As many of you are aware, the KCLSU Student Officer team launched a campaign last month to lobby the university to re-instate protected time on Wednesday afternoons in second semester. We are very happy to announce that the university have now agreed to protect Wednesday afternoons from 2pm onwards starting in semester two. They have also committed to funding mitigations to ensure face-to-face teaching time is not negatively impacted by removing Wednesday Afternoons from timetabling.

Students use Wednesday afternoons to take part in sports or engage with societies, study or complete course work, take time for their wellbeing, work to fund their degrees or fulfil caring commitments, alongside many other activities. The previous officer team had agreed that this time could be used for timetabling during semester one to give the university some timetabling flexibility during the uncertainty at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the university had later planned to extend this measure into second semester as well. The current officer team felt that continuing to remove this time beyond term 1 would have too much of a negative impact on student experience – which is already very much impacted by the ongoing pandemic.

This win came in no small part from the student response we received to our initial statement, with many of you sending in testimonials about the value of Wednesdays and committing to sign our open letter, so the officers would like to thank you all for supporting the campaign!

Signed,

Niall Berry,

Vice President of Activities and Development