Hello hello. And welcome to my whistle-stop tour of October. I’ve been promising for ages to get this blog up to date and late one night in NUS headquarters I’m determined to do it!

October began with Conservative Party Conference, which I’ve covered here. On Thursday 4 October, I spoke at a conference organised by the Council for Industry in Higher Education on internationalising higher education. I led a workshop discussion on internationalising the student experience, focussing on the international student experience as well as broader issues around curriculum, accommodation, the students’ union, community relations and student mobility abroad. At the conference, CIHE launched a new report, ‘Global Horizons for UK Universities’, which you might want to read here. After the conference, I went over to HEFCE’s annual reception with Gemma Tumelty.

Friday 5 October consisted of back-to-back meetings at NUS HQ: first of the FE sub-committee of the NEC, then a joint HE/FE committee meeting and then a meeting of the NUS Improvement Board, which I have been sitting on with Gemma and Stephen since we began the whole process of reforming NUS. A combination of party conferences and meetings in and around the office meant that a good part of the weekend was spent catching up on emails and the like.

Regular readers and attendees at various NUS events will know that I’ve been working hard to develop the NUS’ Learner Voice strategy and the Learner Voice strand of our new plans (which will be published fully in the new year). On Monday 8 October I travelled to Gloucester for a meeting at the QAA with other sector partners including the HE Academy, NPC, Guild HE and Universities UK to talk about our respective plans for learner engagement and how we could better coordinate our energies. The meeting was incredibly productive and will hopefully lead to a regular and coordinated series of multilaterals to coordinate our efforts.

Tuesday 9 October was the first opportunity for the National Executive Committee to meet to receive the report from the Governance Steering Group on the future governance of NUS! This was followed by a meeting on the 16 October where we formally endorsed the white paper on the future governance of NUS. This was passed overwhelmingly by those NEC members present and represented an unprecedented degree of consensus across the political spectrum, including members of Labour Students, Liberal Democrat Youth and Students, Conservative Future, Organised Independents and NEC members with no political grouping whatsoever. It also included almost every liberation campaign representative and the leaders of each of the NUS nations. I’m convinced that the white paper is the right way forward for our national union and will blog separately about what this means for students and students’ unions.

Wednesday 10 was spent being ill but I did manage to make it in on Thursday 11 for meetings with Sean Mackney, Deputy Chief Executive of the Higher Education Academy, to discuss the Academy’s strategic planning and then with Alice Hynes, Chief Executive of Guild HE, to discuss joint areas of work as outlined in my Report and Plan. Friday 12 was also spent in NUS HQ, with the exception of an introductory meeting with officials at the new Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills.

My weekend was cut short, but I’m not complaining as I had a great time at York University Students’ Union freshers’ fair, where I was also interviewed for an ITV 1 documentary about debt. Special thanks to Ciaran Norris from the Block of 12 for coming up to give me a hand at short notice!

The following week (w/c 15 October) was a similar haze of meetings and rare time in the office.

NUS governance reforms continued to be a big theme (and will be until my December blog and even then I think will be going well into 2008!) starting with the Strategic Conversation held in Coventry on the 22 and 23 October. In addition to leading a workshop on the Learner Voice, I took part in Q&A’s on the NEC’s proposals and spent time generally gathering feedback from the participants! On 24 I led the Quality Takes Time event we held jointly with the QAA and ran a consultation about the future of the programme. On Thursday 25 I attended a meeting of the National Student Survey steering group at which we received a briefing about the brand new Unistats website (now online!) and on Friday 26 I attended the FE Campaigns Convention in London before heading up to the Aldwych Group meeting in Birmingham to talk about… can you guess? … Yes, NUS governance reform!

October came to an end with an exciting meeting with HSBC on Monday 29 October and a senior management team meeting on 31.

That’s all for October. I’ll be back shortly with November’s instalment of my whereabouts activities and – invariably – my governance reform ramblings!

Wes

wes.streeting@nus.org.uk

07738 477 353

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