Activities in Action, Area Political Convention, recruitment, A level results Day and numerous campaign planning meetings!

The week of the 8th August I was in Hertfordshire for the Activities in Action summer training course. The venue was gorgeous, if a little corporate, and the NEC with me were Dan Chilcott and Ellie Russell, we did have a good week, the weather was beautiful and the food was ok too. The officers there really bought into the plans for a student activities priority campaign and one of the best thing to come out of the course was the plans to work with Kick It Out and BUSA as part of the campaign. Its always really hard for NUS to cater for sports sabbaticals, for years it has not been easy and I think in the past we have just expected BUSA to cater for them, this years course was better than last years but still needs some work to ensure we are catering for all of our officers.

On Thursday 11th August I held Area Political Convention in my office! This sounds very grand and I expect that it used to be a very beneficial, large event when we had dozens of areas, but with one established area, WMANUS and one fledgling area SEANUS it was not quite the event it used to be. The stipulations for an Area Political Convention are in the NUS Constitution (another area of the document that is outdated! – luckily meeting with rules and revision to iron some of these areas out soon!) and so we had the convention, Bubble from SEANUS and Joe and Andy from WMANUS came down and we decided who would be the Areas council rep and who would be the NEC Observer, as you can imagine with one vote per area and both wanting to be on council the decision was not easy…so we flipped a coin! Bubble is now the National Council Rep and WMANUS are NEC Observers! We also talked about how the areas can support each other and the possibility of other areas being set up this year, maybe we will be able to have a proper convention in a couple of years!

On Friday 12th I attended the STADIA events planning day and caught up on emails, post and phone messages.

The week of Monday 15th I had Training Manager Interviews, deadline for NEC motions and reports, sending out of NEC papers, wrote my speeches for the campaigns launch, met with ULU about student media days, had more campaign planning meetings, and spent a lot of time working on stuff for the campaigns launch, I proof read the democracy guide (coming soon!) and signed off some work on the associate card and the NUS card,

On the 18th it was A level results day, congratulations to our NEC Ellie Russell and Daniel Randall who both did exceptionally well and are off to Uni next year! I am absolutely sick of every time that any results are released we hear that exams are getting easier, we should be able to celebrate our students successes and the talent of the teaching staff who help them to pass not deflating them with dumbing down accusations. It is about time that the Government realises that 14-19 education needs reforming and that it missed a golden opportunity when it did not take up all of Tomlinson’s recommendations. I went on ITN News on the 18th and told the Newsreader exactly that, she was arguing that there should be a quota of people of receive A’s and no one else can! Ridiculous!

I have also been invited to visit Israel on the Young Political Leaders Trip that the Union of Jewish Students arrange every year, I am taking the time off as Annual Leave and go on the 8th September. I think that it is very important that someone from the management team in NUS attends and I hope very much that this will rebuild some bridges in the light of recent events. It will be a very interesting trip that I hope I will learn something from.

This week was extremely busy and I was really glad when the weekend came round!

The Blogs on this site represent the individual views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or practices of the National Union of Students.

All links in blogs will open in a new browser window.

The permanent URL for this specific blog entry is: http://www.officeronline.co.uk/blogs/gemmatumelty/271297.aspx