The Past Couple of weeks

Hello, again! Firstly thanks for all the feedback from my first blog, I’ve also set up another blog where I can get comments on everything I do. Feel free to look at it here.

This week’s blog is going to be on what I have been up too recently in the form of the National Postgraduate Committee Conference, the Higher Education Committee meeting, the Strong and Active Unions Committee meeting, and finally my most favourite of all meetings, NEC.

One of the first things I did when I was elected to the National Executive was to try and get more Postgraduate representation with in student unions, having been a former Post Graduate officer at Swansea University Student Union. With this in mind I asked to be the NPC liaison on the Higher Education Committee. So having been to the Conference just over a week ago it was a very useful training event. The term postgraduate is one of the broadest terms that can be used in the Higher Education Sector. Post Grads themselves stem from PGCEs to PhDs with different levels of funding and teaching methods more varied than the amount of post grad qualifications that exist. So how was it? Well I heard it can be a circus but this year I think was incredibly useful for both Education officers and also post grad officers. The training that was on offer was very good, and allowed people to understand the enormous issues that face postgraduates today. Unfortunately I had to go back to Cornwall on the Friday night so I did not attend the AGM but I would like to say good luck to Duncan who is the new General Secretary of the National Post Graduate Committee, and hopefully we can work together to achieve for post graduates. I’ve also approached the NPC to jointly write a briefing on postgraduate representation in Higher Education institutions.

Moving on to something completely different, on Monday 13^th of August we had a Strong and Active union committee meeting. Which was good, Stephen just really used it to brief the committee on what issues are going to be ahead of us in the next year. And yup you guessed it Governance was a major part.

Then we had NEC in the Afternoon, the first two motions we discussed seemed to have some relevance to campaigns that we should be a part off. These were on Age of Majority and also on the campaign of organ donation.

Then we discussed the motion called “Support Our Postal Workers,” which I whole heartily agree with although I am not a great fan of strikes. They have to be done when there is significant threat to their livelihood and profession. Also as students, I feel that the privatisation of post office is also something that could reflect our whole society, because the post office is the bastion of the community, and can be seen in any campus post office in the country!

Moving on to one of the more interesting motions and quite frankly a contentious one, many of you will remember my “No to NUS Foreign Policy” stickers, because I can just see many officers up and down the country saying “What has the NEC done now?” it’s not that I disagree with the motion its that I don’t feel that it proves relevant any more, further on, how can we justify it to the membership. I know it stems from the internationalism work that NUS has traditionally prided itself on but I know that many people just see affiliating to Stop the War as pointless. And I just want to clear something up, it only claims to be one of the largest student mobilising campaigns in the country and has more press stories than any other mass movement campaign, but a little research into came up with that this was in 2003. And has since got less and less people turning up to any of its meetings/demonstrations which just proves a further thing, demonstrations every year are not an effective way of motivating the membership!

I along with Alex Kemp also submitted a motion to allow the NEC to be able to discuss the discounts shown on the NUS Xtra card. This was in the Context of McDonalds being on the card, as well as Lloyds bank. But it didn’t get discussed due to time restraints.

Finally; Higher Education Committee, well what can I say, it was one of the most productive meeting’s I’ve been too from having a presentation from SPARQS (I’ve forgotten what it stands for) to the form of campaign we are going to take this year, we had a good group dynamic going on, and I did come up with the worst pun ever “block of tills” but you have to come to the campaigns convention to understand that.

Any way sorry about the length, I should really start referencing them and provide a word count. But I wont, I have my dissertation where I can do that.

As always email me on tom.stubbs@nus.org.uk or give me a call; 07973566325.

Thanks for reading