Last week seems to have flown right passed us. Rochelle, Beth, Rich and myself all had a busy week settling into our new roles, meeting staff, planning for the year ahead and rearranging the officers space in Stoke.
The week started with a planning session which took up the majority of Monday afternoon where the four of us looked at what we would like to achieve in the first 100 days of our term in office. Some of the outcomes revolve around ensuring that there is consistency throughout each faculty regarding, contact with tutors, feedback and timetabling, more support to ensure that we can give more help to students to put events on in our venues and tackling quality of living conditions.
Richard delivered a session for the team looking into the demographics of our students. It may surprise many of you but a massive 66% of our students at this University are over the age of 22 which is over 14,000, meaning that we are not your stereotypical University.
Finally on Friday, I attended my final Sports Management Board of the year with Beth who will be taking my place from now on. Sports Management Board brings key individuals from the University, Students' Union and Sassot (Sport across Staffordshire and Stoke on Trent) with a shared interest in sport. We asked the question to the board that what is sport at Staffordshire University and some of the discussions were very interesting regarding BUCS, recreational, Active Universities and coaching and I know Beth is interested to hear what your suggestions are so please tweet her
@SUSU_Beth or
@Teamstaffs.
This week we start with a day in Stafford with a meeting to look at the campaigns that we would like to run over the course of the year to raise awareness and create change. Some of the campaigns that we are looking at running will reflect the manifesto's that we were elected on back in March, some will be issues that come up during the year and some of them will be driven by students and if you would like more information on how you can lead a campaign through the Students' Union please drop me an email (
g.richardson@staffs.ac.uk).
On Tuesday, Beth is meeting with the University and Sport England in the morning about potential partnerships with National Governing Bodies which is an outcome from the work through the Sports Management Board. In the afternoon Richard and myself are meeting with University and SU marketing teams to decide on how to communicate the new Student Charter which is an area of work led by Jamie during the last six months.
Wednesday and Thursday we will be welcoming the officers to Stoke from De Montfort, Liverpool John Moore, Liverpool Hope, Wolverhampton and Birmingham City for the first of several collaborative training sessions with each Union hosting one. I am very excited that we are all working together to deliver these sessions and I hope this will lead to the officer teams working closely together and sharing resources over the course of the year.
The week ends with a photo shoot so we can have our life size boards, posters, banners and website produced so we can be more visual and inform you on a daily basis of what we are doing. The team then will have our regular team meeting, before myself and Richard meet with our marketing team to discuss the website and it's design.
Hope everyone has a fantastic week.
Gary
Saffordshire University Students' Union President