Hi all, time to update you all on the second half of October and first half of November.

Since last council I have had so much on it is impossible to cover it all but i will go through some of the highlights.

• Senior staff conference
  • I spent a day with senior leaders of the university discussing challenges coming up and how we can create a better connection between different areas in our university to provide students with a better experience.

• Supporting student demonstrations
  • Whilst the war in israel and palestine continues, I have been working closely with students wishing to hold demonstrations to ensure that everyone is kept safe and feels able to take part in demonstrations whilst also ensuring students with opposing view points do not feel unwelcome from campus.

• Training new student staff member
  • To assist with the delivery of student priorities, the team have taken on a student staff member who assists with day to day tasks and data gathering. As part of their induction I delivered basic training in to what we do as a team and how they are able to help.

• Meeting the brilliant club
  • I met with the CEO of the brilliant club which is a project to help students from disadvantaged backgrounds into higher education. Part of this includes paid opportunities for our PGR students to mentor.

• Annual Student Celebration meetings
  • I have spent time meeting with Reeves and external companies to consider what options are available for us to ensure that students get the celebration that they deserve. Once we have made decent progress we will be looking forward to having some students involved as it progresses further.

• SU Fireworks
  • A lot of this months work went into delivering the SU fireworks display and the re-scheduling of the event. Eventually we were able to put on the display and we are now taking time to evaluate what we can change for next time as well as preparing for our winter events.

• Kings Award
  • Finally I have been speaking with the media about the amazing achievement of the V team at the SU which was awarded the Kings award for volunteering. I spoke about what it means to students to be able to be involved in helping out the community and how important it is that students recognise this as their award that they earned through their hard work.

Hopefully from this you can see how busy I have been this month. I am sorry I cannot attend council next week but if you have any questions please reach out and I am happy to answer them.