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Action Through Advocacy 2006

Dear all

The course was been designed to support both education and welfare officers in students’ unions. In addition to the sessions covered on the course, participants took away a useful self-learning toolkit, The Advocate’s Handbook, which can be used to further develop skills as an advocate back in students’ unions.

Examples of the skills that this tool supports are listening, negotiation and dealing with casework. The course itself focussed on issues, campaigns and the wider roles of these two officers as advocates.

Day One

Day one was primarily about setting the scene and context for the rest of the course. Once the pleasantries and introductions were out of the way, delegates ran through the following:

Principles of advocacy and representation
History of student representation
A European perspective
Working in a union
Building support, from both students and representatives

Day Two

Once the scene for their roles was set on day one, participants got the opportunity to think about how they were going to make a difference in their unions through campaigning. They would then go on to consider how they were going to run campaigns and find out about the external agencies that are involved with institutional change.

Topics discussed in day two are as follows:-

Creating change through being an advocate
An introduction to change campaigns
Working on change campaigns

Campaigns Workshops:

Trade unions and students
Campaigning for academic regulation change
Sexual and reproductive health
Using the National Student Survey to campaign for change
Politics in the students’ union

Workshops:

Office of Independent Adjudicator
Quality and standards
Unipol
Liberation and equality
Supporting course representatives
Office for Fair Access
Student mental health
Campaigning with campaign volunteers

Day Three

Day three continued where day two ended, with more workshops. We then started to look at how participants could use the information that they gathered to work within their own institutions to make change. This was all pulled together with some final essential action information and the opportunity to ask questions before moving onto the output exercise.

Topics covered in day three are: