‘FE has given me a major second chance’ - meet FE’s new student leader

Emily Chapman will succeed Shakira Martin as NUS vice-president for FE, after the latter was elected as the students’ union’s new president yesterday
27th April 2017, 5:40pm

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‘FE has given me a major second chance’ - meet FE’s new student leader

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“I think today it has sunk in,” says Emily Chapman, the new NUS vice-president for FE.

Ms Chapman, who has been student union president at Leeds City College for the past two years, was named as Shakira Martin’s successor as FE’s student leader at the NUS national conference in Brighton yesterday. Speaking to Tes, Ms Chapman says that her election victory has been “kind of a whirlwind”, but that she is looking forward to the year ahead.

“I’m very excited about the next year,” she says. “Especially with so much that’s going on with FE at the moment.” Ms Chapman will take over from newly elected NUS president Ms Martin in July. 

Like many college students, FE has given Ms Chapman a second chance. Her original “home” was at Leeds College of Technology (now Leeds City College), which she attended in 2005. “I had an Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) and careers and advice and things like that,” she says. ”[Then] I went to university and had to drop out in 2009 due to some poor life choices. I came back into education [at Leeds City College] in 2014 to do my foundation degree.”

Ms Chapman is now completing her degree in law and criminal studies, and has been president of the college’s students’ union since March 2015. “I’ve built the union from a back corner office into a big office in the centre of Leeds City College’s Park Lane Campus,” Ms Chapman says. Learner voice - a consideration of every student’s opinion on college policy  - is now embedded at the college, and she wants other institutions to place a similar emphasis on it. “One of my main priorities [as vice-president for FE] is learner voice,” she says. “Because the government is now understanding what learner voice is, and actually starting to accept it for FE.”

‘Lower the voting age to 16’

Ms Chapman says that as vice-president for FE she also wants to lobby to lower the voting age across the UK to 16: “I think there is a case for [the voting age to be lowered to] 16, because at 16 we can join trade unions. [But] we can’t vote, and that doesn’t make sense for me.”

Ms Chapman believes it is her “passion” that has got her this far, but that without FE she would not have been able to achieve all that she has.

“I’ve always said that FE has given me that major second chance and I’m always going to put back into it,” she says. “Because I wouldn’t be able to do things like [talk to journalists] two years ago. So I’m really grateful for what FE’s given me and I’m going to give it back in return.”

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