Last week saw the most important change in the Students' Union since beginning my post. Myself and the other officers have been busy pulling apart the current structure of the SU and working hard to see how best we can fairly represent students from each site at UCA. After much thought, discussion, feedback, drafts and re-drafts, we arrived at the beginning of January with a proposal for a brand new constitution to present to all you students to pass by calling a referendum last week. To sum up the main change - currently there are 4 sabbatical officers elected across the 5 sites, with each officer responsible for multiple campuses. Unfortunately, this means that not every campus can be represented by a student officer who studied at their site. This doesn't mean a campus won't have officers working for them but sadly for Epsom this year, there is no officer based full-time on their site due to having 4 officers and 5 campuses. When taking into account that Epsom is the largest campus in terms of student numbers, they have sorely missed out this year from not having an officer who is based there and who understands the campus and its students. This is not fair representation. If the current structure was still in place for the coming elections, there would again be the possibility of one campus electing 3 officers, 1 from another campus, leaving 2 campuses without representation from their own students.
BUT - what we have proposed to you is for each campus to vote their own sabbatical officer to represent just the students from that site, based full time with them. We think this is vital for there to be a strong SU presence at each campus with officers who can effectively represent the student body. This means 5 officers, less travel expenses and better representation for you.
We were pleased to see this proposal met with such strong support last week when we put this up for the student vote. What we needed to pass the constitution was for 2% of the student population to vote on this change and from that 2%, for over 50% to vote in favour of the change. What we in fact managed to achieve, was well over 10% of the student population taking part in the vote, with 98.7% of you in agreement to pass the new constitution. That's 717 students actively changing their Students' Union for the good. This is a great victory for us and for you students. Well done!
On a side note - alongside the referendum, I was also elected to represent UCA along with Lee Gavin at the NUS conference next month where we will be in a position to vote on national policies and to elect the National Students' Union Presidents and Vice Presidents. Thanks for your support!
