Our first Student Council meeting of the year took place last night!

Student Council is the body responsible for holding the elected officers to account, and setting the political direction of our organisation through the writing and approval of student policies. All newly elected Student Councillors and the Student Council Chair attended the meeting and were able to hold the Executive Officer team to account and to debate and vote on motions submitted by students.

Our Student Council team for 2021-22:

Student Council Chair

• Tala Hamadah

School of Mathematics, Computer Science & Engineering

• Angus Pedersen (elected Deputy-Chair)
• Emine Kyosey
• Vlad-Constantin Pavel

The City Law School

• Aaminah Patel
• Lilly Taher
• Yavuz Emin Kafadar

School of Arts & Social Sciences  

• Amanpreet Kaur Sagoo
• Gesmina Tsourrai
• Simran Joshi

Bayes Business School

• Ioana Ioanas
• Rosinah Mphetlhe
• Simriddhi Gupta

Officer Reports:

Student Councillors were able to hold the Executive Officer team to account through the accountability reports. Student Council is responsible to ensure the Executive Officer team is undertaking the responsabilities of their roles and abiding to Union Policy in their actions.

13 Officer reports were submitted to Student Council:

• SU President - Shaima Dallali
• VP Education - Ruqaiyah Javaid 
• VP Community and Wellbeing - Shahd Haj-Khalil
• Bayes Business SRO - Prachi Jhaveri
• Law SRO - Sarah Sahi
• SASS SRO - Tevo Kearney-James
• BME Officer - Purity Ajoko
• Ethics & Environmental Officer - Louis Sugunasabesan

Have a look at what they have been up to so far this term here - you only need to scroll down after the agenda.

Student Policies:

At Student Council, all students can submit motions but only Student Councillors are allowed to vote on them.

Student Council voted to pass the following policies:

• Oppose PREVENT - Students Not Suspects

Prevent is a legal duty placed upon Universities to ‘prevent violent extremism and prevent students from being drawn into terrorism’. Although it is a legal duty, there is no legal definition of what extremism is, so Universities are left to make their own interpretations of what this means, which is a very dangerous thing to leave up to people’s perceptions. Prevent may sound like a good thing and that it protects students, but in practice, Prevent causes serious harm to students and student societies. The Students’ Union must be demanded by its students to join the movement to abolish Prevent and so I ask you to vote in favour of this motion to Oppose PREVENT.

This motion passed and is now part of the Student Policy for next three years.

• A new democratic structure for City Students’ Union

This presentation outlined the proposed changes coming out of the democracy review, including the proposed structure of the Assembly, changes to the election process and the proposed timeline. At the end of the presentation, Student Councillors and students present in the room were invited to ask questions about the proposed changes to our democratic structures (further explained in the document SC-004).

This motion passed and the bye-laws will be updated. The new structure will be in place ahead of the next Elections period.  

You can find a copy of the full papers from the meeting, including reports and motions, here.

If you are interested in submitting a motion to the next Student Council meeting, all information is here - if you need support you can email studentrep@city.ac.uk or raquel.marques@city.ac.uk. All students can submit motions!

The next Student Council meeting will be taking place the 9th of February from 16:00 until 18:00 at BLG07.