Friday 23-05-2025 - 14:06

The Students’ Association is in the final year (Year 4) of the Strategic Plan 2025. You can read about our recent achievements in our annual report within our Accounts 2024 and our progress against our Key Performance Indicators.

It was agreed with our Trustee Board in December 2024 that the working assumption is that our Mission, Vision and Values and our Strategic Goals would remain the same given the significant work in development of the Strategic Plan 2025 but that this hypothesis would be tested with our membership through our Annual Student Survey. The results of the Annual Survey 2025 were that 77.3% agreed we had the right Vision, 83.35% agreed we had the right Mission and 84.43% agreed we had the right Strategic Goals. Feedback within the Annual Survey 2025 suggested changing our value from [Being] Inclusive to Inclusivity. Read the analysis report.

A desk-based analysis on the strategic plans of other Scottish students’ associations was undertaken to establish themes in the sector and their success measures. We also reviewed the GCU Strategy 2030 to establish any strategic alignment.

Since January 2025 we developed our SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) Analysis and PESTLE (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal or Environmental) Analysis that was shared at our Student Voice meeting. We then used the ICE (Impact, Confidence, and Ease) Scoring Model to start an internal discussion on our services and activities.

Our Strategic Planning Group proposed revised Strategic Objectives and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and presented these to our Trustee Board in May 2025. Whilst most of the KPIs have been well developed, the Communications and Impact KPIs have still to be thought out more. Provisional targets for all our KPIs will be developed during Summer 2025. The Strategic Planning Group also proposed changing the order of our Strategic Goals as shown in the following diagram.

Our Strategic Plan 2030 will be approved by our Trustee Board in October 2025.

This is a final opportunity for any member to provide feedback on our Strategic Plan 2030 by emailing chief.executive@GCUstudents.co.uk.