July

1 July: National Executive committee meeting - I think it’s fair to say not the easiest meeting to chair. Principally for me this meeting has two main significant events.

1. The setting of the priority campaigns, Education, Education, Education, and Developing our Unions, Supporting our Members. Despite a rather arduous compositing process, and a large and animated argument over the timing of the national demo (first or second term). I believe that we have put together two priority campaigns that can really increase NUS’s profile and lobbying ability, whilst also actively engaging and developing our membership. In particular I’m really delighted that NUS is finally running a priority campaign on Further Education, it’s long overdue.

2. A call from the press and parliamentary team based at HQ, letting us now that the Higher Education Bill, had gained royal assent, something that we hadn’t expected for a number of weeks, Top up Fees passed for 2006. I can’t quite explain the emotions felt upon hearing that piece of news, but I think overall it certainly strengthened our resolve to keep the issue high on the political agenda. Again details of everything we passed at that meeting is available on our website.

In addition I used the opportunity of being in Bloomsbury to view the AUT offices in central London, as a possible future home for NUS.

I’m going to skip over the main July events, giving a rough outline.

• ULU summer training
• Aldwych Handover
• Presentation to the campaign group of MPs
• AMSU conference in Cardiff, where I sat on a question time panel with a variety of people including Theresa Rees, and spoke about the future of students unions. I focussed on how student unions in the light of failing commercial services needed to return to representation as their core aims, there was an interesting debate. All in all I enjoyed the experience far more than I was expecting. It was also confirmed that the following day I would be appearing upon BBC1’s Question Time.
• As part on the priority campaign process we have an outside consultant who comes in, spends a day with us to focus our minds and plan some campaigns
• Question Time. A special young peoples addition, which did nothing to make me less nervous. Interesting array of questions from fees, to smacking, to ‘choice’. And no you really don’t see the questions before there read out.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/question_time

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