SEANUS!

Yesterday I met with the rest of the SEANUS (South East Area NUS) Executive and we made decisions that affect 150,000 students. How very exciting and incredibly scary!

A lot of the focus of the 4 hour meeting was of course the planning of the year and the campaigns that we will be running. SEANUS is primarily a campaigning body – concerned with improving the life of students across the South East of England.

The main campaign for the year is on South East Weighting – it costs almost as much to live in the South East as it does in London and many students may consider the Northern Universities more favourably because of this, especially post-graduates. We want to see Universities in the SE prosper, and a greater number of students from less well off families being able to access Higher Education. This campaign is going to be a long one and so the primary focus at the moment is researching the discrepancies between regions to move towards a point of action later in the year or maybe even later. We’re confident we can win on this but that means preparation.

SEANUS are encouraging institutions within the area to consider their support of International Students, beginning with a survey of English language Support and campaign to make sure institutions are investing in it.

The Executive are also investigating Rights at Work, supporting the NUS’ Student Activities campaign and also Fairtrade and ethical practices within Students Unions. For this last campaign I’ve been asked to produce a guide to ethical consumerism within Students Unions, something I’m passionate about as those of you who know me will recognise.

I submitted a suggestion that the Executive look at doing some co-ordinated days of action across the region to encourage students and groups to work with each other in different institutions. This fed really nicely into an item from Bubble – SEANUS convenor – about doing a co-ordinated RAGs day. A member of the Exec will be getting in touch with RAGs groups in the area to make decisions about this – but the day should appear between the 25^th November (a day of action opposing violence against women) and 1^st December (World AIDS day).

We’re hoping to increase the number of Further Education Institutions with active student representation and are co-ordinating this with Ellie Russell, NUS’ Vice-President of Further Education (see previous post about NUS campaigns for how cool I think she is).

The SEANUS website needs updating and executive members have been directed to do this. We’re hoping to elect representatives for Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual students, Students with Disabilities and Further Education students at the next SEANUS Council at the end of October.

The other piece of ‘regional housekeeping’ was that of expenses. We decided that for the moment at least Sabbatical Officer on SEANUS should pay their own travel while other students who don’t get a wage will have all expenses paid.

We discussed the decision within the NEC to hold a National Demonstration and its implications. There’s a bit of a divide within the movement as to whether the finances of the organisation could allow such an event, but equally it’s important for student rights to be defended and our voice to be heard. We also chatted about the international students festival and the consensus seemed to be that we agreed with it in principal but the way the organisers were suggesting involvement (paying £1000!) and went about telling people about it was not entirely well received.

A lot of this stuff was about planning and researching and so may not seem very ‘sexy’. It is important that we know our facts and can make our campaigns work, and that does mean lots of preparation and getting things right. I have high hopes for the year ahead and for the success of SEANUS.