Report on First Term as Sabbatical Officer (Vice President- Student Voice)
In this report I will be summarising my experience as a sabbatical officer, including what I have done so far in terms of my manifesto goals, my achievements, and my plans for the rest of the year.
As the first ever Student Voice Officer, a large portion of my time in office has been focused on definition and structure. My manifesto was centred on two ideas:
· Making the academic representatives and residential assistants more effective, and
· Emphasising and creating platforms for student conversation and feedback.
In the role, I have come to understand that the student voice is divided into three core principles: student feedback, student engagement and student representation. I have worked towards aligning my manifesto with these principles.
With the Academic Reps, over the past term I have achieved a lot in terms of making their roles more effective. This has required me to build from the ground up. I have formed working relationships with the various faculty administrative staff. Doing so allows me to monitor the academic reps and make sure they are present in meetings where they should be present and that they are being supported at the faculty level. I have also pushed for student representation at the various faculty boards, and I am glad to say that there is now at least one student representative on every faculty board. A personal favourite victory is the creation of the rep hub, which is a space that contains the (now) online training for reps, as well as the rep handbook, and other bits to make them more visible and effective.
The Residential Assistants have posed a unique challenge because they have not traditionally sat within the SU. I approached this with a view of building a working relationship with the accommodation team, to jointly coordinate the residential assistants, and then eventually transition back to the accommodation having more control over the RAs and the SU providing support and student facing benefits. Among the victories in this area, include the creation of RA emails, and establishing a student activity budget (in collaboration with the VP- Student Activities) for the benefit of the students in the halls of residence.
It has not all been rosy, I must admit. One regret I have so far is that I have only been up to the Crewe campus twice in the last term. I plan to rectify this by visiting Crewe a lot more over the rest of the year and hosting one of the Students’ Representative Council meetings at Crewe.
My biggest goal for the rest of the year is the creation of student communities. The idea being to facilitate conversation among students with shared experiences and thus build a different type of engagement with the student body.
I am excited to be working as a sabbatical, every day is exciting and different. I am confident that at the end of the year, we would have achieved a lot.