June was spent mostly with budgets. The budget code manual doesn’t appear to have been changed in about 20 years, so we decided to scrap the whole thing and start again. Well it’s much better, but it’s been a long job, and the tweaking is still going on. But it is done. It’s going to mean much better financial information – well financial information that is actually useful! Of course Extra has been rolling along quite nicely, and the other big office thing has been sorting out exactly we how we go about telling a big proportion of our membership that their predecessors have at best been less than motivated or at worst deliberately lying about their students numbers and block grants to keep their affiliation fees low.

The two big times away for July were both training events. The first was the NEC training in Southport, it’s the fourth one I’ve done and they have got steadily better. Now it is actually the same standard that we give to officers across the country. Obviously it is different, it’s tailored to need, but it seemed to have attributes from each of the NUS summer training programmes with a running theme of doing the sort of stuff that comes in exec handover training.

The one thing that really hit home was the session done by Ian Negus. He did a session which involved the SDI personality test. When not in conflict, I am so in the hub. Not just in the circle, but the hexagon inside that. Tehn in conflict I go straight into the red. It’s like looking at a temperature gauge in a cartoon. If only we had done this session last year and I had known that then.

The second time away was Finance and Governance training and back to Beaumont Hall in Leicester, complete again with a share with SAGA! Well this time Leicester had learned. It was only the dining hall that was shared, there was a partition in the middle, and more importantly, they had set up a temporary bar so the SAGA lot didn’t come and ask for the bar to be opened while we the course was still going and we were using it as a break out area.

I’m terrible with names. I made a friend a promise of learning 20 of the 60 peoples names, and I think I managed it. I’m not sure how well I’ve done really, because I spoke to Bob from Keele today (yes I am writing this in August) and it was only afterwards that I realised, oh yeah, I know you, I met you three weeks ago. But I know I’m doing better.

The programme had been changed and was better than last year, and the vibe seemed right from the start. I always find being lead officer at an event a bit like a cross between being a Butlins redcoat and the political officer on a soviet submarine. You’re there to front the organisation, to try and make sure everyone enjoys themselves and deal with any problems or issues that come up, but also to keep ‘an eye out’ and attend to any issues that may come up, usually when a delegate becomes a problem, but luckily that didn’t happen at this course.

My big mistake was on the first night. The key is for NUS training is not to lose too many going out into town on the first night. Keeps them at the venue the first night is the golden rule. So we did the quiz and the bingo, and I got prizes of a mini football set and a rounders set too. So afterwards there was a massive rounders game, replaced by football after about an hour and a half when both of the balls had been lost.

We were in the eye of a storm. It was the end of the heatwave, and for almost two hours we had this advanced fireworks display, a lightning storm with no rain or even thunder. Well the rain did come eventually, and the old lead officer stuff kicked in. “It’s late and there are too many people up”. The social stuff had worked too well, everyone was enjoying it too much, and wouldn’t go to bed. If you’ve only got a few still up at 3, it’s probably not going to be too much of a problem, but when half of the course are still up, you know there are going to be lots missing the next morning. But at 3.45 I gave up, I was dead on my feet. I hadn’t been sleeping because of the heat, I’d managed about nine hours sleep in the last three days. Now it wasn’t hot, and I slept. Fin rang me four times in the morning, and I just slept through it. I was gutted. In four years, I’ve never been up late at a training event, and now after telling everyone to go to bed and being lead officer, I woke up just past 11, an absolute disgrace.

The rest of the day went well though, there was a trickling in of delegates through the day and some trickling back out when the workshops happened. I got to stay behind the scenes, catch up on some work, hang around in the groups a bit and catch up with some of the guest speakers. I didn’t get enough time with the chair of finance committee, but did get a chance to catch up with Lloyde.

At night, we played it a little safer, with Kareoke at the students’ union. Asim from Aston asked if I was trying to send out a message by singing ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’, but it’s always a song I’ve liked, even if the amount it followed me around when it was first out seems a little prophetic now. The bar would shut at1, late enough to keep people happy, but too late for them to bother going into town. Turnout for the last day was much better as a result.

So what was left, well for me just wrapping up. I try to say something similar at the end of all training events. There are things that are and aren’t covered in any specific course, but there are some things that are just such important bits of advice for new sabbs that it would be wrong to miss the opportunity to tell them. Anyway, maybe you need to know too, so here goes.

”I hope you’ve enjoyed yourselves, learned a lot and met some of the people who are going to be there for you to lean on for the rest of the year. I hope you’ve learned more about your role, because students’ unions are complex. There is no other type of organisation in the country that can reasonably be compared to a students’ union and of course the finances are normally the most complicated bit. So you have responsibility for the most complicated bit of one of the most complicated types of organisations you will ever find. But it’s all about understanding what that means, because a budget is one of the most political statements any organisation can make, because it shows what is important to the organisation, it shows what it is willing to spend money on, to invest in on behalf of students and providing for their needs, and the choices that have been made to get to that point.”

“But the thing that you have to remember is that all the factors which compete against each other in budgets, feed each other in their success. The synergy between them makes an SU what it is. The Unique Selling Point of your bar if you have one is that it is there to help fund the advice centre or the sports clubs or the course reps. And that is the USP you have to communicate to your students, that we do all this and we do it all for you, but we can’t do it without you, so get involved. And that involvement might be being in a society, just buying the odd bit of confectionery in the shop, or it might be becoming a sabb at your union.”

“One of the things that NUS Extra has shown with the trial is that because people were employed to talk to students while they were queuing, they knew more about their union and used it more. The same was true that because they were queuing in the union and saw what it had to offer, more of them used those services.”

“So that is what you need to tell your students, and you need to tell them from day one, because now you’ll be making plans for freshers, and you have about a three week window to hook them, because if you miss the boat in those three weeks, you have missed the boat with them for maybe three years. You have to get them into the building, and that might involve leaving the building to go and talk to them. Ask yourselves, what was your hook, what first got you through the doors?”

“And I’m going to leave it at that, and you can think about that. All that remains for me is to thank the staff again, to thank you for being such a wonderful audience, and lastly to say start thinking about the National demo on October 29th. NUS has gone through a lot of reform and changed the way it does a lot of things in the last few years, and now for the first time ever, we have announced the date of the demo well before the start of term. And that is a massive thing, because you know the date before the start of term so you can build for it right at the start. Make sure it is in your freshers guide or first edition of the newspaper, make sure you are able to sell coach tickets right from freshers, having the date before the start of term is all unions have ever needed to get the best turnout we’ve ever seen. Hope to see you there.”