Tuesday 19-05-2026 - 14:26

Housing is one of those issues universities talk about constantly but often feel structurally unequipped to solve. Everyone acknowledges the pressure.

Rents rising. Student accommodation filling up earlier every year. International students struggling with guarantor requirements. Students’ sofa surfing, commuting unreasonable distances, staying in situations unsafe for their wellbeing because they cannot secure somewhere else to live. And yet when you start trying to move from acknowledging the problem to implementing an institutional intervention, things get complicated very quickly.

Over the past two years, first as Vice President and then as President at GCU, one of the major pieces of work I pushed was lobbying the university to establish a rent guarantor scheme for students. Not because we believed it would solve the housing crisis. It wouldn’t. But because we increasingly saw students being blocked from accessing housing altogether, not necessarily because they could not afford rent, but because they could not produce a UK guarantor. And once you start hearing enough of those cases, the pattern becomes difficult to ignore.

At the same time, we were also doing wider national work around housing — campaigning and engaging MSPs on the need for stronger protections for students within housing legislation. But while that larger policy work mattered, we also knew there was a parallel conversation to have internally.

What could the university itself realistically do, within its own power, to alleviate some of these pressures? That question became the foundation of this work.

Where the idea came from

The initial conversations were rarely dramatic. They were usually casework reports or frequent student visits to my office, emails, social media messages and so on.

Students venting to the Students’ Association after finding somewhere to live but being unable to progress because the landlord required a UK-based guarantor.

International students were particularly affected, but not exclusively. We also saw home students impacted — especially care experienced students, estranged students, students fleeing difficult family situations, and students whose parents themselves did not meet guarantor criteria. At the same time, the wider housing context in Glasgow was changing.

Caledonian Court was at capacity. Private student accommodation was expensive and constrictive. More students were being pushed into the private rental market at the exact moment that market was becoming harder to access.

So the question became whether there was an institutional intervention that was both realistic and capable of making a meaningful difference. That was where the rent guarantor scheme idea emerged. And initially, if I am honest, I thought the hardest part would be proving the need. It wasn’t.

The hardest part was understanding how institutional change actually works when you are a sabbatical officer operating on a fixed-term clock inside a university that existed long before you arrived and will continue long after you leave. Staff members have been in post for years. Processes move carefully. Risk is scrutinised heavily. Priorities compete constantly.

What the work actually involved

There is a tendency sometimes in student movement communications to compress work into neat outcomes.

“Campaign launched.”

“Proposal approved.”

“University agreed.”

And my personal favourite “You said, we did!”

The reality is usually much messier.

This piece of work took close to two years across two officer terms.

It involved:

• Gathering student casework and lived experiences
• Working with fellow officers and SA staff
• Benchmarking universities already operating schemes
• Speaking with sector contacts and external organisations
• Seeking support and guidance from National Union of Students Scotland
• Learning entirely new strategies for institutional lobbying, including using Freedom of Information requests to obtain operational data from universities
• Building relationships internally with university executives and professional services staff
• Reworking arguments repeatedly depending on the audience in the room

One thing I learned very quickly is that having a morally strong argument is not the same as having an institutionally persuasive one.

The argument could not simply be:

“Students need this.”

We had to build a rationale around:

• Widening participation
• International recruitment
• Student retention
• Institutional reputation
• Feasibility
• Risk management
• Administrative burden
• Alignment with university KPIs

The proposal eventually developed into a formal presentation to the university, built around evidence from across the Scottish sector. The benchmarking mattered because it shifted the conversation from:

“Could this ever work?”

to:

“This is already working elsewhere.”

What the research showed

The research we gathered — and the university later independently researched — showed that universities such as the University of Edinburgh, University of Glasgow, University of Dundee, Heriot-Watt University, and University of Aberdeen were already operating rent guarantor schemes.

Some of the findings were particularly important:

• Default rates were extremely low, with some universities reporting none at all
• Most schemes capped the number of awards annually
• Usage was growing year-on-year
• The schemes primarily supported international students, but also widening participation students
• Several universities managed the schemes without dedicated institutional funding

From the Students’ Association side, we argued the potential benefits to GCU were clear:

• Supporting widening participation objectives
• Strengthening support for care experienced and estranged students
• Supporting international students and recruitment
• Providing support for students unable to access Caledonian Court
• Demonstrating institutional responsiveness during a worsening housing crisis

The framing became:

small intervention, potentially significant impact.

The part people don’t see

I think one of the biggest misconceptions about sabbatical officer roles is that institutional change happens because someone has a good idea and argues passionately enough. Most of the time, change happens because people keep showing up to the conversation long enough for an institution to become comfortable moving.

There were moments this work felt stalled completely. There were points where it felt like the university agreed with the problem but not the mechanism.

There were concerns around:

• Financial liability
• Administrative burden
• Scale of demand
• Potential defaults
• Reputational risk if something went wrong

And to be fair, those concerns were not irrational. Universities are risk-managed institutions. Particularly in the current higher education climate. That meant the work increasingly became about reducing perceived risk.

The breakthrough moment was not really a dramatic approval. It was the point at which the university moved from questioning whether intervention was needed to actively researching what implementation options could look like. That shift took far longer than most people probably realise.

One thing I have also reflected on through this process is how often Students’ Association work becomes invisible once institutions formally absorb it into operational delivery, which kind of undersells the huge success of partnership working and co-creation with students. It also means the years of casework, lobbying, relationship-building, research, failed attempts, redrafts and persistence behind a project can quietly disappear once something becomes an institutional initiative rather than an “SA campaign.”

Where the work landed

In the end, the university decided not to immediately establish a fully university-owned guarantor scheme. Instead, they moved towards exploring a partnership with Housing Hand, a third-party provider already working with multiple universities across the UK.

The partnership model meant:

• Students could access discounted guarantor services
• The university would not carry direct financial liability
• Housing Hand would assume responsibility for rent guarantees and debt collection
• The university’s role would primarily involve partnership and promotion

If I am being honest, I was conflicted about this outcome initially because it was not the full vision we campaigned on.

The original ambition was a free university-backed scheme, particularly because accommodation increasingly feels foundational to student success and wellbeing. And by this point, my term as President was approaching its end.

But another reality of sabbatical officer work is recognising that you do not always get enough time to finish the work in the form you imagined it. Sometimes progress arrives in stages. And sometimes your role becomes creating the groundwork, evidence base and institutional momentum for whoever comes next.

What I hope happens next

I still believe universities have a responsibility to think more seriously about accommodation as part of the student experience rather than something entirely external to it. And I still think there is a strong argument for GCU eventually exploring its own institutional scheme in the future which i believe they were open to considering.

But importantly, this process now leaves behind something tangible:

• Sector research
• Internal university research
• Data around student demand
• An implementation pathway
• Evidence from partnership engagement

Future officer teams will not have to start from zero. And honestly, that is part of the reality of institutional change work in Students’ Associations.

You rarely “complete” the work yourself.

You move it further than where you found it.

You create leverage points.

You build relationships.

You gather evidence.

You shift institutional comfort zones slightly.

Then somebody else picks it up and moves it further again.

Because behind every policy discussion, presentation slide and committee paper are students simply trying to navigate life while pursuing their education. If this work makes that process even slightly easier for some of them, then the effort behind it was worth it.

For students — particularly incoming students — who may need support accessing a guarantor service, information about the university’s partnership with Housing Hand can be accessed here:

https://www.gcu.ac.uk/currentstudents/lifeoncampus/accommodation/rent-guarantor-scheme

The reality is that this is not the final form of the work we originally imagined. But it is a movement and allow me to say.... a campaign we won!

You can contact Tom Tom at: president@GCUstudents.co.uk