 The USI last week announced plans to campaign for better conditions for student teachers on placement. Along with various trade unions they are calling for student teachers to receive payment while on placement to cover expenses such as travel, materials and accommodation. We ask student teachers on the St Patrick's campus what the main struggles are while on placement. We go out, we do eight weeks of placement, that's two months. The teacher that we teach for the full day and the teacher is still getting paid their full wage and the student teachers don't get anything. We still have to pay for our transportation, it's going to be in Dublin so we still have to pay for accommodation and then we still have to pay for our own resources. Basically when you're on placement you don't have like you're doing all your preparation for your lessons in the evenings and then you're going in teaching the next day so I don't know how people manage with like part-time jobs and stuff like I never was able to do it, I was able to work through placement. The resources and everything is constantly printed here, you put your point in about nearly five or every day just cover yourself so that's twenty five or again like so it's all had an uplift that's the main thing I suppose. That annoyed me for a while and still annoyed me, nothing's been done about it. DCUSU along with a number of other colleges are highlighting the campaign and are asking student teachers to fill out an online survey. DCUSU Vice President for Education and Placement Matt Davie is heavily involved in the campaign and is urging student teachers to voice their opinions. USA contacted me about the campaign and how I want to get involved and to be honest I jumped on it, I really wanted to do it, being a teacher myself it really affected me and being kind of representative for the biggest kind of cohort of teachers in the country and the Institute of Education on Pats campus, we have the largest number of teachers there so it's really an issue that affects our students and so I wanted to be leading this with USA. I've done a survey myself with the fourth year Beds that went out so my class, we got a great response that around forty or fifty cent of the course replied to that so we've gotten statistics from that as well and I've included them in the proposal that I'm currently making. I'm not sure about the closing day for the USA one but I presume it's going to be very very similar information that I've already covered from my own survey that I did over the summer and so we're going to incorporate that into the proposal as well when we get the results from that I'm not sure about the closing day though. Colleen Brady, DCU TV News