 So I was previously the general secretary of the Student Association and now I'm on our academic board and I'm the representative for law like student member. I'll kind of just start off with what an SPA is, a student partnership agreement, I'll refer to it as an SPN, why you might need one and in terms of if it's right in the context of your university and I'll go through just how you know how it was implemented at UTS and some of the challenges that we faced and then as I mentioned at the beginning of the Zoom it's been a year since we've officially signed the SPA so kind of what the results are a year later and the outcomes we've received from that and kind of how you how you can get successful outcomes in terms of you know accountability implementation things like that and then if we have time just end off with some practical takeaways and actually beginning the process and also just broader discussion I'll kind of get into it with the very beginning straightforward explanation of kind of what a student partnership agreement is for those who also might not be familiar. So basically a student partnership agreement is a quite a formal agreement that is negotiated between students and the educational institution that you're at so might be multiple student groups who come together and they have some priorities that they would like the university to address and so what this agreement does is codify all the roles of either there's different student groups involved so for example we've got the student association which plays a big role on my campus we have our student leaders which are the students that are on our academic boards our faculty board things like that and the third group we had involved that is something called activate UTS they run all the social clubs and societies on campus they're more the like social hub of the new so those three student groups or which of the ones are relevant to your campus will come together outline priorities kind of their rights their responsibilities their role within university and then kind of put them in a formal agreement with the university where it's signed on as kind of codifying what each group's priorities and roles are for the rest of the year and kind of a commitment on the part of the uni to not only work towards what priorities are in the agreement but also meaningfully engage with students as partners in broader decision makers as broader decision makers in the university so that is a very high level explanation but we'll break it down a bit and so right now in Australia four universities when I last checked had negotiated SPAs and so but our one in New South Wales think was the first to kind of get that up and running but all SPAs look a bit different this is kind of just what we've experienced at UTS and how I've run it so really quickly this I will show you the student partnership agreement itself I'll take you to a link but I don't want you to be faced with all it's a bit of a formal looking document with all the writing but at the beginning of the student partnership agreement we have the purpose so here are specific to UTS we've discussed how we as a university were moving into our 2027 strategy which is basically a strategy that the uni wrote by themselves it really didn't have any consultation with students it was called the 2027 plan as you can imagine there was a very much corporate side to it not a lot of engagement students it just talks about those things like you know lifetime learners we want to be an innovative uni but we as students kind of saw a gap that well where's the strategy from the student perspective so the SPA was kind of able to fill that gap and as you can see here we connected it to that strategy and its vision and values but gave our student voice so it as you can see the agreement seeks to engage the student community and deliver on those mutual obligations which are those priorities I will talk about and I think one of the most important points for me when we arrived drafting the purpose was recognizing the role that student representatives play and the importance of seeing students as genuine partners and so a lot of what you'll see in SPAs they can be like this this sentence really could be put in a document and you know forgotten about for the next however many years but I think having it there in writing and what we did as students is we really capitalized on all this being codified and that fed into a lot of the work we do saying you know how can you you know not you know do this priority or this initiative we have or why haven't you consulted us that you're cutting the course of psychology like we have committed to an agreement writing that you know we're recognized as roles as people like the way the students we have a big role in the campus so I think having that in the agreement was actually really really valuable even sometimes more than the priorities themselves it's having it there in writing as a reference point for any future student leadership initiatives etc and just shaping the culture of student leadership at UTS so it's going backwards so if I move to the next one really quickly just so you kind of get an understanding of why why an SPA I've kind of tried to put down what the goals are they're all very interconnected but I'll go through them here and again please if you have any questions put your hand up ask me questions and I'm more than happy to stop and give a bit of an explainer so in the short term what an SPA can do is it can just first off make students feel like they have a platform to engage right as students who started the SPA we you know paved that way but from the SPA onwards there's a very clear platform for representation and I think I find a lot of students when they make contributions or they want to you know bring up something with the you know deputy vice chancellor of education which is our main kind of contact point or any of their deans any of their faculty reps it's kind of like where do I begin and so what the SPA did is it because of there's such broad priorities in there it acts as a launching point for students to bring those ideas forward and within which you'll see later is there's formalized agreed priorities for two years so there is a strong commitment to agreeing on those things and I've talked about these priorities a lot which you'll see but they're things like implementing a sexual assault and harassment survey sorry not survey there was a nss survey and implementing a response to that so then we don't be ahead of myself but from putting in the SPA we were actually wrote a UTS sexual assault and harassment sash policy and that is now codified within UTS governance we put things in there like recognizing the right for the student association to run campaigns and protests on campus because we had issues in the past where our demonstrations weren't were kind of interrupted for lack of a better word and things like that we also talked about sustainability on campus and the university working towards climate goals things like that just so you guys have a better understanding of what it actually means when we talk about mutual priorities it also codifies our roles and it really just puts in writing that you know we are the student union this is our role this is what we're here for etc and the last one is that staff are able to seek direct advice from student leaders on specific areas and it sets up those networks so now and this this SPA was distributed to all staff and all faculties so what it did especially when there's the actual students whose roles were there at the time of um it's the SPA's inception is that staff actually reach out to those students because um it really does depend on the staff member but it's one of the deans of your faculties they want student input for certain things they want engagement with students um they don't want to be teaching to a unpassionate like cohort they want that engagement sometimes and it um meant that not only did they seek direct advice but they were kind of encouraged to and if they didn't um then it would be like a why didn't you we've got all these networks set up we had this entire process set up for you to engage with students uh and you chose not to kind of thing and that's a bit um harsh but that's sometimes how it needs to be put um and long-term goals obviously are culture shifts towards student participation and roles in like decision-making within the university and uh like now it allows us to engage with external organizations to um kind of knowledge share paths on this information to other um people like yourself so we can figure out well what's actually possible uh and what's um feasible when we're talking about student leadership and it's always nice to have a bit of a precedent I'll just quickly talk about the like our journey in the context of why um the student leaders on my campus kind of came together and found now a really good time to implement the SPA um so I briefly mentioned how the UTS 2027 strategy was created um but it didn't include any student import um or kind of uh there was nothing that students had specifically worked on or even asked for it was based off a lot of secondary data like student surveys um which makes sense but I think there's nothing that can replace talking to actual students and consulting with students um but just uh briefly so the when the pandemic began student leaders were called on to advise um about like remote learning and I'm sure everyone at the university is experienced that original rush of you know are we going online what's happening um and so the academic board student member for law which was the predecessor before me um developed a student leadership plan to increase um participation and support for student leaders um and so this wasn't this was separate to the SPA this was their own kind of idea because again we were still kind of in the pandemic at that stage but there was very much a lack of student engagement um and a lot of our academic boards our faculty boards acted kind of as a rubber rubber stamp and there wasn't that students didn't feel empowered to kind of bring up the things they wanted or ask the hard questions at times um and then in 2021 with this from this um student engagement uh we uh introduced a indigenous student representative to our academic board which was a really big feat it unfortunately shouldn't have to have been as difficult as it was but for us it was a massive milestone because um our university and I would love to hear um what you guys might be like um but we'll get into that a bit later our university had something against kind of changing governance rules um so obviously like changing the bylaws of the university or the rules of the board isn't an easy thing to do um but it was almost an excuse from the university to not make these changes because you know if we put an indigenous member that's going to change the amount of votes on the board and that's going to um you know mean there's one more student rep which um uh if there's an extra student rep that's an extra student vote for students should we add one for staff like things like that um but it was almost like at that stage how could they say no so we continued the work and um that was something we achieved and then from that um the planning for the student partnership agreement began because that's when um the 2027 strategy really came out um and uh from this we act we were lucky kind of enough to have the deputy vice chancellor at the time be quite supportive of the program and I think that's something I'll go into a bit later um how can you kind of go about this when you need you need a key decision maker within the university who is willing to be on the other side of those negotiations we can't negotiate within ourselves and then have no one to bring it to um so um from there we began discussion about the SPA we conceptualized what would we want it to look like and then the um national student safety survey results came out the um entry bless survey which was uh all about uh sash on campus and for UTS um produced some not great results um and so that also led us to kind of figure out our priorities as a student leadership cohort and implementing um those into the SPA um and then we ran our anti racism campaign it all kind of worked towards um the final agreement so now I've put a uh QR code on the screen you can scan it with your phones potentially or you can just google UTS SPA or student partnership agreement um and kind of take a look it's a I might actually share on my screen too now that I think about it so this is what the agreement looks like um so if I do a quick scroll as you can see it's a bit of a formal looking document um it's got all our collaborative priorities and it's signed by um the deputy vice chancellor at the time um and like I talked I talked about um this was the president of the activate board which ran our socials um like social clubs and societies um the council on the UTS students association on behalf of the SA and then um the student member for academic board who was the member before me um who I worked very closely on this with and that um brought in the three student groups with the deputy vice chancellor and so I'm not going to um go through this in length but um we when when you look at the structure and obviously if you are looking to implement SPA your own university is you know feel free to um look at how this is done we obviously introduced it looked at the purpose which I showed you guys we talked about inclusive governance um and this really this part we wanted to put in because of um because of uh us being omitted from the 2027 strategy for UTS where we you know kind of put together that it's about students and staff working together that's the only way university succeeds as an institution um and and what you know it depends on mutual respect integrity meaningful interaction um and so we also here set out what rep student representation at UTS currently looks like um just kind of as a point of reference um and then roles and responsibilities um which is again obviously these agreements students tend to get more out of in terms of wanting engagement um so you know it's always good to put in there what our roles and responsibilities as student leaders are um which is very just you know making sure that we're providing reliable representation for the student voice um and doing our best um and so the main part is the collaborative priorities and so this is all mutually agreed obligations um and things that we as the student body wanted to work towards and we split it up into different projects um the responsibility um so it's like you know creating that accountability um which is really important is you know you can put as much down as you want in writing but unless you create accountability and then follow up on it not much can really happen the outcomes and the why um so we split our collaborative priorities into four sections um the first one is about student participation and engagement leadership um second one was about inclusion uh so this um can be everything from accessibility um to uh the LGBT community to uh our anti-racism campaigns um to also uh a lot of our NSS stuff came off the back of um this and so as you can see the biggest part of the student agreement was the results from the survey um and so I don't want to dive too too deep but things like this so considering an introduction of a single point of contact for the handling of the complaint of sexual harassment um this was a really important point because what would happen at UTS with the complaints is that you say something happened at a society event that was run by activate you'd have to complain to activate you'd have to put your own um uh form in with UTS cancelling you'd have to put one into the actual UTS governance body so what would happen is that process of uh retraumatization so what we want to do is a single point of contact that a student could go to for comfortable with and they could handle a lot of the um other uh contact things like that um were really important and it's something we achieved at the university there was some outcomes and um that's currently being worked on um so the third one is sustainability um and the fourth one is about quality management which is um obviously with online learning uh student um student the quality of teaching sometimes can go very uh downhill especially as you as UTS were um making putting a lot of staff on casual contracts so you know staff can sometimes can't put in those hours and uh it just became a um situation where the student association uh was running demonstrations and about um you know staff you know staff can work in conditions as student learning conditions that kind of um situation and oh well there's one on communication which is just about communication between um students and staff uh so yeah if I head back to the presentation I know that was a very um big crash course but just so you have an understanding of what the agreement actually is in terms of its content um so I do here have a bit of a timeline but I'm not going to go through that because I think I might be able to share these slides and with you after and you guys can have a read of that but it's just it was very practical and you know how we um went about uh implementing the SBA um and so this part um I think will is quite important um because I sit here a year later talking about the SPA I'm in a very you know great um way and it has done a lot of really good things for students but I can't underestimate that there were quite a lot of barriers and challenges which is why I think there are such few SPAs because it is such a big project to undertake um especially when you know we all I'm sure believe in student advocacy and student activists and um you know representing the student body but for a lot of us it is in a full-time job and especially if you're in a position like a student's association or academic board role um the terms are one year so by the time you start these projects you know you and you get your head around the role you're already um looking towards the next year and I think sometimes this is what university leadership may rely on because you know every student goes to that phase of getting to it figure out what they want to do by the time you figure it out um you know you're heading towards the end of the year and considering exams and everything for students so um in terms of challenges so the negotiation process I would say is quite a um a challenge because there is such a power and balance between the students who are bringing the uh agreement to be signed um and actual the university leadership so I would suggest unless you believe in what you're putting in the SPA and you can negotiate something that you think is quite um you know you're proud of to having their students um try not to settle because we put a lot of really strong language especially as a student union um about um improving staff conditions about not cutting our student magazine but we found that um the university's tendency when they were sending us their drafts back was to water down the language um you know develop a plan or um or consider and whereas our students wanted you know much more visa um language so I think we found we got to a place where we were at a very um happy point but it did take a lot of back and forth and it very and if you are so set on putting the SPA rushing that process being like all right well at least they're doing it um can really leave you with the final product that um is not as powerful and also prioritizing the issues so what we did is each of those three bodies I've talked about the student association activate um and the leaders on academic board each was set with three key priorities or initiatives flesh those out and then include those but the thing is is that students especially at this time of um you know the cost of living crisis how universities you know occasionally being run a bit more like businesses then um you know institutions of academia are potentially you know there's an endless list of things that need to be included and worked on and prioritizing what issues you want to include um is always such a key challenge because you know certain issues affect other student groups and it's like how do you decide what we as a student association for example prioritize as our three key issues um that is very hard and you don't want to leave people out and you don't want to leave issues out um but at the end of the day you have to be able to make those decisions so thinking about those very early on um is always a good idea um another challenge is the uncertainty of kind of the future from the student perspective and the university leadership perspective for students um you we're relying on every student that comes into the role um is going to consistently work towards the outcomes of the SPA so if you have you know for even three years of no student leadership participation the SPA can easily be a forgotten document it requires on passionate ambitious student leaders who want to continue the work and see the longevity of these initiatives especially because like I said even though the SPA is implemented working on the initiatives within the SPA needs needs continuous work um and it's also reviewed by annually so we get to update our um what we want the priorities to be um which I think is a really good way to keep a current to whatever current issues students are facing but it requires a work of student leaders to update those priorities and have those discussions um and also another thing is that you need a good working relationship with the key administrative decision maker to begin the SPA and to see its continuation because it needs to be re-signed every two years um so I think that point kind of speaks for itself if you have university leadership that isn't willing to commit to students engage with students and empower them then you can't really um continue such an important initiative um and the last one is varying range of students perspective of student perspectives um so like I said in terms of managing what language you'll put in the put in the agreement and you know how uh what issues we thought were priority or how far we think we could have taken those issues all students from all different groups have different expectations of what an SPA is going to look like and depending on whether you operate within an academic board or within a student association um I think you understand that yeah different students have different ideas of what a good SPA is and how strong it needs to be um and the linking stat is maintaining an activist union because at the end of the day student associations are activist bodies they are um not only service providers but you know campaigning bodies and you have to provide a um balance of the both and so making sure that you know this SPA for a better word doesn't make you lie down and roll over because look guys we've achieved student inclusion like it's all there in writing um you still need to be able to hold the university leadership accountable to these outcomes and to the SPA and to um whatever else you would like because one concern we had from students to SPA is well if we've agreed with management that these are our roles and responsibilities and this is what we're doing what if um there's something in there or something in the 2027 strategy for example that we don't agree with and we want to you know protest against or run a demonstration or run a campaign against university will that you know kind of create censorship um and I will say the SPA definitely doesn't especially because we very much closely looked at the wording of the agreement and made sure there was nothing binding um in that sense um so there were concerns and criticisms in that way but it's just about um and some of those are very valid and it's just about mitigating and working towards um like solving those um issues but also making sure you have a very strong understanding of what is in the SPA um to address those concerns the next slide is a quick I think the best advice but I can give or I'm looking at those challenges currently trying to make it as creating very strong messaging around your university or exposure to what do you think some of the barriers that you made potentially face the SPA if you have time if it remains at the front of constant discussion then it is something that students refer to consistently proud of it rather than becoming something that people have to drag out it becomes just a constant talking point and so that even if the students are super engaged and they know everything about the SPA or they are very like they have a leadership role they come to one meeting every six months they still will know what the SPA is and they're still able to refer to it and um at least be aware of those um the priorities so they're able to um work towards it and that was also like in all honesty done with me because I worked on it with the previous law academic board member and as a law student as a student I was involved I was obviously considering the role and I loved the space so that's why we were able to communicate work so closely knowing that um I could continue the work and I think something also is really important as some of what you're saying is a really strong handover um always so even if that person might have been involved something we actually put in the SPA sorry is um just quickly referred to is about um like about training and creating a comprehensive handover package to support student leaders in their role um and give them those key contacts rather than making students work from scratch uh and so yeah definitely something I think a lot of universities and students base um and just kind of has to be made aware of wonderful so I realize I'm very about planning timing but I will kind of try and end off um because I'm sure things get to end off with where we are one year later um and I've touched on it here and there so if these in short um we've made progress on a lot of the outcomes of the SPA and I don't say it lightly that you know just because in there we worked on them we had different student um so many different students working on different aspects so our women's officer was working on the NSS survey um and SSS survey um results and outcomes our welfare officer um worked on certain certain sustainability goals as a law academic board member I worked on kind of the student leadership engagement um things like that um across university were able to touch or at least at least begin discussions and um make sure that kind of university leadership knows we're not letting these things slide we are we are continually you know working we're engaged in terms of just because they you know put down um this is where the kind of the real work begins as I know that sounds like a lot of burden on the students but I when I say I really mean in the context of our meetings you know we we always something we always wanted was no exams at a worth more than 60 percent because 60 percent exams um is inequitable for some students because you know you get to the end of the semester and you may parcel fail based on one exam so things like that we include in the SPA and we'll just make sure to bring up at the meeting we'll write a paper on it and we say you committed to this in the SPA to work on you know equitable assessments for students and where we're working off that and this is what we're bringing to you um things like that it's become a running agenda point in our student council liaison group so um this is another little committee they love their committees but um so with so the UTS council which um is kind of the highest governing body uh had one ex-officer member from council chairs kind of a student group and the students communicate to that council member they bring it to council so it's actually a running agenda point where are we with the SPA outcomes so it gives students the opportunity to make those contributions which is wonderful um like i've been talking about it's referenced a lot um we we make it part of the the lexicon of student leadership is you know the SPA um and then a big one i'm gonna um i really want to just as the final touch on talk about is our student advisory board that was created as a byproduct of the SPA um which i'll get to um and then obviously it's a really good accountability mechanism um for the things that we work towards um so i had a quote from our chair of academic board i got for this presentation because in a reversal of roles we need the staff opinion here just to make sure you know as a student i'm not um you know this and that but i think they kind of agree in terms of you know it helps break down those barriers it allows us to jointly concentrate on the issues um that are really key to the universities and also defines these relationships um so this is just some these are the priorities we had but i'll um move past them but you read them in SPA and we've done different work on all um different sections um and so the student advisory board um which is the final thing i want to talk about which is a very very new development as of um a month or two ago and so what happened is this is our new current deputy vice chancellor names Kylie um and to be honest she's one of i i think we're very fortunate UTS that she is our point person because compared to other staff members may have at UTS um she is really committed to engaging with students she has children of her own that are at other universities um i think one in Queensland actually um so i think she understands she was a bit more than previous people have held the role um and so the different presidents of the organizations um acting as an advisory um board and like what does that mean um essentially i've put here it's not a board in the normal sense of you know our faculty boards academic boards what it literally is is when there is um a new student initiative being rolled out and we have running ones at UTS so we have a lot coming up about you know like orientation week um what are we doing about the student uh the student experience how are we addressing chat GPT before any of those papers are brought to academic board Kylie has to consult the student group um and um they're all very uh uh capable student leaders who you know president of the association they're all um really good i i think actually not acting as like because there's no voting it's it's a board to discuss um and so you can see that the you know the association president has brought in the rising cost of living and how they can support the wider community we talk and it's mentioned here that it it was as a product of the student partnership agreement and it's um driving towards those um priorities we've agreed on um and build upon those commitments set out and so Kylie wrote this or the uni released this media release themselves um and you know just acknowledging that you know the group like we're building upon these commitments like it's a very strong like in my perspective from where we were a couple years ago where the university didn't really care or do much the fact that they're acknowledging that we have commitments and we're working towards them um is a step in the right direction um and our social so activates like our social clubs you know what what the student experience looks like outside of the classroom and the group meets and they report back to the student body on updates um and so yeah so this basically came across as almost a very unexpected product but something that's been really really fantastic and you can see the outcomes and you can see academic board when every time Kylie gets up to speak um she'll you know refer to one of her um the people she's talked about on the student board and they're actually able to bring that um really really important student perspective um so yeah I might leave it at that I got a quote from her um about you know genuine student partnerships accelerate our experience um and engaging with students um but I uh yeah I think that's eight where we can leave it out I have a discussion question um and I did I will share these slides sorry I'm flicking through about a practical roadmap of a very very short version of how you can um begin the process of implementing one at your university that was kind of our journey UTS from its context inception um how we worked towards it the challenges we faced and really um where we are a year later which there are some very outcomes we expected and we worked towards it and wanted but some unintended consequences that have been um quite pleasant so yeah thank you all so much for listening to me speak for an hour if you have any questions or if and I want to pass it over please please let me know