More delight
I heard on Friday (as did all ALs at the Assembly pre-meeting), that the AL representative structure is to get a very visible and central presence on the Walton Hall campus, in the form of its own offices, meeting rooms and hotdesking area for visiting AL reps.
This puts us - and ALs generally - at the heart of the OU, and no one should have an excuse in future not to know how to find us.
Sounds as though this will all be up and running by the autumn.
Absolutely delighted to hear today that the university has found extra money and ALs serving on region/nation committees will now be paid an attendance allowance.
Many thanks to the Vice Chancellor and the Director Students for reviewing this issue.
This should allow us to attract lots of interest from high calibre ALs - and should also remove some of the barriers to close collaboration between region/nation committees and the new AL Assembly.
Great news.
We've got a great lot of candidates for the AL Assembly elections - so that's my first worry over.
Next major challenge is to get people to vote. It's really important we have a good turnout in the elections, otherwise we won't have credibility with the university.
We've got a forum going where people can ask questions of the candidates and find out about them, so they can decide who to vote for - but at present it's largely full of candidates talking to each other, with few disinterested ALs in there.
Anything people can do to encourage others to vote - or ideas for things we can do - greatly appreciated.
ALC approved the changes to the AL Representative Structure by a very narrow majority last Saturday - a huge relief as I think without the change the structure would have withered away fairly soon.
But what was I letting myself in for? Huge amounts of work getting the new structure off the ground.
Watch this space.
The AL representative structure has, I think, operated for too long as an almost secret society. You couldn't find out easily how it worked until you were in it - and then it operated on an apprenticeship model that worked better in some regions/nations than in others.
We're trying to rectify this now in a number of ways. One immediate step is to trial an induction afternoon for new reps on the Friday afternoon at the start of the AL national conference and I've just been thinking about what would be the most useful things to include here. We're doing a campus tour, among other things, so what would people most like to see on the campus?
On a much more ambitious scale, we are trying to review and revise the entire representative structure, so it is much easier to get into it, so we can make much better use of all the AL expertise that is out there, and so that we discuss with ALs much more widely what their views and experiences are. This will be discussed at AL national conference and then publicised more widely among all ALs, before AL Committee makes the final decision about whether to go for it or not, in February.
More later
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