ID136 The Commuter Student: How Keele can better serve Local Lives

The Idea

A recent survey, commissioned by a task and finish group reviewing UG Home recruitment in GSRA, showed that the "typical" Keele student has changed, yet our operational structures remain designed for a primarily residential campus model. The necessity of adapting to this shift is already a live issue at the institutional level, highlighted by the recent Keele Debate: "Local Lives vs Global Goals: Should Keele focus on our region or the wider world?". If we are to genuinely champion these "local lives" and fulfil our civic mission, we must ensure that our campus remains a vehicle for regional social mobility. This proposal is a strategic choice to align our operations with our demographic reality, ensuring an inclusive ‘Keele experience’ that is not reserved for those in halls, but is accessible to our local and regional communities.80% of our commuter students surveyed are travelling 30 minutes or more to Keele, with an average travel time of 60 minutes  (based on 161 responses). For these students, current timetabling practices (single-hour days or lectures spread thinly across the week) are a major barrier to recruitment and retention. Furthermore, our Parking Policy fundamentally misunderstands our geography; for rural students, the car is a necessity, not a preference. Yet, current policy ranks commuting students as the lowest priority (9th out of 9 groups), placing them below society members transferring equipment. 

The University strategy needs a commitment to align university operations with our demographic reality. This involves three major institutional shifts: 

1. Timetabling Policy: Moving to a ‘Block Timetabling’ model that condenses contact hours, minimising ‘dead time’ and travel costs. 
2. Parking Reform: Re-ordering priority groups to recognise distance and necessity over campus convenience, ensuring those with the longest, most complex journeys are not systematically excluded. Students also report anxiety about space availability and this needs to be addressed. 
3. Commuter Hub: Enhancing a central space (e.g. Tawney) with lockers, showers, and kitchen facilities to provide a hub for commuter students between lectures. 

Why This Idea Should Be Considered

Nationally, the cost-of-living crisis has nudged more students towards commuting, and for some, it has become the only realistic route into higher education. Our current parking eligibility is nominally ‘needs-based’, yet it paradoxically prioritises those already on campus over those struggling to get here. When commuting students must compete for limited spaces, juggle timetables where travel outweighs taught hours, and lack a genuinely welcoming place on campus that doesn’t require spending money, we actively erode their sense of belonging. Reforming these policies signals that Keele understands its own geography and respects the significant financial investment local students make to attend. 

This shift isn’t theoretical; it reflects a marked change in our own student population over the past decade. The proportion of new undergraduate students who live at home and commute to Keele has doubled, rising from 21%  in 2015 to 40% in 2024/25 (HESA 2026). Competitors have already begun to adapt their offer in response, with University College Birmingham becoming the latest university to offer two-day-a-week timetables paired with accommodation packages designed around commuter needs. 

How We Would Implement This Idea

• Timetabling: Implement ‘Block Timetabling’ to cluster lectures, avoiding single-hour days and freeing up entire days of the week. This would require close liaison with Faculties to ensure operational constraints (such as use of specialist facilities, placements, laboratories, clinical teaching, accreditation requirements) are considered. Whilst a one-size-fits-all approach would not be practical; it should not dissuade us from advocating for this as an institution-wide principle. 
• Curriculum Design: Allow timetables to be ‘locked down’ early, enabling planning for work/care commitments. One potential way to achieve this would be to remove optionality of First Year students where curriculum and professional requirements allow. 
• Parking: Re-order permit priority groups to place long-distance commuters at the heart of the policy. Address space availability to capitalise on a staff workforce that often works from home. 
• Tawney: Enhance the commuter space in Tawney to be best in class. Embed messaging about this space in marketing and recruitment messages to signal that Keele is commuter-friendly. Consideration could be given to whether the Students’ Union and/or the Multi-Faith Chaplaincy could play a leading role with this. 

What Success Would Look Like

Success is:

• A campus that functions for the ‘nearly half’ of students who now commute. 
• A timetable where no student travels for longer than they spend in class. 
• A parking system where a student from a rural area has guaranteed access, removing the daily travel anxiety that hinders learning. 
• A measurable decrease in non-continuation rates, increase in student satisfaction and an increase in recruitment of local students, driven by reduced structural barriers. 
• An approach that remains adaptable across disciplines, recognising that some programmes (such as Medicine) have fixed professional or clinical requirements, while still applying the same principles of fairness, access and belonging wherever possible. 
• Keele proves that its campus can successfully serve a distributed cohort without forcing them to move in to fit in.