• NEC Delegation meeting – held bright and early (well for an NEC meeting) at 9am, sadly many of the NEC failed to get out of bed as bright and early as perhaps they should have. The result - many of those who had submitted text hadn’t arrived when it was discussed, and therefore it fell! The details of the text submitted by the NEC is available on OfficerOnline.

• The NEC delegation meeting was followed by a formal open NEC meeting, again for details please see OfficerOnline.

• A few months ago I applied to be on the board of the new Quality Improvement Agency, one of two organisations that have been created and will see the Learning and Skills Development (LSDA) close. They are FE specific and are tasked with developing and rolling out strategies to improve quality across the sector. NUS have been lobbying and arguing that part of that process must be about the creation of a real learner feedback system. Anyhow, this week I learnt that I had been successful in my application and from April will be working to develop and guide this new organisation. More info can be found at www.qia.org

• Also met with the consultant who is assisting me with the National Directors appraisal process.

• Visited Edinburgh SA, first to talk to a people and planet event, and to discuss ways to ensure NUSSL provides more Fair Trade products, and then to address the SRC, which was great fun, I especially enjoyed the debate around whether they should publicly take a stance against Boris Johnson who was running to be rector. They did and he lost!

• Went from Edinburgh to Park Lane College in Leeds, who are seriously and systematically investing in ‘learner voice’. Spoke both to their general meeting (the first one in years) and their board.

• Meeting with Bill Rammell Minister for HE, FE and Lifelong Learning to discuss Foster, the Upcoming FE white paper, and our general FE priorities. We discussed course reps, Unions, the number of student governors on the board, SSLO support and development, EMA’s and a number of other topics. It was a really positive meeting and the Minister was very responsive.

• Management Team Meeting.

• Thursday night I flew to Denmark for the Danish Social Forum, I ran a number of workshops on the British HE education system. Denmark is just about to introduce fees for the first time for International Students so the need to link up has never been greater as the student activists believe that the are only about 5 - 10years being Blair’s model.

• Flew back late Saturday.

• Spent Sunday driving to Huddersfield, via Oxford for the start of the regional conferences week.

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