The Membership Services Conference has always been a kind of time capsule.
Its programme – built bottom-up each year by practitioners from across students’ unions and the sector – offers us a glimpse into what people are doing, what they care about, and where the sector is heading.
In the early days, sessions mostly sat within neat professional silos – Advice, Activities, Democracy, Campaigns.
The focus was often about putting the basics in place: policies, procedures, and practice. Ten years in, a different story has emerged.
The boundaries between disciplines are blurring. Sessions aren’t just about delivering good services, they’re about rethinking them. More than that, they’re about shaping what it means to be a student in the first place.
Across the agendas, you can trace a subtle but significant shift from unions reacting to what students do, to proactively shaping the environments students live, learn and connect in. It’s a change in posture from observer, to advocate, to organiser.
From membership to movement building
One of the strongest shifts across the agenda for the Conference over the decade has been in how unions seem to think about the concept of membership.
Membership is no longer just a list of students or a mass mailing list, or even the genuine complexity of trying to reconcile their often-competing interests. Students’ union membership is increasingly understood as a layered ecosystem of participation, affiliation and identity.
Back in 2015, we saw sessions on using casework to inform social policy – a sign that unions were beginning to move from service delivery to systems thinking. By 2019, sessions like “Scaling Social Impact Through Student Communities” reflected a growing ambition to build capacity and connection across student groups.
By 2025, with workshops like “Building a Powerful, Influential Movement on Funding and Maintenance”, we see unions actively stepping into the role of organisers and power-builders. In that arc, you can trace a shift from observing and responding to social conditions, to acting on them and ultimately, to anticipating and reshaping them.
Movement-building isn’t an add-on anymore, For many unions, this will become core business.
This means more than getting people to join things. It feels like unions are really leaning into building sustainable, values-based coalitions of groups with shared and intersecting interests – who want to get things done.
In the many unions I’ve had the pleasure of working with, in Counterculture and throughout the Eurotours with Wonkhe, SUs have been increasingly focused on discovering new approaches to community, to connectedness and meeting students where they are.
It means staying close to the interests and identities of students in their lived contexts, not just engaging them in the structures of the SU. For some, that means supporting networks of students facing shared barriers. For others, it’s nurturing civic partnerships. In both cases, unions are learning that the most powerful organising is rooted in the local and the specific.
Liberation-first design
This one has crept in slowly. In the early days of MSConf, sessions about liberation were often focused on fighting discrimination and supporting marginalised students in spite of our systems – and rightly so.
What I saw in the development of the agendas over time was a shift towards designing those systems around those students to begin with.
The 2017 session “Liberation in Governance” began to explore how structures and systems could shift. Fast forward to 2020’s “Decolonising Student Voice Structures” and 2022’s “Inclusive Leadership in Representation Teams”, and we begin to see the change crystallising. More recent sessions like “Our Journey to Becoming an Anti-Loneliness SU” and “That Time We Banned Being Gay: Reimagining Safe Spaces” (2025) take an explicitly design-first approach to equity and liberation.
The goal isn’t just to be anti-discriminatory. It’s to be actively pro-diversity, with our unions intentionally creating services, spaces, and communities where liberation identities are centred rather than simply accommodated. The conversation is shifting from compliance, through advocacy and on to creativity.
Unions as anchor institutions
More unions are asking – what does it mean to be a permanent institution in a city or region, not just a bolt-on to a university? SUs are often more trusted than their host institutions, more stable at their core than they sometimes look or sound, and more rooted in local issues than many would assume.
That stability, combined with growing multi-community approaches, is beginning to produce a much broader civic role – and opportunity.
The 2025 session on “Students, Community and Partnership” is emblematic of this trend, as are earlier sessions like 2018’s “Civic Impact and the SU Role” or even 2015’s workshops on SU-run social enterprises.
We’re seeing more unions take active roles in housing coalitions, sustainability forums, or civic roundtables. We live in a time where civil society has been decimated. Some of these institutions cannot simply be switched back on. Our unions sit as both a potential resource for civil society, but also stand in front of great opportunities to advance collaborative and cooperative community-based agendas.
In time, we might see students’ unions playing a role closer to the Dutch or Norwegian civic associations, sitting within local welfare ecosystems, not outside them. That’s a big shift in what it means to be a union.
AI, data, and ethics
It’s obvious that AI will reshape every sector, and education is no exception. It’s already notable that in a number of cases, it’s been unions who’ve led the ethical conversations about AI’s use in assessment, support, and feedback.
The 2017 session “Predictive Analytics in Retention Work” was a sign of things to come. In 2024, we saw “Artificial Intelligence and Advice Delivery” a sign that unions are no longer waiting for institutional policy to catch up.
On Eurotours, we met Swedish and Finnish unions who had set the narrative for their universities – and in my view ours too – by encapsulating what their members thought about the ethics of AI, what the new definitions of fairness are.
What happens next will be messier – within this mess of wicked problems, w[JC8] e will need to think about how we regulate the use of AI in casework and in campaigning. How we interpret its impact on engagement, workload, or fairness. How to maintain human-centred ethics in a world of automated systems.
Unions could, and arguably should, lead that conversation. MSConf has shown year after year that these conversations don’t need to wait for sector consensus.
Workforce transformation
This one’s already started. Unions have increasingly professionalised over the last 10 years, but now they’re also adapting to a combination of changing financial contexts and the patterns, needs and opportunities that lie in the membership.
We’re seeing more student staff in career-grade roles, some moving into management. Sessions like 2021’s “Developing Student Staff as Leaders”, 2024’s “Student-led, Evidence-Informed”, and 2025’s “Workin’ 9 to Thrive” show the growing ambition in this area.
Interactions with US and European unions are increasingly highlighting a tangible truth – student leadership and staffing are more advanced elsewhere. From paid student managers in US college unions to student-delivered services across Europe, the question isn’t “can students do this?” but “why aren’t we letting them?”
This won’t just mean more student staff running students’ unions, I predict within five years we will have students actually managing teams of union coordinators (across a variety of interdisciplinary roles).
Meanwhile, the rise of micro-credentialing and skills frameworks could turn student employment in SUs into recognised, credit-bearing development, but that will require us to rethink not just roles and pay, but also purpose.
What does it mean to have student managers? Or a student-designed development month for staff? We’re going to find out. And when we do, it might just challenge wider sector practice in our universities too.
And something else?
There’s probably a sixth trend, hidden in plain sight: the way knowledge is shared across the sector has changed.
When Membership Services Conference began, session submissions were largely from known faces. (and sincere thanks to those big names!) But we have always managed to get an agenda delivered with one third of sessions coming from first-time presenters each year – even in 2015. The result is a real-time evolution of ideas, not just case studies, but prototypes, challenges, and provocations.
Sessions like “Rewriting the Rules of Representation”, “Fix-it Forums” (2025), the Laboratory sessions, the actually-do-some-work-workshops and going back to 2017’s “Co-designing Officer Training” reflect a different kind of discourse: one that expects co-creation, iteration, and even disagreement.
What happens at MSC doesn’t stay at MSC. And that’s probably the point.
Alan Roberts is Programme Director of the Membership Services Conference and a membership services specialist. He works with students’ unions and education organisations across the UK.
