Our first meeting of the National Education Officers’ Network (NEON) took place on Thursday 14th November 2019 at Glasgow Caledonian University. The inaugural event was attended by 21 attendees from 16 institutions across Scotland and colleagues from NUS Scotland. Originally called EON prior to the first meeting, the "National" part was added following discussions at the first meeting on 14th November!
The network was set up in response to feedback from student officers who have expressed the need for a national officer network with members from both universities and colleges and the first meeting was a great success.
The event began with a workshop on ‘Monitoring the Diversity of Course Reps’, encouraging officers to consider the demographics of their course rep population. The attendees then split into two groups – the college officers attended a session on new developments for How Good is Our College and Progress Visits, whilst university officers considered the next Enhancement Theme.
In the afternoon, the group reconvened to attend a workshop on mental wellbeing in the curriculum, led by Dr Heather Gray and Dr Shiv Shanmugam from Glasgow Caledonian University.
Materials from the day can be found on the event page. The event hashtag, for use on Twitter, was #sparqsEON, for the first meeting, but going forward it will be #sparqsNEON.
Attendees fed back positively on the first meeting of NEON and we are looking forward to developing the network going forward. It will meet three times each academic year, and we are currently looking for institutions willing to host the next meetings of NEON.
The dates for the next two meetings are:
- Wednesday 19th February 2020 at Fife College, Dunfermline Campus
- Thursday 7th May 2020 (venue TBC)
We also welcome suggestions for future agenda items and discussion topics.
See the NEON webpage for further information on the network. We would be grateful if Students’ Associations could encourage student officers to join the network if they’re not already signed up! The network is designed to be a space for officers to network and work on issues together in a cross-sector capacity.
For further information on NEON, please contact Megan Brown, Development Consultant, at Megan.Brown@sparqs.ac.uk
