NUS Wales Spring Conference, 6-7th March 2009... for me it was all about the FE!

For many years NUS Wales has struggled to reach quorum at conference, especially at the Spring meeting in mid-Wales. When making excuses it’s easy to look at the same old story of underfunded, underdeveloped unions in FE, and that’s if they exist at all. However, this isn’t the story everywhere, as Lleu, Beth and I discovered on our ‘Betty, Dalts and Lleu do F to the E’ trip to Coleg Gwent and Coleg Sir Gar...

In both these colleges we found enthusiastic, passionate students who wanted any opportunity to get involved in the wider student movement. They were eager to learn more about NUS’s structures and to engage in our conferences and events. Both have SLOs that care about developing their unions and about getting their students engaged in NUS. Why is it then, that we have seen little of FE during the past few years?

Well, for a start some had never seen an NUS officer before... they certainly had no idea what NUS conferences were or how they could really get involved. It was clear that there is a need for NUS Wales officers to really engage with FE and to treat them as equal members of our national union. We’re happy enough to pop down to the HE unions that we know will turn up for conference, but this is about representation and we are not the national union of HE students. The majority of our members are in FE and it’s about time we started recognising this. It’s not good enough to send the DTO out to FE unions and claim that we have delivered; we need some political engagement with our further education members and that means our elected officers getting out onto campuses. We may get the meetings with the Minister for Education and her civil servants, but we need real stories from real students to ensure that we are truly representing out students. That means us on FE campuses and FE students at our conferences.

A typical Spring Conference of the past saw NUSW struggling to reach quorum of 3 FE constituent members, never mind having a good choice of FE delegates running for WNEC. However, this year was different and we had a total of 12 FE delegates from 4 different colleges and a wealth of talent. We had a motion from Coleg Gwent, speeches from FE delegates about the constitution, and some quality candidates standing for the FE places on the WNEC. Their elections speeches were great, and their responses to questions from the floor were more politically astute than many of the HE candidates we have see in past years. I’m confident that the FE reps elected to next years WNEC will do themselves and NUS proud. We just have to make sure that our efforts continue. We need to make sure that we get out of the NUSW office and onto FE campuses and that we bring even more FE students back with us to conferences and events throughout the year.

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/katiedalton/276420.aspx