it's been a hard day's night, and i've been working like a dog

Happy day,

Apologies are definately in order for the length of time it has been since I last blogged. No particularly valid reason so I might as well just crack on.

The year is passing remarkably quickly. Five months in and still buzzin off the early morning starts and late night finishes.

The highlights over the last month have been ...

1. Officer roles review
I am carrying out a comprehensive blank page review of the Union Officer roles. This is a large and complex task but is a very exciting one. We have the opportunity to make sure we get the officer representation which our membership wants to have.

This process is widely engaging our membership through consultation in focus groups, questionnaires and one to one conversations.

I want to encourage you to engage in this process and make your opinion heard on your Union representatives. Please email me: mark.willoughby@sheffield.ac.uk or come and see me in person in my office (in the Sabbatical Office on Level 4 of the Union building) or if you see me in passing. I reiterate how exciting and essential this process is.

2. Representing our students:
Aldwych in Bristol
The Aldwych group is the Students' Union's of the Russell Group Universities (the top 20 research led Uni's in the country)
Emily (Education Officer) and I meet with the rest of the group monthly to further our work, the direction of which was agreed at our first meeting during the summer.
Our main two of objectives are:
1) Higher Education funding - Building towards the 2009 review of HE funding
2) National Bursary Scheme - crucial to any Widening Participation agenda is that a system of bursary allocation exists to ensure access to education for all. A National Bursary scheme is one of the proposals.
We also have 3 sub-objectives, specific to Russell Group Unis:
1) Teaching Quality
2) Postgraduate students
3) International students

At this meeting we also had John Denham MP, the Secretary of State for the Department of Universities, Innovation and Skills who we were able to lobby hard on teaching quality and bursaries.

University meetings
I've spent some of my time recently sitting on University committees, namely University Council, University Finance Committee and the Senate. These are the sovereign bodies of the University and it has been good to engage in debate in those meetings particularly around the new build proposed on the current Ranmoor site.

3. Community representation
I have recently coordinated the Sshh campaign, which took the more proactive approach of going directly to students in the residences with the message of respecting your fellow residents and the local surrounding community in the levels of noise made. Big thanks to James Gould for helping run this.

I'm also beginning the process, alongside Tom Bramall, of working with the University to draw up a Community Strategy. This is very much in the early stages, so not much to report here.

4. NUS Extraordinary Conference
The NUS (National Union of Students) was mandated at the 2007 Annual Conference to carry out a long overdue reform of its governance. For too long our national union has been ineffective and inefficient. It has failed to fight and win for students on a plethora of issues as it has spent its time on internal squabbles and relatively insignificant policy debates. The chance now exists to change that.

The consequences of these proposed changes for students could be huge. They will make the NUS easier for normal students to understand and get involved in. They will make the organisation more transparent and more democratic, and most importantly of all, they will mean that we have a chance of winning the fees debate in 2009/10.

The future of our National student movement depends upon this governance reform going through and I have been working hard to ensure this happens.

An Extraordinary Conference is being held next Tuesday 4th December and we are sending a delegation of 10 people to this Conference to engage in the debate. It should be quite a giggle.

Check out the following site for info on the conference and the proposed reform: http://www.officeronline.co.uk//events/nationalevents/274911.aspx

This is all from me for now.
I hope to resume regular blogging from now on, so watch this space...

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