Senate House fifth-floor study space set to close later this year
The Students’ Union will be moving its student support services onto the floor
The fifth-floor study space in the University of Bristol’s Senate House is set to close later this academic year.
This comes after the university’s Students’ Union (SU) announced last Tuesday (21st November) that it is moving its support and services to Senate House.
In an email to students last week, it announced: “We are excited to share some news with you about an upcoming change that will bring us closer to the heart of campus.”
It added that the move will make it “easier than ever to talk to your elected officer team and access our key services, like academic advice.”
The move follows many students claiming that the SU services in the Richmond Building are too far away and need to be brought directly onto the campus.
The fifth-floor of Senate House is an incredibly popular study space for students, but after the SU move in, which is expected to occur after Easter, students will no longer be able to access the floor.
The SU said that the fifth-floor “has temporarily been a space available to students, although the university’s plan has always been to repurpose the space.”
Whilst no space on the fifth-floor can be used by students during the day, rooms 5.20 and 5.22 will be open for student groups in the evenings; however, four other rooms will become completely inaccessible.
The SU is aware of the shortage of study spaces already, it said: “We are actively lobbying the university to find additional space for students to study and to make it easier to find out which study spaces have availability”.
To combat the lack of study spaces around exam season, from Thursday 25th April until Friday 31st May, the Carpenter Room in the Richmond Building will be open daily as an additional study area.
The old SU offices will be replaced by the Centre for Academic Language and Development (CALD) on the third and fourth floors of the Richmond Building.
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