Last Christmas, my Nan got me a mini suitcase on wheels. It turned out to be a somewhat fortuitous, as at that point I hadn’t even decided to run for the NEC- but less than a year later its battered, bruised, and falling apart, and in the last few weeks I seem to have been living out of it.

Friday 11th November
I spent the morning doing interviews for local commercial radio stations about student housing, and in particular about student debt. Thanks to Cherie Blair’s comments that week about how she couldn’t have gone to university without a grant I got the chance to talk a lot about our opposition to fees.

I then jumped on a train to Newport to the inaugural Welsh regional conference. There was only myself, Sian and Jo there from the NEC, but that was nearly equal to the number of delegates there. It’s a shame more unions weren’t there and I hope at least those that were there found the day valuable. It was also decision day at Exmouth, and as you probably have heard the battle was lost. It’s a travesty and a shame, and I just wanted to pay tribute to the hard work of all concerned in Exmouth and Plymouth- particularly the officers- they ran an amazing campaign and are an example to us all.

I spent Saturday in HQ trying to catch up on some emails. Saturday night I was at the student media awards, where I did try to look after the welfare of my colleagues but it was too much of an uphill struggle!

W/c Monday 14th November
National Council was on Monday, in an absolutely freezing Coventry student union. It was only my 2nd national council, and I much preferred it to the last one, in June which was incredible bitchy and tense. I got the chance to present an update on the welfare campaign, which I was over the moon about- it was the first chance I’d had and I think my enthusiasm was evident. We passed some motions, nothing massively controversial though.

Tuesday and Wednesday I was in HQ for what feels like the only time all month! Trying to catch up on some emails and make final arrangements for the Mental Health Lobby the following week, then on Wednesday night it was up to Manchester for a co-op meeting the next day- and so began a 6 day tour of the country- thank goodness for that suitcase!

The co-op meeting on Thursday was quite exciting- I can’t go into too much detail on it here but there may be an exciting development occurring soon in the project which will make the project a reality in the short term rather than the current seemingly far off expensive project. If you want a full up date on where we are with the project give me a shout.

From there I went to London FE Essentials in Hitchin to help out there, and really enjoyed it. I found both the FE Essentials I’ve been on in the last few weeks really interesting and have been glad of the chance to play a role in them (quite literally, its all about the role plays!). Ellie was doing a fabulous job of motivating the delegates and we had a really productive day. As we were sat in the bar, that night we ended up having some huge debates on everything from feminism and pro-feminism to what the bible says about homosexuality- such levels of passionate and informed debate I do not recall seeing of an evening on summer training!

Then on Friday it was back to London for the FE briefing day on the Housing Act and the implications for FE colleges and specialist institutions on the code of standards. Which we ran a session at. I then had to dash to Heathrow to catch a flight to Edinburgh and managed to stall check in from closing by a couple of minutes so Gemma was able to make check in. I used to pride myself on being Northern and thus not too susceptible to the cold but Edinburgh was freezing! We were there for Scottish council in Perth the next day, (Saturday) which was even colder.

At Scottish council I ran a session on Mental Health- promotion and working with your institution, which was well attended and hopefully useful. Unfortunately I had to leave before the report and plan to go to Liverpool, as I had long standing plans there. Apologies to anyone who had welfare related questions and do feel free to feed them in to me at any point.

On Monday and Tuesday it was the Welfare & Ed Network Days in Leeds and Coventry respectively, which Julian and me were running. Although we didn’t have a huge turn out for these (despite me plugging them by emails, the brief, the website and ring arounds!) I think and hope those who attended found them useful and productive. I feel really strongly, from my own experience that by idea-sharing and comparing experiences welfare officers in particular can gain so much- and many officers have campaigns that they’re really proud of that they’re happy to share for the collective good, so this was very much the focus of these days.

Wednesday 23rd was the Mental Health Lobby which myself and Sian had organized. I had been writing briefings, booking venues and trying to co-ordinate this event and was pleased when it went pretty well. We had some great speakers at the pre-lobby session, including Lynn Roberts, chair of the all-party group on mental health, and Paul Farmer, chair of the Mental Health Alliance. Thank you for everyone who played a role in the day. We had around 40 students there and most people got to see their MPs. Myself and Sian got to meet Rosie Winterton, the Minister for Mental health’s PPS and discuss our concerns around the bill for students and also some wider issues around students and mental health, which we found really positive. I couldn’t blog about the lobby and not big up the delegation from Canterbury Christchurch who arrived fully briefed and wearing fabulous mental health campaign T-shirts, brilliant!

Thursday I was in the office and I also met with the Terence Higgins Trust to look at work we can together. The second strand of the sexual health campaign is going to be around campaigning for better sexual health provisions for students on 3 strands:
1) shorter GUM waiting times
2) Free sexual health resources for Students unions across the board
3) Removal of VAT from condoms
We’re going to hold a day of action for this on Valentines day ( I wont have anything better to do anyway!) and hopefully organize a lobby.

On Friday I was in Brighton for the 3rd Welfare & Ed network day. Julian was unable to attend at the last minute so it was all about the welfare, but I covered education as best I could. We had a good policy writing session and an interesting discussion about the procedure for no confidencing an NEC member…colleagues beware….!

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