Four Day Away-Training with NUS

This HOPmail includes:

• The National Union of Students
• What did the course involve?
• The National Demo

The National Union of Students (NUS)

Last week, I spent four days at Bristol UWE with the NUS on a training course for sabbatical officers! It was a great opportunity to meet other union presidents from around the country and compare how other unions are run. For example, at some unions, sudents run as a "slate"-where they run for the exec as a group and you can vote for them as a "group" instead of as individuals! And at some unions they just run to be on the exec, not even for a particular position! All very different!

The NUS represent students nationally. You may very well have seen Aaron Porter, the NUS President, on television before! They fight for students right, tuition fees and all the issues surrounding higher education. Some unions get more involved in the national issues than others.

What did the course involve?

This was an intense four-day course that involved public speaking training, workig out your mission for the year, how to effectively influence those in power (ie the university!) as well as understanding student representation.

I have taken so much away from this course-not only in terms of what I was taught-but seeing just how genuinely amazing our students union is! I felt so proud to be there representing Loughborough, and the amount of other union sabbaticals who wanted to talk to me about what we do here was amazing. We should all be very proud of what we have here.

The National Demo

As I am sure many of you have seen in the press, there are many issues surrounding higher education at the moment. Many universities will seriously suffer from cuts from the government and so the NUS, and many unions, are getting strongly involved in fighting the cuts to universities. On Wednesday the 10th of November there is a student demonstration happening outside the Houses of Parliament to fight the cause!

As your president, I want to know if this is something YOU want to get involved in?

Do you think Loughborough should be down there too having its say?

Do we have a responsibility to future Loughborough students?

I want to hear YOUR views so leave some comments.

We will holding an information stall about it at our freshers bazaar so keep looking out for news.

And if you are particularly interested, why not find out some more information?

To find out more click here...