Northen Lights: Adversity also brings out inventiveness

Spare a thought for the city’s university students. They are, in so many ways, the futures on which we all depend – their skills, ingenuity, abilities and enterprise will shape the prosperity of the future. They’ve had a difficult start to the academic year – and so have the university staff on whom they depend. As the pandemic continues to wreak havoc with our lives and our planning, our social lives and our health, the repeated changes to national guidance have made life very difficult for universities and their students.

The challenges of running a university in remote mode for, now eight months, have begun to take their toll on staff and students. Sheffield Hallam has put in enormous resource to support students and staff to enable them to study and work successfully in these different circumstances – IT support, hardship support, wellbeing support. For all of us, there are competing pressures every day, with rapidly shifting immediate priorities. It all makes its demands on everyone’s resilience and patience.

Just last week, the government set out prescriptive guidance for universities on plans for the end of term and Christmas. Through a combination of testing and a late-in-term shift to online teaching, government has set out plans for all residential students to be home for Christmas. The city’s two universities are now working through that guidance and considering the implications – both for our residential and our commuter students. At times like this, it is easy to focus on the problems and challenges everyone faces, but it is important to highlight that adversity also brings out inventiveness. Last year, some 1,500 of Sheffield Hallam’s students gave over 40,000 hours of volunteering to the community. One of those, Laura Green, a final year student volunteered through the NHS ‘Check In and Chat’ telephone volunteer service talking to people self-isolating during lockdown. She said: “I’ve always volunteered while I‘ve been at university, and I’ve volunteered as much as I can alongside my final year studies.”

Emily Williams, a Hallam graduate, created a series of eye-catching illustrations called ‘Frontline’ depicting keyworkers working at the forefront of the pandemic. She worked with The Framery on Sharrow Vale Road to sell the prints, raising money for NHS and the Sheffield Hospital charities. The Student Action for Refugees volunteer group at Sheffield Hallam’s Student Union organised a virtual marathon during lockdown. Participants ran, walked or cycled 26.2 miles over a day, week or month to raise money for vulnerable people in Sheffield. Working with Northern Powerhouse Partnership, Sheffield Hallam has established a pioneering mentoring scheme deploying graduate mentors into schools to support Year 10 and Year 11 pupils in re-engaging with learning. This scheme has been such a success, supporting pupils at a crucial stage of their school career and providing much needed opportunities for graduates, that the programme is due to be rolled out extensively across South Yorkshire in 2021, and is being replicated across the country. Our research and development effort has been redirected too. Our Lab4Living researchers created online resources to support people with dementia during the pandemic, in conjunction with a national charity. The resources have now been accessed thousands of times by dementia patients and their families. The Advanced Well-Being Research Centre has developed a superb online resource on long COVID – supporting those many people who have struggled for many months with long-term symptoms of the virus. I could go on with many more examples of how our community have creatively responded to the unprecedent challenge of the last eight months – but words are always tight in these columns. Crises are always challenging. They inevitably present us all with real difficulties – and those difficulties are rarely predictable and make enormous demands. But they can bring out the best in us, individually and collectively. We have always known how much value the city’s two universities bring in terms of economic success and cultural diversity. We’ve learnt that students and our staff add value in other ways by contributing to the common good.

The new year is not far off. There’s promising news on a vaccine. We can look forward, perhaps, to life becoming rather different. As it does, we should not forget what we have learnt during these difficult months.

In these confusing and worrying times, local journalism is more vital than ever. Thanks to everyone who helps us ask the questions that matter by taking out a subscription or buying a paper. We stand together. Nancy Fielder, editor.