In the office Monday 4th and Tuesday 5th June

Much of these two days were spent dealing with the fallout from the debate taking place within UCU about a potential boycott of Israeli academia, which I will return to in a future blog. Just for the record, because I have been misrepresented by another ill-informed blogger, as a committed trade unionist myself I fully support the right of UCU members to debate any issue they like, including the Middle East. However, I have a responsibility to protect the education and welfare of all students studying in the UK and have made representations to UCU on this issue. We have been warmly encouraged by UCU General Secretary Sally Hunt to take part in the debate and I shall ensure we take UCU up on this offer. I make no secret of the fact that I strongly oppose a boycott of Israeli academia (you’d be hard pushed to convince me to boycott any academics as I strongly support academic freedom) but I resent being accused of stifling debate.

I also spent this time in the office preparing a number of speeches for forthcoming events, which I will blog in due course.

National Teaching Fellowship Awards Panel, Channel 4 news and HE Funding dinner– Wednesday 6th

I had the pleasure of taking part in judging the Higher Education Academy’s National Teaching Fellowship Awards. The quality of applications was exceptionally high and the HE Academy (of which I am a director) plays an important role in promoting and developing high quality teaching within the sector.

I then went over to ULU to do an interview for Channel 4 news on bursaries, which was fun and then back to NUS HQ to meet with Gemma and our Public Affairs team to prepare for a dinner we were hosting with John Grogan MP with a number of MPs and vice-chancellors on our strategy for the 2009 review. I can’t say much here as the event was held under the Chatham House rule, but it was incredibly useful and a good taste of a lot of the work that goes on behind the scenes to advance NUS’ lobbying objectives.

UNIAID meetings and Association of Business Schools event – Thursday 7th

My day started at 8.30am for a breakfast meeting run by UNIAID as part of their topical breakfast series, which I attended with Kat Stark. This was about parents in higher education, which myself and Kat assumed would mean students who were also parents, but was actually about the role of parents in finance and information, advice and guidance for their children in HE. This was still useful and the points we made about students sometimes also being parents were well received!

We then had a separate meeting with UNIAID about their Student Calculator, which we were supporting and helping to develop, which was really productive. There are a number of expansions we hope to make to the existing calculator like postgraduate support, international student support and greater information on bursaries and we will continue to work with UNIAID on this.

I then attended a meeting organised by the Association of Business Schools to deliver a presentation on the National Student Survey and how UK business schools should be using the data to enhance the quality of the student experience.

Meeting with UCAS – Friday 8th

Most of Friday was spent on trains doing the long journey from London to UCAS headquarters in Cheltenham and then back again. Ellie Russell and I were treated to a tour of UCAS headquarters, which was quite interesting having both gone through the UCAS experience ourselves. We discussed a number of issues of common interest, mainly HE admissions reform, information, advice & guidance to young people and mature students, postgraduate admissions and the new diplomas being introduced by the government.

Office day – Monday 11th

Following a cancelled meeting I had a welcome day in the office!

Satisfying Student Demand Conference – Tuesday 12th

I delivered a keynote speech which I’ll blog separately exploring the notion of students as learners, consumers and active partners in education. It was a really good conference and it was a good opportunity to catch up with various sector types from the QAA, DfES and AMSU. I got some really good feedback from the speech and my comments received a really good write up on the front page of the Times Higher Education Supplement.

Office day – Wednesday 13th

I spent the day preparing for the Education Conference I organised for the following day…

10 Years After Dearing: the Future for Higher Education – Thursday 14th

The bane of my life for a number of months finally paid off with what I thought was an excellent day looking at a number of issues facing the future of Higher Education. We managed to get a great range of speakers, including Hilary Benn MP, then Secretary of State for Education; David Willetts, Conservative Shadow Education Secretary; Sally Hunt, UCU General Secretary; Peter Williams, Chief Executive of the QAA and a number of other really excellent speakers.

Having been misrepresented by George Woods in his blog (a theme is emerging here) I would like to point a few things that contradict the erroneous charges made in his blog last month:

Cheeky George! Gemma and I will be presenting our campaign strategy for the future at the NUS Campaigns Convention on 4th September. NUS does need to change direction or face defeat, but two years in a row the hard left has advocated their strategy on the floor of NUS conference in policy debate and elections and has lost to progressive candidates who care about representing students’ unions each and every time. We take our line from the membership of NUS!

Here are some photos from the event:

As ever, I’d welcome feedback from anyone who attended. E-mail wes.streeting@nus.org.uk

Day off – Friday 15th

Because everyone needs some annual leave sometimes and despite it being near the end of the holiday calendar I had loads left!

Amicus Youth Weekend – Saturday 16th and Sunday 17th

I attended the Amicus Youth Weekend, which was an excellent opportunity to promote our protocol agreement with the TUC and to talk about how students’ unions and trade unions need to work together to protect students’ rights at work and our the promotion of our shared values within the public policy arena.

I had the great pleasure of chairing a session on fighting the BNP with Jon Cruddas MP (who at the time was making his pitch for the Labour Deputy leadership) and a speaker from Searchlight. Both speakers spoke incredibly well about the fight we face against the fascist BNP, particularly in the run up to the local elections and elections for the Greater London Assembly in 2008.

Senior Management Team residential – Monday 18th – Wednesday 20th

In between a number of other events (see below), I spent three days in Coventry with the staff and officers on the Senior Management Team reflecting on the significant organisational changes taking place within the organisation and where we were going as an organisation. To be honest, my whole month was overshadowed by what was going on in terms of staff losses and restructuring. It was an incredibly difficult process for everyone concerned and Gemma’s leadership through this difficult process particularly struck me, which has been incredible to say the least. This event was also positive as Dave Lewis and Ama Uzowuru attended for the first time and it allowed us to build them into what was taking place.

UK HE Europe Unit Conference and London Education Partnership Awards – Tuesday 19th

I ducked out of the SMT residential for an afternoon and evening, firstly to speak on a panel with HE Minister Bill Rammell, Guild HE Chair Pam Taylor and Peter Williams, Chief Executive of the Quality Assurance Agency. I spoke on a number of issues related to European HE and posed a number of policy challenges to the Minister on language provision in schools, opportunity to mobility and marketisation under the Lisbon Agenda.

I then went off to Arsenal’s swanky new home at the Emirates Stadium to speak at the awards ceremony for the London Education Partnership Awards, for which I had been a judge. It was amazing and I’ll blog my little speech some other time.

UJS Summer Reception and roundtable with Chief Rabbi – Wednesday 20th

After SMT residential, myself, Ama and Dave Lewis joined Kat Stark and others at the Union of Jewish Students’ summer reception, which we attended after a roundtable discussion with the Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks, which was incredibly inspiring. The Chief Rabbi is a particular supporter of our campaign against fees!

Office day – Thursday 21st

… Because everyone needs to catch up sometimes!

OIA Board Meeting, Reading – Friday 22nd

As regular readers of my blog will know, I sit on the board as a non-executive director of the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education. This board meeting was particularly important as we were discussing the preparation of the annual report and the appointment of the new Independent Adjudicator once Baroness Deech, the current IA, steps down.

FOSIS Conference – Saturday 23rd

Along with Ama and Kat I attended the annual conference of the Federation Of Student Islamic Societies in Nottingham, where we each delivered a speech on our work and then fielded some questions. I really enjoyed the discussion and debate and the conference also gave me an opportunity to explain – and most importantly apologise for – some deeply crass and inappropriate comments I made at an NEC meeting last year during the Lebanon conflict. Suffice to say in the heat of discussion I got carried away with my rhetoric and was pretty stupid.

At the end of the day, political representatives at every level make mistakes and whilst that doesn’t automatically excuse them, all you can ever ask is that when people make mistakes they a) recognise their mistake b) apologise and c) don’t do it again. I was very grateful to the delegates at FOSIS conference for their sympathetic hearing!

UCELNET Conference on Student Contracts – Monday 25th

I travelled to New College, Oxford for an HE sector conference on Student Contracts. I was invited because of my previous vocal opposition to the one-sided student contracts I’d seen emerging throughout the year. It was an interesting conference and provided much food for thought for a campaign I’m planning to run for the year ahead. More soon!

I also met with Martin McCluskey, new president of Oxford University Students’ Union to discuss, amongst other things, OUSU’s position on the National Student Survey and NUS Extra.

UUK Conference on Higher Education funding – Tuesday 26th

I spoke on a panel at a sector-wide conference on Sustainable Higher Education Funding for the 21st Century organised by Universities UK. The conference itself was interesting, though some of the usual suspects continued their fixation with lifting the cap. Also speaking at the conference were Lord Dearing, Bill Rammell and David Willetts.

Education Funding Campaign Meeting – Wednesday 27th

On Wednesday Gemma and I met with key staff to pull together plans for our education funding strategy in the run up to the ’09 review. I won’t go into too much detail here as we’ll be presenting plans at the NUS Campaigns Convention.

Back to back meetings – Thursday 28th

A very busy Thursday started with a meeting of the Delivery Partnership Steering Group on Admissions reform at UUK, which took up the best part of the morning. We were all slightly distracted by regular updates from various PDA’s and mobiles in the room about Gordon Brown’s first government appointments.

I then headed back to NUS HQ for a meeting of the NUS Improvement Board and then onto the leaving party for Ellie Russell and Veronica King.

That’s all for now. July and August to follow shortly!

Wes

wes.streeting@nus.org.uk

07738 477 353

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