Student Voice is the structured engagement of students to represent you on relevant issues both locally and nationally.
Listening and acting upon said issues to affect change and being your voice as a steer for future planning. Student Voice includes the Student Union and Course Reps.
Student Union
The Student Union is run by students for students. The ‘executive’, as they are known, are voted into their positions by the students twice yearly.
Meet your President
Brandon Powell has been part of the Student Union since September 2023. He is currently studying a Health and Social Care BTEC Extended Certificate level 3 planning to study politics at university. He is passionate about enhancing the quality of education for young people and continues to volunteer within the behavioural management sector.
A major part of their role is student representation, giving you a voice and ensuring that your views are heard, shared, and acted upon appropriately by our leadership team. To this end, the Union has seats on the governors’ health and safety, equality and diversity, FEQSI and HEQSIC committees.
There are currently 22 executive posts that include the President, Women’s Officer, Welfare Officer, International Students’ Officer and Campaigns Officer, to name just a few.
There is more to Student Union life than just meetings and committees, we also run successful campaigns and awards as well as trips.
The Union also works on national initiatives in partnership with the National Union of Students (NUS) and other external agencies. Internally the Union works with SET (Student Enrichment Team) to both support and promote their agenda.
In short, the Student Union here at the college is a vibrant, energetic, and progressive movement you can be involved with that mirrors the college’s values of diversity, inclusion, and equality. It will certainly broaden your horizons!
Come along and get involved!
Course Reps
The Government has realised that customer service is as important in education as it is in the business world. It is no good having Government Ministers or even Principals of colleges deciding what is good for students and what works in education without having a big input from the students themselves. This form of student input is known as “The Student Voice”.
The Student Voice can take many different forms; the course representative system is one of the main ways of facilitating the student voice within colleges. Leicester College course representative system is very well established; it has been running for over 10 years and has about on average 400 reps a year.
The system has been widely recognised as an excellent model and as a result our reps have been involved with providing feedback to government on their education policies. The Student Liaison Committee (where you meet with the Principal and Governors) has been so successful other colleges’ are now copying.
Some of the things the reps have been involved in include:
- Meeting with the Principal and the Governors (Student Liaison Committee).
- Meeting with the Director General for Education (Direct advisory to the Government).
- Helping to set the mission statement and values for the college.
- Visiting other colleges to get feedback from their students.
- Formed one of the committees for the OFSTED inspection.
- Been on interview panels for senior members of staff.
- Taken part in the national trials for representative training.
- As well as this there were numerous occasions where reps provided feedback in various meetings and carried out surveys in their classes.
Please don’t feel daunted by this, by the time the reps attended these meetings they felt supported by the SET team.
Student discount card and other benefits
TOTUM card
When you are a student at Leicester College, you have the opportunity to get a TOTUM card and use their app to have access to over 200 UK discounts. That includes Amazon, Odeon, ASOS and many more. It is the new name for the NUS extra student discount card and your TOTUM membership opens up a world of fantastic student discounts, offers and vouchers on your everyday essentials, must-have gear and luxury items.
Office 365
All students at Leicester College get free access to the full Office 365 suite, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneDrive. All IT at the college is accessed using your student email address. Please do not forget the dot when you are logging into your college Office 365 and Moodle accounts. Remember the format – studentid@my.leicestercollege.ac.uk
Facilities
You also, of course, have access to all of the College’s facilities including our nurseries, sports, libraries, Culture & Faith Service and Food.inc.