 and good afternoon to Jeff as well. I just noticed Sally Vaughn just popped in and she's definitely no stranger to us, so I think she's even downstairs on campus. I'm upstairs, Sally, if you want to get coffee after. But good afternoon, everyone, and thank you so much for the opportunity to present this year's Gin Voice Australia Symposium. So what I'm going to do, I'll quickly share my screen first. Can someone give me a thumbs up if you can see that? Good, fantastic. Awesome. Well, today's presentation will focus on enacting a student partnership agreement. It's really an exciting time at UCS. We recently signed our first student partnership agreement and the purpose of today's presentation is to give you a bit of a overview of what we signed, but also how you can potentially enact a similar student partnership agreement at your institution. It's proven in the last three months to be a really helpful document for student leaders to progress particular student initiatives and go forward and work on key priorities that we want to work on over the next two years. So before I kick off in the spirit of reconciliation, I'd like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. Upon this ancestral lands, our current university stands. And I would also like to extend this acknowledgement to the many lands from which you are joining from virtually today, right across Australia as well as New Zealand. I would also like to pay my respects to the elders by past presence and emerging, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of knowledge for these places. So today's presentation will be fairly simple. We'll go through a very quick introduction of what the UCS student partnership agreement is about. I'll then touch on the development of the agreement, which will be the main focus of today's session, looking at how we managed to develop it over seven months, working alongside student leaders across our academic board, our student union, but also what we have activated UCS, which is our on-campus service provider, which I'm sure many of your universities would also have that essentially manages all the clubs and societies, as well as on-campus venues, that is bars, cafes and function centers. And lastly, I'll touch on the challenges and observations throughout the seven month development process. There were many challenges and observations, which I found quite interesting while we were enacting the student partnership agreement. So first off, I'll touch on a bit about introduction. In all about inclusive governance, the photo on the screen you see is our former deputy vice chancellor, professor Shreya Alexander, who worked very closely with student leaders in the development of this agreement and she recently retired from UCS after 30 years, but she's also a very strong advocate across the higher education sector in working with students as partners, particularly championing student voice in governance and decision making. So first off, what is actually the student partnership agreement? Now it can be separated into three prongs. The first is that it is essentially a collective approach between student leaders and senior staff, outlining how we want to approach student engagement at UCS over the next two years. And the second fold is a compilation of key priorities for the next two years, which is essentially 13 collaborative priorities that we've agreed on that we're going to work on over the next two years, no matter who the student lead is elected at that time up. So we identified what issues are facing students right now and key issues that we see will come up in the next two years and a commitment from the university that no matter who was elected into those roles, because students come and go, some degrees are three, four, five years and elected reps are not employees. So they're not really at universities for all that long. But essentially we want to ensure there is that record or handover rather that the issues we identify now will be worked on over the next two years. And thirdly because the document is signed in 2022, we want to ensure it is relevant in let's say 2032. So every two years a document will be reviewed by the student council liaison group and for a bit of context the SOG is a committee of our university council. Depending on your institution you may have a senate, a council or a board and essentially it reports directly to the BC and the chancellor and all the student leaders convene at this committee between academic board, activate UCS and the student union SRC or sit on this committee and can work on reviewing this agreement which is what occurred in the development phase. We all came together and worked on its development. Now the actual purpose of it and I will flag that this is very UCS specific. I'm very mindful that student partnership agreements will vary across institutions and apply on different issues based on the values and the different areas you want to work on with your own institution. But essentially our agreement supports our long term vision at the university as long as its vision and values promote an understanding between our elected student leaders and the university's broader range of activities that will impact the entire UCS community. We focus on two strategic initiatives of that strategy and essentially worked on that and expanded on how do we actually work together and how do we actually ensure a lifetime of learning to shape our learning experience at the university. But what I would say applies to each of your institutions would be the content in the blue box. The agreement essentially commits to three key things. It commits to a meaningful dialogue with the students in line with existing policy. It commits to recognizing the role that student leaders actually play and the importance of seeing students as genuine partners. I think that point is really important. Quite often we have elected student leaders and quite often you might just be filling a governor's requirement. But how do we actually genuinely engage our students as partners. It could be approaching students to get advice during the initial development of a policy, during the initial consultation phase of a new project, during the phase of introducing a new degree or making a new decision. Students should be at the decision making table and to be seen as genuine partners it's also mutually it's also mutual in the sense that student leaders also have to be willing to work with the university. So seeing students as genuine partners was a key point in the agreement. And thirdly it's a support engagement with our students during our time at university. Across our institutions we need to continue to engage our students along the way. Students might be elected for one year two years but we need to engage them throughout the whole process to ensure we're working together along the whole time that student is in a role. So these are three things that the agreement essentially commits to. It's a renewed commitment but it's also a new commitment on the part of the university to send a very strong message to over 50 elected student leaders that we have across university. Now I'll focus a bit on inclusive governance. Inclusive governance is applicable across all our institutions. Essentially we want a relationship between students and staff that can actually realise the bigger picture of the university. We recognise that partnership is a really important aspect of working together and the student partnership agreement helps us become effective contributors within our community at university. By partnering with students university now recognises that we can shape the broad picture of the university and our everyday experience. And when I mentioned that there are 13 collaborative priorities these 13 collaborative priorities are actually grouped under key themes and those five key themes that we've identified is student participation, inclusion, the standability, quality management and communication. I'll elaborate on those a little bit later but for now as you might be aware Sally Barnum was really the creator of Student Voices for an organisation that has helped so many institutions expand, enrich and further student voice across 26 institutions across the country. And she says essentially that a student partnership agreement should not be considered transactional in nature rather it should actually be focused on working together, working together on common goals aimed at enhancement across institution. It should provide a tool for collaboration on decision making and governance, institutional strategy and direction. I think it's really important to note that the SVA isn't a transaction between student leaders and the senior executive. It's not saying you must do this and we must do this but rather it sets out a mutual beneficial set of goals, a set of vision and values that we want to actually achieve together and it's actually a tool for great collaboration. I'll expand on this a little bit later but when I say that this agreement was signed on three months ago, work has already progressed. We agreed on something like improving how we deliver subject content and how do we ensure our subjects are engaging and that comes through training tutors, incoming tutors that are new to UCS and the very department responsible for that has already reached other student leaders to meet with us and say how do we work on this now and how would you like to inform our strategies in the training of new casual tutors at the university. So things like that are progressing and I'll expand on that a little bit shortly. I will now focus on the development of the agreement. As I mentioned the agreement took seven months between December 2021 and about June to July this year and it took a lot of work. It took a lot of work and energy of student leaders and the commitment and passion that each and every one of us has to enhancing the university overall and the picture on the screen there is essentially the student council liaison group that I talked about earlier where we convene across all the senior student leaders who each represent a key part of the university in one room every few months or so and that's directly with the deputy vice chancellor and various other executives at the university as well. It's really a forum, a very informal forum for us to air out any issues, raise concerns but also discuss topical things like strategy, policy and what things are coming up at the university that we should be aware about. So touching on the development it's only one slide but essentially it's all here. It took seven months and I won't go through all of it for the purposes and the interests of time but it really started in October, real work didn't start till December but about this time last year, about a year ago there was just some preliminary ideas. We put a preliminary idea at the scene that four other universities across the country have an SVA. We thought about how do we enhance the working relationship that we have with the university, how do we train up our student leaders to ensure that a good cohort of student leaders isn't lost by a new team, how to ensure a smooth transition with student leaders. So then we consulted Student Voice, so these four organisations speaking with Piper and many other people involved with Student Voice including Sally on how do we start and we also consulted the Australian National University. So the ANU were the first university to sign an SVA so we've consulted with them and then work started. We proposed and submitted a proposal to our deputy vice chancellor and one of our directors at the university and over the summer break it was sort of you know mulled over, considered and when the new year rolled around in January and things started rolling back the project was endorsed and were commenced in January. So then a working group was then established between student leaders, key student leaders, so I myself represented academic board, we had our student union executive as well as our active ACS executives as well and overall we worked together over February to begin some skeleton drafting, we tossed my dears around and then finally wrote something more substantial and by February the governance support team and the university so the very team that's responsible for every policy and every big governance change that the university makes actually provided us with a number of staff to advise and review the projects and ultimately the project was then formalized at SLG which is that committee of the university council and then it was referred to various parts of the university for their information. So for example referring up to UCS council, the chancellor, vice chancellor and all the council members were made aware, referring it to academic board or 60 board members on there including all the deans, deputy vice chancellors and all the senior staff, I mean 60 board members were essentially aware and then referring to faculty boards, every faculty in the university was made aware of the project as well. So then April work started to ramp up a lot more, we started refining the agreement, the marketing team at the university released marketing material and it was announced publicly externally to the university as well and then by May some final reviews were taking place by the university secretary and the final copy of the agreement was endorsed by the various parties to the agreement and then by June it was signed and then in July some further media was released and it was finalized. If this development project sorry this development timeline went on in the last two months it would be probably discussing the work progress so far but I'll talk about that coming up shortly in the impact stage. Now I'd like to touch on the collaborative priorities, I'm not going to go through all of them because it is quite a lot and in the interest of time I'll only focus on four but essentially as I mentioned the 13 priorities fall under five key categories and for student participation I'd like to focus on engagement with the SVA. All of us here are joining this imposing because of the work of the SVA and the different resources they provide us with in order to work within our institutions to enhance student voice. So I'm not sure you know are we you know student leaders are we just spectators today who are joining this session but essentially SVA appoints sorry if you're a member of SVA the institution that you represent has essentially one member and that member is essentially a contact point between the university and the organization and we essentially want to bolster that engagement by ensuring that we appoint one key student leader to SVA AG to be able to deliver insights about what we're doing at the university while engaging with a fantastic network of 26 universities and different student leaders to hear what they're doing at their institution and how do we bring that back to our university as well. So that's one of the key collaborative priorities to make sure like going forward the next two years given I currently represent you here so the SVA to make sure that next year and the year after someone's going to be there because I'll probably be graduated by then. The second is inclusion interestingly enough I'm sure those of us early this year would have seen that the national student safety survey results were released and this is a survey done across many universities to look at the prevalence of sexual assault and harassment on campus and in response to those findings the university has taken the view that while we are below the national average when it comes to cases sexual assault and harassment on campus it is still unacceptably high and one of the key ways in addressing that in our response is to work with student leaders work with the everyday student that has insight on how do clubs and society events run you know what messaging and what approaches of messaging work best in the engagement of students so one of the key collaborative priorities is work with student leaders on our response to the NCCS surveys over the next two years the university is doing a lot of work in the past months and they're constantly engaging our elected leaders across the student union across activate UCS as well as those in academic forward when it comes to advising them policy and looking at how we respond going forward. The fourth one is quality management so unquality management you see that are highlighted um recognizing the role of this student association which is essentially our student union engaging in activism on campus as a student union including campaigns and demonstrations um we all come from different institutions joining this session today but inherently we recognize the role of student union has an activist component to it and we wanted recognition from the university that where the student union is an independent organization and they have a right to hold demonstrations on campus including campaigns about important causes and issues that are really important and we want that recognition we don't want it to seem that the student union is going against policy and that is holding demonstrations on campus because it is within line of policy we do have a campus policy that states that demonstrations are allowed on campus subject to some regulations but we wanted a commitment on the part of the senior executive and the university to recognize that the student union can partake in activism on campus and this is allowed and this is something that's now included in the agreement so that was a huge win for us um and for the student union in particular now the fourth and last one is under communication um where I mentioned strengthening communication or relationship between student leaders and senior staff within coming in outgoing student leaders at the moment we're just finalizing our most recent student elections um I'm aware that a new student rep in my position will be coming in very soon and across many other across many other positions as well and while I will still be at university next year I want to ensure that student leaders have that strong communication with staff and that institutional knowledge and relationship building that I've been able to get the last few years to be passed on to that incoming rep and that will allow us to have that seamless handover that transition of institutional knowledge that exchange of different relationships we have to ensure that student can get the most out of their term while being in that position so these are the certain collaborative priorities I'm mindful that it is quite a lot so I'll be sending more information in the chat after for your reference that you can have a look at the full copy of the agreement as well but for us to move on I will now talk a little bit about the challenges and observations as I said it was a big seven month project and all the student leaders you see on your screen right now were involved in the development of it and it took a lot of time it took a lot of time energy but at the same time the word is agreements it was by no means perfect and I think you need to have robust debate you need to have good and robust negotiations to ensure that we achieve the best outcome possible in this agreement so these were some challenges and observations that I found while we did the agreement so firstly collaboration as I mentioned UCS provided a set of government and policy staff to work closely with student leaders throughout the whole process from drafting to advice to reviewing to editing to formatting the agreement to be a very nice UCS branded document that provided us with a pillar of support initially with a lot of student projects you sort of think is it going to be student led we're going to get the resources we're going to get the help but on this occasion you know we received so much help to bring this agreement through over the line the second is negotiation as I mentioned the agreement itself required a really high level negotiation between student leaders ourselves as well as with the senior executive so even within the student leadership team we had our own differences you had a student union you wanted key things you had activate UCS which is a different organization you want to key things and you had academic board and elected student leaders across the university who wanted different things so you had to negotiate amongst a big team of student leaders and we navigated that very diplomatically very professionally in order to achieve the best outcome but that also meant that we had to negotiate with the senior executive for example the inclusion of the clause that recognises the role of student union or something that we had to negotiate and talk about because at a time where there are many concerns and issues facing our broader student community including our staff it was important for us to navigate that and work through that with the senior executive to ensure that it is something we wanted to include but also in such a way that they can also agree to it so required a really high level negotiation which I was quite interested in observing during the whole process. Thirdly it's acknowledgement the agreement really acknowledged the recognition of the role of student leaders and the various bodies we represent in the student union to the organization that runs the campuses clubs societies bars and cafes but also as I mentioned earlier the really specific reference to the role of the student union in acknowledging that they are allowed to partake in activism and demonstrations on campus which was really an important and a big achievement for our student association and the whole team on the src as well. Fourth student voice so this organization recognise that student leaders play a big role outside the university the fact that I'm being able to you know talk to all of you today in this session is it acknowledgement by the university that we should be supporting key organizations such as SVA that brings together over 26 universities and so many student leaders who are passionate about this area to engage in dialogue to discuss issues with other student leaders but also be inspired by the ideas and thoughtfulness that they have at their universities and how we bring them back to our university as well. So engagement with key bodies such as SVA brings our university closer to others in the enhancement student voice and approaches of governance across the country and lastly I was quite interested in media so the university released quite a lot of media both internally across all the different departments faculties and different bodies to publicize a project but also externally with some articles as well to bolster engagement and overall this meant that we saw higher engagement with staff we saw higher engagement students internally we saw you know a mood of excitement in the lead up to the signing of the agreement but we also saw other universities discussing the impact both positive and negative about the SVA and I elaborate on that in the following slide but when it came to the agreement no agreement will ever be you know 100 happy everyone's going to be happy with it there's always going to be positives and negatives which I think is really important to ensure that we have a robust and critical process that we ensure that we come to a conclusion that most people benefit from this agreement and those observations were found in the impacts going forward firstly um post signing the agreement so UCS is located in New South Wales where the first New South Wales University to sign an SVA with a fifth in the country and student leaders across our neighboring universities over at the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales have also begun discussing ideas for an SVA at their university both students and staff um found that there were benefits to it at UCS and they're carrying it forward now with their new leadership teams as well extra and opportunities so most recently I did present at the HES for higher education session on student voice of partnership to universities in Australia New Zealand I'm talking about our SVA but also the benefits for staff to also approach their student leaders to start that discussion this very symposium that I'm presenting to you today as well as the Australian and New Zealand Law Association conference coming up this Thursday which will be hosted in Sydney and I'll be attending the Sally Barnum to also discuss a bit about the work with the SVA and the importance of it over at the National Union of Students Education Conference back in July the SVA was discussed widely and other surrounding universities expressed keen interest in learning more about developing their own version as I mentioned no agreement is going to be 100 positive and everyone's going to be happy with it I think we need to respect that there must be differences and a robust debate to ensure we can critically look at the agreement and see whether thing whether parts could be improved so when it came to the development of the agreement it was really important that we allowed space for that and we saw that for example at the NUS conference where both sides came out and discussed different viewpoints which really formed the future outlook of what we're going to change what we're going to keep within the future agreement when it comes to a time to review and other universities other universities in Australia New Zealand have actually progressed on the SVA speaking with Sally earlier this week the University of Wellington over in New Zealand also finalised an SVA and I'm sure they definitely guarded the resources that SVA provides as an organisation and lastly internally within UTS as of September this month two to three months of work has already evolved with key areas within university taking forward taking forward various collaborative priorities that we've agreed on and reporting back on how are we working on it who are we approaching how are we going to fit this within the timeline of work whether it's response to the National Student Safety Survey on sexual assault and harassment on campus or the way to ensure that our tutors are adopting inclusive and engaging practices in their classes all these sort of things inform us taking this agreement forward and a review we undertake every three months while work progresses to ensure student leaders of the day given our elections most recently are over that future student leaders coming in next year can also be kept up to date on how key initiatives are being implemented or worked on based on the SVA as a really important reference point going forward so that pretty much sums up the impacts of the SVA as we go forward post signing over the next two years it's a fantastic agreement it has enabled our institution to work on so many important issues it's allowed student leaders to draw closer with our senior executive and staff a more sort of cohesive and mutually collaborative relationship where we can all work together to enhance institution and be part of the important decisions that make up our experience and our journey at the university so that sums up the student partnership agreement at UCS and how you perhaps could consider enacting one at your various institutions and with that I'm happy to take any questions. Thank you for that amazing session Kat um we have about two minutes to answer some questions um so maybe some really quick ones feel free to pop some in the chat or speak out loud whatever works. And just for those who might not have questions I've sent all the links in the chat you'll find various articles released by the university at different points in time as well as copy of the four agreement um and if you'd like to get in touch feel free to shoot my name out or message