With the arrival of September I knew that we’d arrived on the slippery slope to Christmas where everything moves so fast your feet barely touch the ground. This year was no exception.

One of the benefits of doing a second year as a fulltime officer is that it allows you to better anticipate the pressure points and peak periods during your year in office. It doesn’t make the job any less challenging, but it does mean you can better plan for it. With the arrival of September I knew that we’d arrived on the slippery slope to Christmas where everything moves so fast your feet barely touch the ground. This year was no exception.

The first week started on Monday 3 September with a senior management team meeting followed by a meeting of the NEC, at which Gemma and I presented the three year strategy for the HE funding campaign. Feedback from the NEC was incredibly constructive and I’m grateful to the NEC for their patience in receiving the strategy at fairly short notice, after the disruption caused to our planning cycle by recent significant changes to NUS HQ. Following the meeting Gemma and I sat down to prepare our speech for the campaigns convention the next day which you can read elsewhere on my blog. I was up at the crack of dawn the next day to prepare for the day’s events, including the ‘Edumart’ supermarket creep stall to promote the education campaign this year –‘Unchartered Territory’ - opposing student contracts and promoting students’ rights charters on every campus. As well as an overview of the HSBC campaign I ran with Ama, I also helped run a well-attended workshop to allow delegates to feed directly into the national students’ rights charter I am currently working on. Can I say a massive thanks to NEC members who helped run the stall on the day of the convention, particularly Ben Gray and Tom Stubbs and huge thanks also to Ben Pringle and Katie Curtis who put a lot of time into helping prepare materials for the day itself.

On Wednesday 5 I attended the ULU anti-semitism training day along with Bubble and Katie Curtis. Although attendance wasn’t what it could have been, because of preparation for freshers’ season, it was a really good initiative and I’d encourage other students’ unions to work with organisations like the Union of Jewish Students and the Federation of Student Islamic Societies to look at combating religious intolerance and rising anti-semitism and islamophobia in colleges and on campuses.

Thursday 6 saw myself and Katie Curtis attend the student governors’ training day, organised by the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education, where I delivered a presentation on how to tackle the tensions between being corporate responsibility for the institution and effectively representing students. If anyone has any problems or issues that arise throughout the year, don’t hesitate to get in touch . Similarly, if there are issues coming up on the governing body that have a national slant or impact, let me know as it helps me to better represent you nationally at a sector level. My week ended on Friday 7 when I attended a breakfast seminar organised by Uniaid on part-time students and spent a day in the office catching up on stuff, followed by a weekend with a rotten cold!

The second week of September was similarly busy. It started with an all staff meeting on Monday 10 which I attended with Gemma to answer questions on the Learner Voice strategy I have been developing with Duncan Cockburn from SPARQS. On Tuesday 11 I went to Reading to attend the inaugural meeting of Unions 94 - the new group for students’ unions of the 1994 Group. After opening the event with Ben Elgar, the Reading Chief Executive, I took part in discussions for the remainder of the day, advised on some projects and presided over the election of the chair and secretary of Unions 94. Congratulations Aaron Porter from Leicester and Ashley Petrons from Exeter respectively!

The next morning I was back in London first thing for the press launch of the National Student Survey data. I was part of the panel at the press conference alongside Professor David Eastwood (Chief Executive, HEFCE), Professor Michael Arthur (Leeds VC and Chair of the NSS Steering Group) and the new Minister for Quality Lord Triesman. I used the opportunity to flag up my ongoing concerns about the significantly lower scores for feedback and assessment, which managed to attract a fair bit of coverage and to once again welcome The Times’ question about whether or not a question on value for money would be added. I then went down to Brighton for the Endsleigh Insurance dinner at the TUC (http://www.tuc.org.uk/)’s annual gathering.

On Thursday 13, I led an event at King’s College, London for students’ unions undertaking institutional audits during the next year or so. I am particularly grateful to Derfel Owen and Jane Holt from the QAA for their contributions to the day and Aiden Grills from Leeds University Union for his plenary and workshop. Overall feedback demonstrated that the day had been a success, though since it’s the first event we’ve held as part of the new audit cycle we’ll be building in the feedback we received to improve our next event. Friday 14 was spent in the office and on Sunday 16 I joined the NUS delegation to the Protect Darfur demonstration as part of the day of global action. Massive congratulations must go to Society and Citizenship co-convenors Adam McNicholas and Kat Stark for their work in building for the demo, not to mention our very own Stephen Brown (http://www.officeronline.co.uk/blogs/stephenbrown/) who spoke on behalf of NUS.

During the last week before my part in the political conference season began, I did a mammoth trip from Leicester, where I had been speaking at the University of Leicester’s annual teaching enhancement forum on the Learner Voice, down to Canterbury where I spoke at the Canterbury Christ Church Students’ Union's freshers’ welcome event. There was a great turnout and excellent campaigning speeches from President Becci Heard and Caroline Wilkes, the Education and Welfare Officer at Christ Church. I also visited Kent Union as they were in the middle of their freshers’ week and had just achieved a Guiness world record for the biggest ever ‘mass robot dance’! Bizarre – but well down to Archie and the gang for this world triumph!

After a doctors’ appointment and some work at home on Tuesday 18, I went down to Worcester for the Worcester College of Technology’s freshers’ fair on Wednesday 19. It was an incredibly well organised, well-attended event with loads of societies and organisations represented. I really enjoyed it and managed to get loads of students signing up for more information about becoming a course rep, plugging the exec elections and promoting NUS Extra. Afterwards I shot straight back to London for the HE Academy’s national teaching fellowship awards as I am a panel member. It was a good opportunity to catch up with Professor Rick Trainor, the new president of Universities UK as well as a number of other key figures from around the HE sector. It was also a good opportunity to hatch a plot with some of the principals and vice chancellors that attended. I’m not going to give anything away now, but I’ll be back with more information about a challenge we’ll be launching later in the year hopefully!

Thursday 20 was a pretty busy day. I was responding to some press attention off the back of a Sutton Trust report about access to some of Britain’s elite institutions, including a pretty stern exchange between myself and a private school head teacher on News 24. Every time the bias in UK admissions towards independent schools is revealed, the spinning jenny’s of the body representing their head teachers try and shut it down whilst whinging any time someone tries to do something about it. I might blog about this in more detail if I get time! I also attended a meeting of the heads of Guild HE institutions at Guild HE Council where I talked about the Learner Voice, equitably funding higher education, widening participation and retention, student ‘consumerism’ and so-called Mickey Mouse degrees and how we could tackle this term effectively in the media.

Friday began at the crack of dawn when the BBC sent a taxi for me at 7am to appear on the Today programme on Radio 4 to talk about university league tables. At the end, I was sad enough to get a photo with John Humphreys and Sarah Montague for posterity! Later that day, Ama and I went to HSBC headquarters in Canary Wharf to discuss the fallout from our recent campaign, how we could help them develop their student and graduate accounts and how they might support some of our wider work on the student experience and student finance. It was a productive meeting and we’ll be having another shortly and obviously keep you posted!

Wes

wes.streeting@nus.org.uk

07738 477 353

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