Staff-Student Consultative Committees (SSCC): Arrangements for 2020-21

UCL is fully committed to working in partnership with its students to place students at the heart of decision making and help to improve their experience while studying here. Following discussion between the Students’ Union (SU) and UCL last session, a number of improvements have been made to the SSCC operations and their terms of reference:

• Greater alignment of the SSCC terms of reference with the Annual Student Experience Review (ASER) Development and Enhancement Plan. This ensures that the SSCC and ASER policy and practice match.
• Placing the Student Representatives’ areas of concerns to the first discussion point on the SSCC agenda. This addresses previous concerns from student representatives that meetings sometimes ran out of time to discuss their own issues.
• Clarification in the SSCC policy that meetings can be held online - this provides flexibility for SSCCs and can also help more diverse or disparate groups of students to meet when holding physical meetings is difficult. The SU has created a guide to running SSCCs remotely for staff. 
• SSCC agenda and minute templates amended to align with and reflect the changes to the SSCC policy. 

SSCC Chairs and Secretaries are asked to note the following: 

• The SU manages Student Academic Representation in partnership with UCL. Training and support are provided to all students acting in a representative role. All students appointed as representatives should have been elected and returned to the Union by Friday 16 October 2020. Resources for Staff on student representation have been provided by the SU. 
• SSCCs should meet at least three times a year, typically once each term (though PG SSCCs and others may choose to meet outside of term-time if necessary, or where students request this).
• SSCC minutes should be produced within two weeks of meetings and forwarded to members and students (see below), as well as to the SU and UCL professional services at sscc@ucl.ac.uk. They should be approved by the SSCC Co-Chairs, but do not need to be confirmed by the subsequent meeting before distribution.
• SSCC minutes should be distributed within the department to ensure student awareness of the hard work that student academic representatives and staff undertake together to enhance their academic experience. It is advisable to post the minutes online using either Moodle or the Departmental website. You may also wish to request that students place them on the noticeboard for the new Virtual Common Rooms (VCR). They should also be reported to the Departmental Teaching Committee (DTC), to ensure further consideration of relevant matters.
• SSCC minutes are also used for a number of purposes, including tracking student issues across UCL which are reported to key committees such as Academic Committee.
• Any outstanding SSCC minutes from 2019-20 should be submitted to: sscc@ucl.ac.uk by 16 October 2020. 
• The SU has also set up a SSCC Staff Community MS Teams page to help support committees. You are very welcome to join this for the latest news on SSCCs.

Please also get in touch via sscc@ucl.ac.uk if you need any further support with running your SSCC. 

Thank you in advance for your cooperation and for all of your hard work on the SSCCs.

Mr Ayman Benmati, Education Officer, Students’ Union UCL
Professor Deborah Gill, Pro Vice-Provost (Student Experience) and Chair of the Student Experience Committee (StEC) and the Quality Review Sub-Committee (QRSC) 

Contact details for further information: sscc@ucl.ac.uk