We launched our third Cost of Living Survey in May 2024 (previous waves held in Autumn 2022 and Spring 2023) to gain a deeper understanding of how the Cost of Living crisis is impacting our students, and whether anything has changed since last year's survey.

As expected, the Cost of Living continues to have a huge impact on students' wellbeing and overall student experience, with many students now reducing food intake, skipping social events, and missing scheduled teaching.

To help ease the burden on our students, we'll use our findings to develop support and lobby for positive change at a local and national level in line with the following recommendations.

Recommendations

Support related to food:

• Continue to offer and develop support, as well as lobby external representatives and partner organisations, for students around the rising cost of food.
• HSU to continue to offer support such as the Cost of Living shop (providing emergency food packs & the community fridge), as well as lobbying other organisations that can offer support and discounts for students around food.

Support related to travel:

• HSU and SHU to look at ways to help students with the cost of travel, this could be through lobbying external travel companies to continue to reduce their fares.

Support related to healthcare:

• HSU to continue to offer some form of period poverty support for the next academic year.
• Look at support offered by other organisations and the University to lobby for positive change.

Support related to employment:

• Collaborate with SHU to create a robust student employment strategy and action plan for Hallam students to get high quality, stable jobs closer to campus.
• HSU will continue to offer flexible, part time work to students as well as promoting other organisations where students can look for work alongside their studies.

Support related to socialising:

• Continue to offer and develop low-cost social activities for students to get involved in whilst at Hallam.

Support related to Cost of Living:

• HSU and SHU to lobby the incoming government to increase earning thresholds and maintenance amounts to levels that ensure financial support reflects the actual cost of living for students.

Read the full report

Need support?

Check out our Cost of Living resources, come and chat with us at the HUBS, or email us at campaigns@shu.ac.uk.