Conferences

I've spent most of the last week in the midlands at conferences.

The first was the Students' Unions Evaluations Initiative (SUEI) conference on Tuesday in Birmingham. SUEI is a bit like ofsted for Students' Unions. It assesses Students' Unions using set criteria and indicates areas for continuous improvement. It will help us identify areas that we do well and also shows us the areas that we need to improve. The conference was really useful as it provided an opportunity to see what other SU's are doing - we came away with a lot of new ideas! We're being assessed for SUEI later in the year - I'll keep you posted on our progress. If you want to find out more about SUEI go here: http://www.suei.co.uk

My second conference was the NUS Higher Education Conference in Coventry. Again this was really useful, I went with Vicky, our VP Education and Richard, our Chief Executive.

Again the conference provided lots of opportunity to learn about the work that other SU's are doing. It also gave us the chance to be further informed about the current debates happening within higher education, such as improving teaching and learning and higher education funding.

After an impassioned, if slightly alcohol fueled speach by NUS president Wes Streeting I have become re-energised about the 'Broke and Broken' campaign which is calling on the UK government to thoroughly review the current fudning model which is 'broken' and which is leaving students 'broke'. There is a national lobby of parliment at the end of term and I'm determinded that Reading will be well represented!

I also went to an interesting session about student parents and thier expereince in Higher Education - one of the things I talked about in my manifesto was helping student parents - we've got a new nursery being opened soon, but we still need to do more to help these students. If you have any ideas then get in touch, leave a comment or email me .

I'm off the the NUS Extraordinary conference on tuesday - this will hopefully see the ratification of the new NUS constitution that will make our National Union the dynamic campaigning organisation that we need.

As ever get in touch if you have any comments about the union, the university or life in general .You can get my email address from the notice boards :)
Your President,
Shivam