September felt like the month of freshers’ fairs but started with an NEC meeting in London which was the shortest and most pointless meeting of my life! Travelling all the way to London for an hour long meeting that didn’t have any contentious isues in it at all has made my passion for the governance review changes that have subsequently been developed even greater; if it wasn’t for the national campaigns launch the next day it would have been an utterlessly pointless affair. The following day I headed to Gloucester to discuss with the QAA our upcoming event highlighting the student written submission process as part of the institutional reviews, this meeting also yielded some positive sounds on student reviewers as part of the QAA’s review teams.

Before embarking on my fresher’s fair tour I attended Plaid’s party conference in Llanduno with Carl where we had a stand in their conference lobby and where we made some significant contacts for the year ahead. We will also be attending the other political party conferences when they happen, as to what we take along will depend entirely on what they are charging us for having a stall or not!

There now follows a list of all the fresher’s fairs I attended in September:

• Bridgend College


• Newport


• Aberystwyth (two days)


• Bangor (two days)


• Glamorgan

At all the fairs I was pushing the full range of our campaigns and objectives and particularly I was signing up students to our student reps ‘have your say’ campaign which is our joint project with Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW). Our target was to sign up 500 students to a course reps network and to provide assistance in training course reps and best practice in developing handbooks for reps as well as enouraging debate on the structures which they can feed into. At the end of the freshers’ fairs, all the various stalls we had staffed across Wales resulted in around 700 names and we have already had positive results from training days that Rhys has gone to help with.

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