Jacqui Dredge Women on Campus

Hi, I'm Jackie. I am on the Bankstown Student Campus Council. I became involved in trying to get occasional care for students so my background is kind of advocacy. UWS was building a new child care centre and I thought that it would be better for students to have occasional care rather than long day care because long day care is expensive and it's not very student-friendly. So that was our campaign and we won that and now UWS is now going to run the occasional day care so we're quite proud of that. My reasons behind doing it is I am a single parent, and studying with children is extremely difficult. My role on the Student Campus Council is just to fight for women's issues and parents in particular and I set up a club called Uni Family Support and that's an online Facebook community that just helps parents work out what they need to do to get through university with kids. Women have a lot more responsibility with working, family, study. you're looking after things at home, getting kids to sport, all those type of things, so there is all that additional pressure and there was changes in the legislation to that meant that single parents lost their payment this year so that's put even more pressure on studying families and it's causing women to drop out at a greater rate as well so we try to just encourage people through uni family support to stay at uni where possible by just trying to talk them through to keep them in tertiary education.