The Presidents and Vice President from New College Lanarkshire and South Lanarkshire College (Jules, Ashley and Michelle) identified a need for staff training around what a students’ association does and how staff and the students’ association can work together.
Working with sparqs, Jules, Michelle and Ashley developed a workshop that they felt confident they could deliver as part of the colleges’ staff professional development event. Run across the campuses the workshop had a fantastic turnout with 74 staff attending the workshop across the three campuses. Feedback from staff was overwhelmingly positive and many stated they had found out things about the students’ association work they were not aware of.
Called “Engage To inspire” the workshops lasted one hour and were highly interactive, enabling the staff to discuss a range of questions. The workshop aimed to familiarise staff with the workings of the students’ association to give them an idea of the range of work that it does, who’s involved and how to better work with it to improve the student experience.
It is hoped that the workshop will be an annual event in the staff development calendar.
sparqs is producing a standardised version of the workshop to enable other students’ associations to run the workshop in their colleges, which will be available on the sparqs website soon.
For more information contact Stephanie Millar, sparqs Development Advisor - stephanie.millar@sparqs.ac.uk
