Two important policy papers adopted at ESU’s Board Meeting

VALLETTA – One hundred and twenty delegates from national unions of students gathered in Malta for ESU’s bi-annual Board Meeting from 2 to 5 December. ESU’s Board is the organisation’s highest decision-making body consisting of representatives from all the unions that are full members of ESU, or 47 in total. In the Board meetings the participants discuss and adopt ESU’s policies and strategic documents, the annual plan of work and a budget, membership issues and current topics that the member unions are working on in their national contexts.

Three year strategic framework

“In Malta, there were several interesting debates and important decisions on the agenda. ESU has now, for the first time, adopted a three year strategic policy framework that outlines the main topics and issues that we will focus on. We have identified four main areas of our work for the period from 2013 to 2015: access and support, education as public responsibility, quality and transparency and mobility and internationalisation. Based on these strategic priorities, the Board also approved the plan of work for 2013, which defines the work of the Executive Committee and three coordinators, and the budget that will enable us to implement it,” says Rok Primozic, ESU’s Vice Chairperson.

Social dimension policy paper
The Board also discussed and adopted a new policy paper on the Social dimension, which holistically approaches students’ views on the issue and deals with access, success and completion of higher education. This policy paper is already in the framework of the overall policy revision of ESU that will continue until the next Board meeting will be held in Hungary in April 2013.

New member at ESU
“At the Board meeting, we also discussed membership issues. We have expanded our network and now ESU also has a union from Armenia – ANSA (more about that can be found here). The board also granted candidate status to SCT from Turkey (more on this can be found here), meaning that a study visit will take place to Turkey in early 2013, which the decision on whether to grant SCT full membership or not will be based on,” Rok mentions.

A number of resolutions on different issues were also adopted at the Board Meeting that can be accessed here.

The Board Meeting took place in Malta.

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For more information, please contact:

Rok Primozic, ESU Vice-Chairperson: +32/479.126.390 // rok@esu-online.org or Robert Hlynur Baldursson, ESU Communications Manager: +32/473.669.894 // robert@esu-online.org