About the conference

This week four of the sabbatical officers went to NUS Zones Conference in Leeds. At this conference NUS holds different workshops to help sabbatical officers find resources and other student unions to help them with their priorities. So for example because many of my priorities fall under the umbrella of wellbeing, I attended some of the Welfare Zone workshops. However if there was a workshop in a different zone that I wanted to attend I could pop along to that one.

As well as Zone workshops there was accountability sessions for the NUS Officers. The NUS officers are basically like your USSU officers but on a national scale. At zones conference student officers are welcomed to submit questions to the different officers and ask about updates and plans for future projects.

What Can I bring back to Salford?

Wellbeing:

In the Wellbeing workshops I learnt loads of different things which the NUS are working and ideas that would be helpful to consider when working on future campaigns.

* BME Mental Health - NUS are creating a BME mental health working group. I want to influence our University to make their mental health services more accessible. I am really excited to see the outcome of this group and implement the recommendations to our university and Rafiki.

* Post Graduate Students and their mental health – Post grad students seem to be completely forgotten about at University. Eva (NUS Welfare officer) is wanting to find what support works for these students. Similar to the BME mental health, I want to create services that are more accessible to students studying post graduate courses.

* Eva also encouraged us to expand who we talk to. One of the recommendations is for the students with disabilities officer to have a bigger presence with mental health campaigns. Therefore I will be working closer with the Community & Welfare and the students with disabilities voluntary officers throughout the year.

* NUS are continuing to support the students with 2 GPs agenda. I would love to be involved with this as I struggled to decipher between where I should have my GP.

Other wellbeing workshops were targeted to more specific topics. The workshops encouraged us to debate with other officers and have in-depth conversations about Welfare. One of the debating topics was about Wellbeing vs Counselling support. Salford Students’ Union has created and opened Rafiki, the mental health drop in centre with peer to peer support. We are grateful for the support that the University has given us, especially the Wellbeing services. However the argument we had within the workshop was around making sure the University don’t think that Rafiki will solve everything. Rafiki will help with a certain type of issue but the counselling services are still stretched and have a lack of resource. Whilst Rafiki is useful in helping the services we now need to look towards areas that also need help.

Another debate that really affected me as a sabbatical officer was the argument around Nursing and Health students that are too afraid to ask and seek help for their mental health because they are too scared about going to fitness to practices. It is important that we promote the message that asking for help when studying a health course is okay. Leaving everything bottled up and not seeking for help is more damaging than seeking support. I would love to focus on Health students and spread the message that it is okay to not be okay, especially with such an intense and time consuming course.

I attended a Society and Citizenship zone workshop about being an active citizen. I wasn’t sure what to expect or what the session was about. I like to go to workshops on topics that I don’t know much about to learn about students and topics I don’t understand to gain that knowledge. This session really showed me how valuable the Student leadership conference is. The skills people learn from the conference can really help students become a more active citizen and can help make a difference. The session shows how students can be an active citizen through volunteering, being involved with the students’ union and the democracy within the union and keeping up to date with local and global issues. One of the things I would like to look into is trying to get newspapers for the café in Atmosphere, both local and global in order to keep students up to date with news.

The other workshop I attended was about Car parking in the union development zone. I met with another Union who was having the same problem that we are facing at Salford. I have their details and we are going to share ideas about how we can help solve the problem. Some that we thought about was park and ride and utilising the 50, bursaries and a bike doctor.

Finally was accountability I asked Eva about how the Universities Minister has been talking about making mental health a priority and her response to this. She said “the minister should go back to his party and look towards NUS cuts”, it is all well and good fixing counselling services and wellbeing issues that arise in Universities but what happens when students leave university and struggle to access services from the NHS because of the cuts that they are facing. She also thinks that the minister might have skewed ideas about what a student is, assuming that it is the typical stereotype of an 18 year old leaving home, forgetting about mature students, commuting, parents and careers, etc.

I really enjoyed the conference and feel like I can help Salford students with the things that I learned in Leeds.

If you have any questions about the conference please email E.Voss-Bevan@salford.ac.uk