Second Working Group on Student Welfare
Last weekend (18 – 20 December 2015) the Working Group on Student Welfare had its last face-to-face meeting in Helsinki, Finland. The Working Group consists of representatives of OBESSU Member Organisations ASuBiH, SLL, SIF and CANAE, OBESSU Board Member Oona Heiska, with the support of the OBESSU Project Officer.
After the first Working Group meeting in Madrid in May, where its members started defining student wellbeing and welfare, planned the work throughout the year, planed the case studies in Slovenia, Spain and Iceland; the year has come full of work and events that needed to be evaluate and its results collected.
This second and last Working Group meeting aimed at collecting the results of the case studies in the three different countries; meet with the Finnish organisations to get an overview on the situation of student welfare in Finland; evaluate the results of the Convention on Student Welfare, Wellbeing and Social Autonomy; write the OBESSU policy paper on student welfare; decide how to communicate the results of the working group; evaluate the year and plan the next steps of the work.
This was a productive long weekend that started on Friday with the WG members sharing and exploring the results of the three case studies. Interesting outcomes where found related to the perception of school students. For example, most of the case studies found out that school students are not informed of the policies and social services that are available for them. The WG assessed this as an important result and is evaluating how to include it in the policy recommendations that will be produced.
On Friday afternoon, the WG had the chance to meet with representatives from SLL, SAKKI and FSS, the OBESSU Member Organisations from Finland. It was a very interesting meeting to find out what are the main issues and challenges that Finnish students face regarding their wellbeing. One of them, for example, related to the budged cuts on VET education, or an upcoming reform of the health system. The Finnish organisations are following these developments and assessing what will be the impact on the student wellbeing.
Saturday morning, the WG evaluated the results of the Convention on Student Welfare, Wellbeing and Social Autonomy that took place in Cluj-Napoca at the beginning of November. During the Convention participants explored student wellbeing and started defining the social policies they thought should be in place to ensure this wellbeing. The WG compared the results to the ones from their meeting in Madrid and started to work on the OBESSU policy paper.
The redaction of the policy paper on Student Welfare took more than one day and a half and it was a long, tiring but also very productive process. The WG members tried to bring coherence to the document, to include all the proposals coming from the Member Organisations and its different approaches and to make the document as concrete as possible. At this point there is still a lot of fine tuning to do but it is looking very good. The WG will continue working on it over the winter break and in January it will be shared with the OBESSU Board. After their input, the document will be shared with all the OBESSU Member, Candidate and Affiliate Organisations for a comment round before officially proposing it to the General Assembly for adoption. There will be plenty of opportunities for OBESSU members to input and make this policy paper relevant for the platform.
The meeting ended with the WG deciding on the communication of the results of the year and an evaluation of the whole process. Everyone in the group was really satisfied with the work done and are looking forward to continue with the policy paper to propose it to the General Assembly in 2016.
Keep an eye to our website and to your emails because in the next months you will receive news from the Working Group and the policy paper! #WGWelfare
Note: The Working Group on Student Welfare was possible with the economical support from the European Youth Foundation of the Council of Europe.
Special thanks to FSS for hosting the WG meeting in Helsinki!
