► TAKE A LOOK INSIDE
► Login
► HELP ON UNIVERSITY OF CUMBRIA SU
► SEARCH UNIVERSITY OF CUMBRIA SU
► UNIVERSITY OF CUMBRIA SU POLL
Advertise
University of Cumbria Students Union has various student marketing and student advertising tools that can promote your services direct to our students.
For all our student
marketing & advertising opportunities click the media pack button.
► Sabbatical Officers
Sabbatical Officer roles in the New Structure
The Union Structure Panel asked some simple questions when it came to looking at what the best spread of paid full time (Sabbatical) officials were for our students. They included:
Who are our students now and where are they based?
What do they want their paid student leaders to be focussing on?
What is the best structure to allow the Sabbaticals to inspire and lead any unpaid or volunteer Union officials or activists?
What are the core purposes that only a Student Union can fulfil for its members?
Consequently the first year or so of the Restructure process was spent seeking answers from students to these questions and researching what options were available. As this process continued we also audited our current structure of one Cross-Campus President and four campus based Vice Presidents and this threw up some more questions as to whether focusing on campus based representation was still the ideal approach for the University of Cumbria in 2010. Some of the potential issues that were identified were:
A growing number of our students do not identify as belonging to the campus community of any one of the ‘major sites’ (which are traditionally defined as Ambleside, Carlisle,
Current Vice Presidents have very open ended role descriptions, making it difficult for them to set goals or signpost successes for their students. In the past the lack of definition for these roles has created difficulties for holders of the post in defining their purpose.
With no role or goal specific positions (aside from President) the Union is severely limited in its ability to have student lead developmental projects that run over more than one year term of office. Although individual officers may pick up lead responsibility to work on certain projects as long as their primary purpose is to represent local constituencies there is no guarantee that their successor will share the same interest in the project.
The recommendations of the Structure Panel are that a new and markedly different approach to deployment of Sabbatical officials is needed to meet the needs of a diverse and more geographically decentralised membership. The focus of representative resources on the main sites will probably only become more problematic as the recent ‘mothballing’ of Ambleside illustrates, and given the fact that a majority of students do not see themselves as being members of any given campus community a change is needed to try and engage with more students.
The proposal is create role-specific full time Sabbatical positions with clearly defined leadership roles that apply equally to all students and activists no matter where they may be based and to mix them with some part-time paid representation positions at the three remaining large campuses to provide that continuity of local support. The break down of the roles is as follows:
|
FULL TIME PAID POSITIONS |
PART TIME PAID POSITIONS |
|
|
Sabbatical Title |
Purpose |
|
|
Representation Sabbatical (aka the President) |
University & external liaison, ‘senior’ sabbatical, governance, democracy, discipline. |
|
|
Union Community Sabbatical |
Internal communication, campus engagement, local representation, Inclusion, works with Bars Dept. Local community relations |
|
|
Student Life Sabbatical |
Activities, welfare, safety issues, student groups & teams, health, & wellbeing. LISS & Facilities Management liaison. |
Penrith Campus Representative |
|
Academic Sabbatical |
Educational standards and provision, academic campaigns, faculty & course representation. Senior UoC academic committees |
|
The proposed structure has many significant changes from the current one:
a) The President position is replaced in name by the Representation Sabbatical and essentially divides the role of the President into two elements, that of a senior element who has responsibility for the inwards (University and SU Structures) facing lead representative role which in this case is realised by the Representation Leader role, and the outwards public and student/campus facing lead representative role which is covered by the Union Community Leader position.
b) A clear commitment to a campaigning culture with the twin activist leader Sabbatical roles of Academic and Student Life. The Academic Sabbatical reflects the charitable core purpose of the
c) It is suggested that the fifth Sabbatical salary be re-deployed to offer a part-time honorarium to the Campus Representative of each three main campuses, allowing for local site-based representation which is recognised as being highly valued through the payment of a part-time wage. This reduces the need the position to take on paid work outside the
This approach would ‘beef up’ the role of the current Student Executive, effectively stepping in to take on the local representative aspects role formerly filled by the Vice President.
d) Other portions of the current VP role would be freed up to be undertaken by the relevant local official, role specific Sabbatical officer or staff member, effectively addressing the problem identified through the Governance Review of Campus Committee officers experiencing little control of their areas of elected mandate.
e) The proposed Sabbatical roles have been developed alongside the proposed Union Structure and strategic plan for the next 3 years, meaning that the Sabbaticals would sit in perfect harmony with the main developmental objectives and organisational structure of the Union, both being based on the four-fold plan of representation, academic quality, student life and union community.
f) Each of the Sabbaticals would have whole-Union Officer Teams to lead. These Officer Teams promote greater cohesion between Sabbatical and Part Time roles, enable cross-campus working and generally encourage a much closer knit working relationship between the various elements of the SU team. These Teams would encourage and facilitate the part time officers to take ownership of their own workflow; coordinate campaigns and activities cross campus and generally improve the levels of communication and support offered to local officials. This in turn will meet another Governance Review objective, that of empowering the part-time officers at Campus level.
g) These proposed Sabbatical positions are not site based and in this initial draft all are expected to be mobile about the campuses using hot desks in each office. Minimum time spent at each of the campuses would be a contractual requirement, with the Community Sabbatical having more specified obligation then the rest of the Sabbaticals.
In short the proposed Sabbatical structure has been developed as part of a whole-Union plan to both expand the representative roles outward to meet the needs of the widest possible range of students and also lead an organisation which is open, flexible, consultative and centrally driven to meet shared goals.
Bookmark with:
Delicious
Digg
Facebook
reddit
StumbleUpon
|