A new life with Halls Life
- Written byStudent Communications
- Published date 02 February 2024
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Moving to live in university halls is always a big change, whether students are coming to us from another country, another part of the UK, or just from around London. We currently have 3,770 students living across 14 halls; as this number continues to grow, we are constantly looking at how we can expand and improve the experience for these students.
It’s important to help these students, many of whom are living away from home for the first time, to find a sense of community in their accommodation. This is the goal of Halls Life, who aim to create a home away from home for these UAL students.
A redesigned offer
Halls Life is the new developed offering of what was previously called Social Programme, which was redesigned and gained its new identity as Halls Life in August 2023 – ready to welcome the new arrivals in September. Halls Life offers a holistic and supportive environment for all students who live with us, alongside the wider student population.
This new Halls Life programme has 4 key values:
- Supporting, with coping mechanisms to live happily in halls of residence and providing them with life skill opportunities to develop whilst living with us.
- Protecting, by providing safe, secure spaces that foster a supportive atmosphere all year round.
- Nourish(ing), with knowledge – offering a varied and considered events and wellbeing programme with students leading these initiatives.
- Flourish(ing), helping students on their own personal journey for a life after halls (career, sexuality, etc)
Introducing committees
One of the key changes when introducing the new Halls Life programme was to move it from being a ‘party programme’ and to being more of a community of support as well as fun. This can be seen in the replacement of Students Reps with Halls Committees, each with an Event Lead, Marketing Lead, Finance Lead, and a Committee Secretary. Halls Life aims to give the power back to the students on what is delivered in their homes, with all the committees’ members being current students living in halls.
As well as the redesign of these rolls, the number of these students has almost doubled, going from 16 student reps to now 30 students employed as part of committees. With this, Halls Life can offer more support across our halls to help build the communities from the get-go. This also means more events, more promotion, more face-to-face interaction with committees’ staff and students.
The committees deliver events and wellbeing campaigns in the halls that they live. These events are created, budgeted, and delivered by the committees with the support of the staff team where needed. These are all different events dependant on what committee and what site they are on, delivering tailored events to their hall. In the first term of this academic year alone 115 events have been held across the 8 halls currently with committees.
Supporting students
As well as investing in employing more students in these roles, we have been investing in more permanent members of staff to help support the new programme. A recent UAL graduate has been hired as a Hall Committee Administrator, to help support the committees; we have also hired 2 new Equality Diversity and Inclusion roles to support all our halls.
Another new role in Halls Life is a new Student Wellbeing Coordinator, who works to support the committees and also deliver the new Here4U initiative. Here4U, is a wellbeing programme dedicated to providing support to students throughout their stay in halls. The programme works closely with the University’s student services and this year also delivered the SHAG (Sexual Health And Guidance) Week as part of the welcome. This covered 5 sold out events with alcohol-free cocktail making with anti-spiking facts, a Sexpectations Panel Talk, and an LGBTQ+ Big Glam Bingo!
A new welcome
The new Halls Life offer was kicked-off in September for the 2023 Welcome Weekend, when the majority of halls students move-in to their new home. This year the welcome from Halls Life had over 50 events for halls and non-halls students, with 3,263 students attending – more than double the number of students that were able to attend last year.
The welcome also included sustainable pop-up shops across the halls, offering free products including food, bamboo toothbrushes, toilet roll, and cleaning products from Composty. Over 6,000 free products were given out and was a massive success and was a great way to make our new students feel right at home.
Find out more
Not only is Halls Life a programme delivered in halls, it is also your site to find useful information, interesting stories and ways to be a part of the community. The Halls Life site is also the place to find out about all the amazing events that the team put on.