August 23rd-29th

On Monday Helen Symons and I went to Leeds for an Education and Welfare day. Student officers from all over the north-east came to Leeds University Union for the day where we discussed the current ed and welfare issues, informed the officers about what NUS is working on and discussed creative campaigning ideas. I spent the next few days London based, catching up in the office and attending various internal meetings. I also had a meeting with HEFCE about the National Student Survey where we agreed that a briefing would go out to HE unions answering the questions that arose at Support and Represent. On Thursday I went with a group of NUS staff to meet with the DfES and student loans company to get an update on the late payment issue. A summary of the meeting was then sent to union presidents. On Friday I went to visit Bournemouth Institute of Art and Design where I helped their president plan for their QAA student submission, due in later this term. This week I also saw the almost finished ‘Voter Registration’ pack. I proof read it and made some minor amendments over the weekend so that it was ready to go to print.

August 30th-September 10th

After a welcome break over the Bank Holiday weekend we held the redesigned QAA Day at the Universities UK offices in London. I opened the event and also co-led one of the afternoon sessions on briefing and audit visits with Julian Nicholds from the NEC, despite having a nasty cold and a very croaky voice! The day went very well and received good feedback from the participants. We are planning on holding the next QAA day in January. The internal steering group is working on it’s development. All of our QAA materials will soon be appearing on officer online. If you have an example of questionnaires, submissions, funding bids etc. that your union has produced please send them to sofija.opiacic@nus.org.uk so that you can share your experience with those currently going through the institutional audit process.

After a short period of annual leave I returned to work the following week and went to my first board meeting as a Director of the Office of the Independent Adjudicator. We were presented with the first set of statistics about the work of the OIA which made for interesting reading. This will soon be published in the company’s annual report.

The 10th was my birthday! I spent the day catching up on the hundreds of emails and chasing an invitation to the launch of the Schwartz report on Admissions which we found out was being released on Monday 13th.

September 13th-18th

I found out first thing that we had missed the Schwartz launch. A number of key organisations had not been invited including the teaching unions. UUK only got an invite after much chasing on their part. The DfES were also refusing to give us an embargoed copy of the report which made drafting our press release very difficult as we are basing it on what we thought was going to be in the report without actually seeing it. After a personal call to Professor Schwartz’s office we finally got out hands on the report and having briefly skimmed it we finished off the press release and got it out in time for the next days’ papers. I started doing press work Monday evening and didn’t finish until Tuesday afternoon. I did interviews for Independent Radio Network, a pre-record for 5 Live and Radio One, a pre-record for Sky News, live interviews for the 5 Live breakfast show, BBC Radio Essex, BBC News 24, a lunch-time discussion on 5 Live and finally a pre-record for BBC 3 news. It was a tiring 24 hours with very little sleep but it was great to have NUS at the centre of the discussions around the report. Over the following few days I also did interviews for and American education publication and a swiss newspaper on the subject.

After the media circus ended I headed down to Brighton to meet up with Kat and our Public Affairs Officer at the TUC. We spent the next couple of days networking with Trade Union representatives, gathering support for our campaign and setting up meetings with some of our key partners. At the education fringe meeting we met Charles Clarke who offered us a meeting. I made contact with colleagues from the teaching unions who I’m hoping to work with on issues relating to trainee teachers. I went to a really interesting fringe meeting run by ATL about Red Watch, a website run by a number of fascist organisations including the BNP and Combat 18, who publish photos, addresses, car registration details etc. of anyone who campaigns against fascists and racists. We heard of two teachers who had their car burnt out after their details were put up on Red Watch. We asked that NUS be involved in the on-going campaign to close a legal loophole and bring the people who run the site to justice.

On the Thursday I popped into Brighton University Union with Gemma Tumelty to see how their plans for Freshers Week were going. I then made my way over to my parent’s house near Portsmouth for a dentists appointment on Friday which fortunately didn’t involve any pain! I went up to Bath after that for the Bath Spa University College Union annual reception. When I arrived in Bath I had to stop off at the BBC studio to do a pre-recorded interview for Radio 4’s Money Box about the delays in student loan payments. It was a rather bizarre interview where the interviewer appeared to want to blame me for what had happened!! I hope that I put him straight but unfortunately I didn’t hear the final cut of the interview on the radio. The Bath Spa annual reception was a great event. I went along last year and it’s great to see how the event has developed and how well the union has moved on. In the evening we were shown the Bath nightlife by the Bath Uni and Bath Spa sabbs and also joined by some of the Plymouth sabbs.

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