Union Council Training

So, hopefully you’ve seen by now but I was successfully elected into the position of Union Councillor for Computer Science, so I’d like to thank everyone who voted for me and I’ll keep my promises to you – to do a good job, and keep you updated via this blog on what I’m doing as CS councillor.

Councillor training was today – a 4 hour session incorporating a mock session at the end which I unfortunately had to leave early due to other commitments.

The main thing that struck me about the session is just how complicated and in depth the Union is (they’ve franchised some of their brands out), especially compared to what I’ve had experience with before at York and Alcuin. Obviously Sheffield is a much bigger University, and a much bigger Union – over 900 members of staff and an 8 figure turnover which gives rise to the complex structures that appear to have arisen. The other main shock is the level of support given to the sabbatical officers – their salary is considerably more than their counterparts at York (although I would agree with the point raised that it’s still not representative of an equivalent job in industry!) and they appear to have considerably more staff to support them than at York – unlike last year when there was no General Manager for a good part of the year, Sheffield has a GM, a Deputy GM, and lord knows how many other full time staff to support them.

The other main difference is representation. Unlike at York where essentially everything is done by cross-campus ballot, there seems to be a great deal of appointment into positions – apparently until recently even the Council was appointed! However, there do appear to be more representative structures in place – Union Links in particular who are students who (from what I can gather) are paid to ensure that any University education (for York people reading this, education is synonymous with academic, e.g., York’s Academic Officer Charlie Leyland vs. Sheffield’s Education Officer Holly Taylor) campaigns are being carried out within the individual departments.

Another interesting thing I noted was a seeming lack of Union policy – at York last year we got 8 motions passed in a single UGM, whereas Sheffield currently only has 8 pieces of active policy overall! Presumably this is because policy is not directly synonymous to UGM motions but there are other ways of getting things done.

There was lots of other information as well – it was a genuinely useful session not just about procedure and format of council but also about the different structures and lots of corporate bumpf about the Union.

The first council meeting is on Thursday – the initial agenda includes the approval of individual objectives and aims for the sabbatical officers, and also a larger vision for the Union, discussion of how best to scrutinise officers and their code of conduct and election of councillors to sit on the Constitutional Select Committee, the USport Board and for election of the Chair and Vice Chair of Council, as well as any issues other councillors want to raise – I’m not planning on raising any myself at the first meeting

If you have any questions about any of these or have an issue you want me to raise – leave me a comment, or drop me an e-mail at computersciencecouncillor[at]shef.ac.uk

I’ll post another update after Thursday with my experiences from the meeting.