The priorities will probably be:
- Student engagement with the Student Rep Scheme
- Recruiting and developing our Student Reps
- Reporting structures (Making sure that something happens when Student Reps raise a concern)
- Sharing best practice
A good strategy is very important because it can provide a direction for the scheme over the next few years. Hopefully we will have a draft together by June.
How do you want to see the Student Rep Scheme improving? Give your ideas as a comment or email me t.marley@guild.bham.ac.uk
5 comments:
It is a shame you didn't do this at the start of the year like you promised.
June= too little too late for students in my constituency who have been let down by a shocking student rep system
This 'new strategy' seems to be exactly the same as what the scheme should do at the moment.
What happened to getting all of the names up on the Guild website, and making email address publication a stipulation for all student reps; after all how on earth are people meant to contact them.
Also, you have said what the Uni is doing, but what are you doing Mr Marley? How concerned are you?
Thanks for you feedback on the Student Rep Scheme.
To the first anonymous poster:
1.I didn't 'promise to do this at the start of the year' like you claim. 2009 was the last year in the previous improvement strategy and it was important that we evaluated where the scheme currently was before creating a new strategy. Nobody for one minute thinks Student Reps are perfect, but the system is very diverse.
2. It would be nice to know what school you are in because then I can look into why you feel you have been let down. Student Reps do underperform in some schools, and do very well in others.
To the second poster:
1. I agree with your first point, we want the strategy to be getting the Student Reps to what we want them to be doing anyway.
2. With regards to the Rep names online, many of them currently. Unfortunately many names are not online because those individuals did not consent for this. I agree with you that all names should go online and Student Reps should not be able to opt-out. Therefore that is something that will be rectified in October after the elections.
Also, there's no real reason to call me Mr Marley. We're all friends here - you can call me Tom. I can call you...?
Finally I am 'concerned' about Student Reps. That's why we have been working to improve the training so that more Reps then ever before are trained, have worked closely with Staff Liasion Contacts to ensure they know how to run the scheme, and I ahve also run College Student Rep forums. It's not all worked perfectly, though I can hold my head up that it's slightly better then it was 12 months ago and we are going in the right direction.
Thanks for your constructive comments.
can i ask you about the 'elections' that you mentioned...
in quite a few schools no elections take place and students are merely invited to attend a meeting, once they do this they become student reps
are elections compulsory, and if so, should they be as we know how crap the turnouts are in guild councillor elections
ta
Elections are compulsory, if you look at the policy which I linked to in the original post you will see all schools are expected to run elections for their Student Reps.
So in short we should be expecting every school to elect their Student Reps. This year we have tried to innovate and been helping some schools trial voting via email.
In many schools the scenario which you descibe is still the case and this is not good enough. If you email me to let me know where you think there are particular problems I can work to rectify them.
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