The last few weeks have been so busy that my blogging frequency has slipped – however, I do intend to rectify this.

In mid-October, NUS Scotland held Board of Management Training/ Scottish Training Forum, which is a 3 day residential training event for student officers in FE and smaller unions. It was held in West Linton, near Edinburgh and was attended by delegates from all over Scotland, including from Orkney and Shetland. We ran loads of training workshops and also had a guest speaker from the Scottish Executive who talked about the Review of Scotland’s Colleges, which we are using to argue the case for having 2 students on college boards of management and for colleges to have to properly fund their students’ unions.

We held a Higher Education Networking Day which looked at all the current big HE policy issues in Scotland and further afield such as the Bologna process. Guest speakers from the Scottish Executive also attended this and talked about ‘HE Futures’, which is a review of HE in Scotland that they are launching soon. The Deputy Chief Executive of the newly merged Scottish Funding Council for Further and Higher Education also gave a presentation, which was fantastic as the merger was something NUS Scotland campaigned for for over a decade – and now it has happened.

I’ve been doing some work with the British Council on building links between the UK and Africa, which is really interesting – one of my UK responsibilities is internationalism. I am hoping that, through this, we can gain support (and maybe funding…) for an NUS International Twinning Programme to twin UK student unions with a student union in another country. I’m working with Dan Chilcott on it, as we both have links with different student movements in a number of other countries, and so I’ve met with Dan to work through our ideas for this and come up with the plan, which I’ll attach at the end of this blog. I’m taking a paper to the NEC meeting on 8th November to hopefully get support for it to happen. I’ve attended a meeting of the NEC strategy team and apparently missed a meeting of the anti-racism/ anti-fascism team and the internationalism team because I wasn’t told about them, which is rather annoying.

We held our annual NUS Scotland reception for parliamentarians and external organisations which was attended by lots of guests, including the new Deputy First Minister and Minister for Enterprise and Lifelong Learning. I also spoke at the launch of some new research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation which showed that not only are children from poorer backgrounds less likely to go into higher education, but they also leave university with the highest debts and go into lower paid jobs that their middle class counterparts. I had rather a lot to say about that, including the need to seriously increase grants in Scotland, with the most money going to the poorest students and the need to keep top-up fees out of Scotland. The research also showed that working class graduates feel their accent and their address counts against them with some employers – I think this shows the need for employers and society as a whole to ask ourselves some serious questions about our prejudices and perceptions of other – and employers need to take action. A huge amount needs to happen at school level too, if this situation is going to changes. You can read the report here

That’s a quick update on what I’ve been up to for now – I’ll blog again soon!

Twinning programme proposal

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