen first-hand how the pandemic has plunged students further into a mental health crisis.

Students have faced mass unemployment, been confined to studying from their bedrooms, and have been continually scapegoated by the media, all while being expected to produce the same level of work as before. It’s little wonder that since last year, there has been a 470 per cent increase in students accessing university wellbeing support.

Throughout that time, I have used my platform as Welfare Officer to continuously campaign for mental health support at every opportunity.

When your mental health services were inadequate, I secured SU input into choosing a new counselling service that gives more sessions, more choice, and more flexibility for you.

When students were struggling with assessments, I successfully lobbied to secure changes to Exceptional Circumstances, increasing the amount of days available for an extension from five to fourteen, and introduced a new category of self-certification for Covid.

When students on the frontlines were forgotten, we successfully secured a £2000 payment for nursing, midwifery, and social work students.

When students had to self-isolate in Elms and the local area, I secured food packages and wellbeing support.

Meanwhile, I have redeveloped and overhauled our Students’ Union’s approach to mental health so that it works better for you and successfully lobbied for hundreds of thousands of pounds in additional funding for mental health.

But there is so much more that needs to be done, and that’s why I’m running for President.

While students have been crying out for support, the marketization of HE has clouded our universities’ perspective. In the drive to make universities more profitable, institutions have lost sight of why they exist.

Students are being pushed harder than ever before and resources are stretched to their limits, all to increase the profit margins of an institution that was founded to educate, enlighten, and empower the minds of our young population.

Universities invest only in what will increase their score on the National Student Survey and battle it out to score coveted top spots on university league tables. In the ever-growing competitive market that monetises our learning and places profit ahead of student wellbeing, students lose out.

This isn’t good enough. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

We need a radical transformation in how the university approaches mental health, to give every student the support they need to succeed. We need to investigate the impact on mental health of every department, subject and practice of the institution and then we need to tackle and overhaul all the factors that negatively impact mental health.

To start, we need to tackle academic and financial pressures that impact your mental health by ending bunched deadlines and scrapping course costs. We need to tackle issues in housing by holding landlords accountable for poor living conditions, campaigning for the suspension of rental contracts, and ensuring students have the environments to succeed. And we need to make sure that university works for all students, including students from marginalised backgrounds. Most importantly of all, we need to challenge the marketization of our universities to ensure students are partners in an accessible, liberated system where education is no longer viewed as a commodity, but a social good.

I’m running for President to push Queen’s into making the big changes we need. Queen’s can no longer dictate that profits are more important than our wellbeing and our lives, and I’m going to hold this university accountable for what they’re doing.

Our students are in crisis and we can’t wait any longer.

I’m asking you to vote Katie for President to put mental health front and centre of this university for once and for all.

To see all the candidates running for this position, visit the QUB SU Website.