As well as representing you to College, the Union also works hard to represent you nationally. As you'll know, we're not affiliated or involved with the National Union of Students, and so we have to come up with our own responses, reports and views on national policy, and indeed on NUS's proposals. Personally, I think this is a much better position to be in - we get to lobby our MPs with 30-page reports we have written, specifcally representing just Imperial students. I think this is much better than getting a one-line mention in an NUS report - particularly since sometimes we do disagree, or hold different priorities to NUS.

This year we've responded to numerous national calls for evidence, and written to our local MPs a couple of times sharing with them our views. The most recent case of this was with regards to postgraduate taught funding and fees. 

The NUS set out their ideas for how they think postgraduate taught programmes (Masters courses) should be funded and fees kept low. They wanted to cap fees, cap the number of students per institution and introduce a state-backed loan. Our Union Council was against this - it would be a disaster for a STEM only institution like Imperial (our courses cost a lot more to run on average than a University with low-cost courses like arts and humanities). It would also mean that students who were academically able to attend the best universities might not be able to due to a quota - ie, the NUS would rather students were spread throughout institutions, but we'd prefer to see those who could attend the highest ranking institutions be able to do so. The NUS proposal also had no maintenance element (to cover living costs), which, for a London institution isn't ideal. So we wrote our own proposal, sent it to our local MP, who liked it and made representations to the Minister for Universities. We received a response from the Minister just last week explaining that he too favoured the hybrid Professional & Career Development Loan (PCDL) model we'd proposed (which i'll explain in a bit), and that he was looking at a number of similar models to progress in the future.

So, what did we propose? After talking to the College's Chief Financial Officer, who said he'd be interested in investigating our proposal further, the Union Council came to the decision that it favoured PCDLs over anything else, as they a) didn't cap the number of places, b) incldued enough cash for a maintenance element, and (in our hybrid model) c) could be competitive if (as the College's CFO said he'd investigate) they could be backed by the College's large balance sheet - reducing the interest rate. The Minister also wrote that NUS's model wouldn't be implemented - so If Imperial introduced this, we'd genuinely have one of the most attractive offerings out there, with accessible and low interest loans available to help students study. If the whole sector introduced it, we wouldn't be "special" as such, but at least lots more students than Imperial could ever teach would have access to lower rate loans.

So we may not be a part of a national student body, but we certainly still have a voice - in fact one that was listened to! If something like this does get introduced nationally, you heard it here first... Imperial College Union Council proposed it!