The Welsh Academic Communities Experiment: read all about it!
In the academic communities experiments we saw the value of students coming together on their terms, with gentle shaping, encouragement and support from their students’ unions and universities.
The Welsh Academic Communities Experiment is concluding and we’ve blogged about the project as we’ve had lots of questions about it!
But first, what do we mean by an ‘academic community’? Well, Hannah and I spent ages thinking about this and came up with:
An active academic community intentionally combines student representation with the activities and identity of academic societies. It brings together social, academic, co-curricular and student voice through informal or formal approaches.
That’s our definition, and what we worked with across the project, which kicked off in late 2024. An NUS Charity project, funded by Medr, exploring academic communities in Wales. The project timeline below shows the key milestones in the project and links to the two reports we’ve written.
The first, published in June 2025 and excitingly titled ‘Academic Communities Report’ explains the drivers behind the work; the challenges we’d seen in meangingful, student-centred representation activities. We did some research with NUS Charity and explored volunteering in Welsh SUs and found that it’s a challenging world - students are time poor and finding volunteering difficult.
The second report outlines our findings from the Experiment and includes case studies from Undeb Aber and Swansea University Students’ Union. There were so many interesting discoveries through this project. We presented some of these at Membership Services Conference in August and at the Academic Communities Network in April (join the network, it’s great!). We have a final workshop coming soon on Tuesday 10th November, 12:00-13:00 for NUS Charity members. Email uniondevelopment@nus.org.uk to sign up.
Project Timeline
July 2026 - published the learnings from the project: Academic Communities Toolkit
September 2025 - May 2026 - ‘Experiment’ window with monthly consultancy inputs and ongoing support
August 2025 - setting up projects with successful applicants - Swansea University Students’ Union & Undeb Aber
July 2025 - opened ‘Experiment’ applications to Welsh students’ unions
June 2025 - published the interim findings report: Academic Communities Report
January - May 2025 - research analysis and write up
December 2024 - project kick off - research opening
Summer 2024 - setting up the project with NUS Charity and Medr. Establishing project goals and intended impacts.
Note: the resources are only accessible to NUS Charity members.
Thanks :)
Big thanks to the teams at Undeb Aber, Aberystwyth University, Swansea University Students’ Union and Swansea University. Particularly Jaye, Luisa and Tom who drove the projects in their SUs. Thanks to our Associate Hannah for working hard on this project. Finally, to NUS Charity and Medr for working with us on this from an initial idea to a finished, successful project.