Every summer, before the trains are booked, the hotels are reserved and the unfeasibly large order of unfeasibly large post-it notes is placed, we sit down and read the pledges that incoming SU officers made to get themselves elected.
This year we have coded and analysed just under a thousand of them, from winners and losers, across institutions large and small, specialist and comprehensive, and all four nations (plus a few from the Republic of Ireland).
For anyone reading from outside the SU world, every spring, on almost every campus, thousands of students put their names forward to become the next year’s full-time, paid, elected officers – the sabbatical officers, or “sabbs”.
From the outside it can look like a garish popularity contest of leaflets, lollipops and people in costumes. But the students who win spend a year working at the join between their peers’ urgent expectations and a sector that moves at the speed of a committee cycle, and the manifestos they run on are one of the few archivable snapshots anyone gets of what students want from their education.
We read them not because every pledge is wise, but because together they show where the pressure is building.
Last year the question that fell out of the exercise was one of ambition – whether a cohort making historically modest demands should be encouraged to reach for the stars, or gently prepared for a sector with almost no capacity to deliver even the basics. We were torn, and still are.
This year the question has changed, because the cohort has changed. The class of 2026 is not apathetic, and it is not just unambitious. It is precise about a promise that just doesn’t add up.
They imagine students as short of money and short of time, frequently commuting, usually working, uncertain about the rules and worn down by systems that don’t join up. And so their manifestos are full of timetables, deadlines, buses, food, recordings, microwaves, room bookings, application processes and unanswered emails.
Read them together and the headline isn’t cost of living, and it isn’t mental health, though both are everywhere. It is that they were promised a day at Alton Towers but could only get on two rides. And were never told that unless they bring their own sandwiches, they can’t afford lunch.
Students were sold a complete university life – an education, a community, a career head start, independence, a transformation – and have discovered that those goods now compete for the same scarce hours and the same empty account.
You can’t, it turns out, have it all. The thousand small pledges about buses and microwaves and reading weeks are what it looks like when a generation tries to make an impossible promise fit inside a real life.
The university, as advertised
Let’s kick off with the thing almost every set has in common – a sense that the advertised experience and the delivered one are not the same thing. It comes out with unusual bluntness at the merged City St George’s, where the presidential offer is free of euphemism:
Scrap the 9am: push back unnecessary 9am starts. Better timetables and online lecture attendance: fewer gaps, no more coming in for just one class.
Ag Agarwal, President, City St George’s SU
No more coming in for just one class” is the whole theory. The imagined student is a commuter and a worker, and the institutions we’re reading about are designed around a student who is neither. At Worcester the framing is almost affectionate about it:
I’ve lived that “Worcester juggle” and I believe the SU can do more to catch you when you trip… advocating for “Pay-as-you-Stay” parking, so you aren’t paying for a full day when you only have one lecture.
Naifa Juma, President, Worcester SU
The same instinct recurs across very different institutions. Over in Ireland, DCU’s academic manifesto reaches for compressed timetables and hybrid lectures for commuters. Southampton’s re-elected education officer wants to attack the inbox itself:
Reduce email overload through opt-outs and redirected comms; lobby for university-wide reading and consolidation weeks to ease Semester 1 burnout; transform vacant buildings into study spaces.
Joshie Christian, VP Education, Southampton SUSU
Portsmouth reframes the timetable itself as a menu the student, not the institution, should get to choose from:
Block or spread-out classes – you choose what fits your life.
Raiyan Rahman, Education Officer, University of Portsmouth SU
Notice what these are not. They are not campaigns for something new and better. They are campaigns for the removal of obstacles that should not have been there – a 9am with no purpose, a journey made for a single seminar, a timetable released too late to plan a shift around, an inbox nobody can get on top of.
When you know the B conditions and the Quality Code as well as we are paid to, it is faintly dispiriting to see so much energy spent asking for accessible materials and a working VLE.
But it is also a signal – this is a cohort that has stopped assuming the system works, and has decided that making it understandable is a project fit for a year of their lives.
A microwave of one’s own
The word “belonging” is still everywhere. What has changed is that it has almost entirely stopped meaning welcome events and friendship campaigns, and started meaning infrastructure.
For the class of 2026, belonging is somewhere to sit between classes, an affordable meal, a hot tap, a quiet room, and a way to get home after dark. At City St George’s, one officer wants belonging built out of hardware:
Expand community spaces: departmental common rooms with accessible microwaves and hot/cold water stations.
Maham Omer, Officer, City St George’s SU
At DCU, the community platform is built around a commuter hub and, memorably, microwaves for students stuck on campus between lectures. At Imperial, the welfare candidate treats accessibility not as a favour but as a standard to be audited:
My priority would be to extend and build this sense of belonging for every student as we all deserve to have a home away from home… a full accessibility audit with time-bound improvements.
Sarah Azam, Deputy President (Welfare), Imperial College Union
At Durham, the community officer reaches past the physical fittings to the evidence, promising systems that flag the physical and sensory demands of an activity before a student commits to it – and cites the stat that explains why:
Less than 40% of university students who are diagnosed with autism complete their university education.
Alex Evans, Community Officer, Durham SU
Inclusion is being relocated into the ordinary architecture of the day. The underlying argument is that a student can’t feel part of a community they can’t afford, can’t reach, can’t make sense of and can’t physically use. It is a more materialist account of belonging than the sector’s own strategies tend to offer, and it comes from the bottom up.
Exeter pushes the same logic from the physical into the cultural. Its education and employability officer, Mia Taylor-Seal, treats classism and imposter syndrome not as personal deficits to be coached away, but as something an institution manufactures.
The project, as she frames it, is to change the systems, curricula and cultures that make working-class students feel small, rather than working on the students. It is a useful corrective to those that file “confidence” under student characteristics rather than institutional design.
The right to rest
Across the collection, the wall between education and welfare is melting. Deadlines, reading weeks, feedback, recordings and mitigating-circumstances processes are no longer discussed as academic-quality issues. They are discussed as causes of stress, exclusion and financial harm.
Mental health, in these manifestos, is not primarily a counselling-service problem. It is produced by course design.
Right to Rest – LSE’s culture harms working-class and neurodivergent students: reading weeks for all courses; remove assessments and deadlines during reading weeks so students get a real break.
Ardour Kelshiker-Williams, Welfare and Liberation Officer, LSESU
The same argument surfaces elsewhere. Southampton’s education officer wants reading weeks aligned for joint honours and course reps trained to challenge over-assessment. Nottingham’s re-elected education officer frames the whole endeavour in a way that would have read as impossibly soft a decade ago, and now feels like the mood of the year:
Let’s build an education system with ambition and kindness together.
Alma (YingYing), VP Education, University of Nottingham SU
At Nottingham Trent the same anxiety has hardened into a campaign with a slogan:
Campaigns such as Accessible Education Week and Deadline Stress Week.
Katie Booth, VP Education, Nottingham Trent SU
And it is not only candidates who think this way. When Royal Holloway’s students voted for the priorities that will bind their officers all year, the assessment calendar came near the top of the list:
Reduce deadline stacking for assessments and coursework. More student-friendly timetables.
Royal Holloway’s elected student priorities, 2026-27
This is a more sophisticated theory of wellbeing than perennial promises to improve awareness of counselling. It locates distress inside the timetable and the assessment calendar.
The better of these manifestos understand that “a reading week with no assessments in it” is a mental health intervention – and that the people who control it sit on an education committee, not in a wellbeing service.
Behind the bike shed
Follow the logic far enough and we arrive at the cohort’s most ambiguous feature. Across the collection, students’ unions are being asked to become a small parallel welfare state – to provide or broker food, emergency accommodation, housing advice, immigration guidance, hardship funding, safe transport, career mentoring, study space, printing, and increasingly the basics of survival.
Manchester’s Union Affairs officer wants support that does not simply evaporate when teaching stops:
52 week support: support for students virtually ends in the Summer. I would ensure the SU is present to support students who don’t have the privilege to move home through reduced storage costs and accommodation costs, summer lets in halls, and free community meals.
Anna Ward, Union Affairs Officer, University of Manchester SU
The LSE welfare manifesto goes further into improvised infrastructure – a shop for essentials, sewing machines for repairs, and free breakfast:
Create a LSESU Community Hub for students to purchase basics (grains, pulses etc) at below market rates and repair clothes with sewing machines… create the LSESU Breakfast Club so students can eat breakfast on campus for free.
Ardour Kelshiker-Williams, Welfare and Liberation Officer, LSESU
At Nottingham, the postgraduate and international offer is captured in a single, slightly heartbreaking phrase – the ambition not to thrive, but to stop merely coping:
I want to make sure postgraduates and international students are not just “getting by” at Nottingham… I want to publish a clear PG and International Survival Guide in my first three months.
Farhan Khan, VP Postgraduate and International, University of Nottingham SU
The provision reaches right down to the essentials. At Plymouth, one faculty president wants period products treated as a basic that no student should go without:
Introduce the Red Box Scheme… to ensure that more students can access products.
Emily Pinn, President (Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business), University of Plymouth SU
There is a version of this where the SU becomes so good at helping students survive defective systems that the institution is relieved of any pressure to fix them. It is possible to find a great many little wins behind the bike shed. The test of these manifestos is whether the immediate relief comes attached to a structural demand, or whether it lets the university and the government off the hook.
The better ones do attach it – DCU’s president pairs the same summer-survival instinct with a supply-side fix, wanting to import the Utrecht model of modular, prefabricated housing to answer shortages faster and at lower cost, having called first-year conditions in some halls “disheartening and dehumanising”.
The weakest position an officer can end up in is auxiliary service manager for problems others have created and have no incentive to solve.
The impossible bundle
Step back from the individual pledges and a single shape appears. What a university sells is not a set of lectures. It is a whole life – education, belonging, employment, independence, wellbeing, a network, a transformation – and the sheer breadth of that promise is part of what justifies the price and the upheaval of turning up for it.
The problem is that the class of 2026 has worked out that the parts of the promise now collide.
There is an older version of this. The promise made to an earlier generation of women was not simply that they could enter work and public life, but that they could do it while still carrying the domestic and emotional labour nobody proposed to remove or share out. New freedoms were added – old obligations stayed exactly where they were.
Students have been handed much the same deal. They are to attend and prepare, produce ever-better assessed work, hold down paid jobs, chase placements, build a network, acquire “future skills”, join societies, volunteer, keep up friendships, manage their health and graduate with a coherent personal brand. No single item is unreasonable. Their simultaneous imposition is.
Read that way, those pledges stop being grumbles about administration and become dispatches from a collision. Imperial’s Daniel Zhuo wants coursework to stop clashing with internship recruitment; Southampton’s Joshie Christian wants reading weeks and an end to over-assessment; City St George’s wants no journey made for a single class; DCU wants compressed timetables; Kingston wants recorded teaching because commuting and work turn attendance into a lottery.
The student is told employability matters, then recruitment lands on top of assessment. Told to join in, then priced out. Told belonging matters, then sent off to a shift the moment teaching ends. The shortage is not of opportunities. It is of the time, money and predictability needed to turn opportunities into experience.
It exposes an inequality the sector still measures poorly – the unequal ownership of time. A student with family money, a room near campus and no job can make the seminar, stay for the society, take the unpaid internship and still reach the bar.
A commuter with a job and a two-hour round trip is sold precisely the same advertised experience and can use almost none of it. Formally the same degree – substantively far less of it. Which is why the mundane-looking promises – recordings, bus fares, participation funds, a working microwave – are doing more than they appear to.
Kingston’s Belonging Fund exists so that kit and membership costs do not decide who takes part; Hull insists a team or community should not feel “out of reach”. Opportunity you can’t use isn’t really opportunity.
Students have been trained to read the collision as a personal failing – to hear exhaustion as poor time management, loneliness as insufficient engagement, a thin CV as proof they failed to grab every chance. Exeter’s Mia Taylor-Seal identifies the classism and imposter syndrome that grow in that soil; Durham’s candidates insist the place should be everyone’s, not just “some of ours”.
The slow, cumulative work of these manifestos is to shift responsibility back off the individual student and onto the design of the thing. It is also the collection’s unresolved contradiction – even as students report being overfull, the reliable way to win an election is still to promise more – more fairs, more workshops, more societies.
The better manifestos have noticed that addition is no longer the answer, and promise subtraction instead – fewer journeys, fewer collisions, lower costs, consolidation weeks. LSE’s “right to rest” goes at this directly, because it disputes the founding assumption – that every waking hour should be converted into academic, social or professional advantage.
Do it. Prove it.
If there is one phrase that captures the emotional temperature of the year, it is not defiance. It is a slightly weary insistence on proof. Officers reject “empty promises”, stress that they will “actually” act, and – above all – promise to close the loop.
It reads less like the usual demand for more student voice than a response to a collapse in belief that giving feedback achieves anything at all. One of Reading’s incoming presidents turns it into a slogan:
Do it. Prove it: a 2-minute survey every month, public results, real action, and students decide what changes next.
Ashmit Singh, President, Reading SU
Middlesex’s education officer makes the same vow, in almost the same breath:
Turn student feedback into visible change – not just conversations and surveys but action.
Temi Osinubi, Education Officer, Middlesex SU
At De Montfort, the same instinct has become a whole project, complete with hardware:
Expanding the Feedback Loop project – library station, QR posters, outreach stalls – to ensure feedback is captured, tracked, and clearly fed back through stronger “You Said, We Did” outcomes.
Precious Ikechukwu, Student Voice Leader – Academic, De Montfort SU
At LSE, the general secretary wants to turn the union itself inside out – minutes published, officers on the clock:
Publishing all meeting minutes from Executive Committee… so you know what we’re up to and can hold us accountable. Setting up “office hours”-style slots for Sabbatical Officers.
Amara Otero Salgado, General Secretary, LSESU
A more modest version comes from Edge Hill, where the promise is not that everything will be fixed, but that students will at least be told the truth about what can’t be:
If something can’t be fixed immediately, I would explain why and outline the next steps. Support shouldn’t feel like speaking into the void.
Kiran Hussain, Faculty of Arts and Sciences President, Edge Hill SU
“Speaking into the void” is not the language of a generation that thinks it will win. It is the language of a generation that has stopped believing the system is listening, and has decided that visible, auditable, closed-loop feedback is the least an officer owes them. It’s a diagnosis of institutional trust, dressed up as a customer-service upgrade.
We are so back
The other thing that marks this cohort out is how little appetite it has for reinvention. The characteristic verbs are “continue”, “improve”, “strengthen”, “protect” and “finish” – not “transform” or “revolutionise”.
Where previous years produced a fresh set of branded projects every spring, the class of 2026 is openly sceptical of the annual ritual in which each new officer abandons the last one’s work. Chester’s re-elected education officer makes the argument explicitly:
I am running for re-election because meaningful change takes time, persistence and consistency… I am standing again to continue what we have started together.
Luis Martell Correia, VP Education, Chester SU
At Kingston, the re-elected president simply campaigns on the receipts:
Proven results… real influence… finishing the job.
Hamza Haroon, President, Kingston SU
At Anglia Ruskin, the presidential offer includes an entire pledge dedicated to not throwing away existing work:
Every year, new officers bring new ideas, but important ongoing work should not be lost.
Roshan Lal, President, Union Anglia Ruskin University
And the anti-performative register reaches its logical conclusion at LSE, where the incumbent education officer refuses to ask for trust at all:
I won’t tell you to vote for Noor. I will show you the successes and wins I’ve already secured for students instead.
Nooralhoda Tillaih, Education Officer, LSESU
Winchester’s incoming president distils the whole register into a single promise:
Your voice is not just heard but acted upon.
Ellie Waters, President (Student Voice), Winchester SU
Call it compassionate managerialism. The tone across the cohort combines personal vulnerability with operational competence – candidates describe financial hardship, disability, migration, commuting and insecure housing, but generally offer it as evidence of expertise rather than only as a claim to be heard.
The recurring vocabulary is clear, fair, visible, accessible, honest, approachable, accountable, realistic, practical. It is reassuring rather than optimistic. The officer is being presented not as a campus politician but as the reliable person who will explain the process, follow it up, stay visible, and stop you being passed between departments. That is valuable. It is also, we’d note, a much smaller idea of what a student leader is for than we used to expect.
For all that sameness of register, a handful of manifestos are unmistakably of their place. At the specialist end, Arts University Bournemouth’s two sabbatical officers, Achilles and Lily Smith, campaign on paid commissions for student artists, a permanent online showcase, vinyl nights, cheaper on-campus food and a productive garden growing herbs and vegetables for the campus kitchen to cut costs.
At the other specialist pole, Loughborough’s sport officer campaigns on something no microwave-and-timetable union ever would:
This facility should feature saunas, ice baths and cryotherapy.
Annabel Lloyd, Sport Executive Officer, Loughborough SU
These are not generic pledges with a different university’s name pasted on top – and that specificity is itself an argument – the manifestos that read as interchangeable are usually describing an experience the institution has made interchangeable.
The ghost in the machine
AI has arrived in officer elections, but there is no settled student line on it – and the range is itself the finding. For some, AI is the answer to the daily grind of process. Imperial’s activities candidate offers a crisp diagnosis of SU bureaucracy:
Activities AI Helper – one ask, one complete process.
Sky Wang, Deputy President (Activities), Imperial College Union
For others it is a question of academic fairness, to be pinned down with clear rules – as at Nottingham, where the education officer wants guidance that “will lead to brainstorming and reducing workload without penalising students”. And for at least one officer, it is a cultural threat to be resisted outright:
I am firmly anti-AI and will work strongly to discourage the use of any and all AI generated content for SUSU and the wider University.
Harvey Penycate-Smith, VP Communities, Southampton SUSU
One sees AI as the cure for the very problems their colleagues are campaigning against. Another sees it as a solvent that will dissolve authentic student culture. Both are in the same collection, sometimes on the same campus. It is a good reminder that “the student view on AI” does not exist, and that anyone claiming there is one should be asked which student they mean.
Power back to students
Another line runs through the whole lot, and it is the reason we think this year’s story is more than “modest ambition”. Most of them operate at a low ideological temperature. But a concentrated minority – at Manchester, LSE and UEA especially – offers something markedly more political, and more structural.
The Manchester material is clear about why the temperature has dropped in the first place. Its Union Affairs officer diagnoses the very depoliticisation we’ve been describing:
The increasing squeeze in poor housing conditions, spiralling rent prices, fees and political repression has led to students and SUs becoming increasingly depoliticised… focus has shifted to student survival, as students rely on food banks.
Anna Ward, Union Affairs Officer, University of Manchester SU
Her colleagues then do the thing the rest of the field mostly avoids – they follow the money. The argument is explicitly about where it sits:
The university reported an £84 million surplus last year from our tuition fees. This money should be reinvested directly into student life… I will lobby the mayor Andy Burnham for discounted student tram tickets.
Hasan Patel, City and Community Officer, University of Manchester SU
And about who pays, and how much:
As a working-class student on the maximum maintenance loan, 70% of my loan went towards rent in first year. That is exploitative and unsustainable.
Hasan Patel, City and Community Officer, University of Manchester SU
The dividing line in this cohort is not “political” versus “non-political”. The Manchester and LSE manifestos are intensely material – they talk about breakfast, rent, storage, sewing machines and microwaves just as much as the apparently apolitical ones do. And the apparently apolitical manifestos make thoroughly distributive demands about food, housing and institutional resources.
The real difference is whether the problem is framed as an isolated service failure, or as a product of power, budgets and governance.
And that is where most of the cohort trails off. The manifestos are often exact about the desired output and vague about the lever. A £1 night bus, a 50 per cent meal discount, a subsidised canteen, lower city-wide rent – all memorable, all easy to want, and all sitting some distance from anything an officer actually controls. The exceptions are revealing because they identify where authority sits. Nottingham’s president names the rooms:
With Future Nottingham bringing course closures and restructuring, I will continue my fight for direct student influence in Senate, Council, and executive meetings.
Riffat Shaheen, President, University of Nottingham SU
DCU’s president spots that her university holds a majority stake in its own gym, and treats that ownership as negotiating leverage. At LSE, the general secretary offer turns a moral demand into a governance one:
Advancing the Targeted Divestment Campaign… increasing student engagement and mobilisation and pushing for student representation on the LSE Investment Subcommittee.
Amara Otero Salgado, General Secretary, LSESU
These officers understand something – that a manifesto is not a list of desirable outcomes. It is a preliminary map of power. The better ones read like workplans. Many read like wishlists with the mechanism left blank.
Speaking truth to power, revisited
Three years ago, Jim worried that SUs had drifted into a faulty theory of change – an insider strategy of meetings, committees and lobbying that was running out of wins, in a sector too volatile and too broke to keep saying yes.
The class of 2026 has, in a sense, answered that worry – and in doing so walked straight into its central risk. They have become expert guides to the machine. They can point at every seam where the university fails to work as advertised, and they have reorganised the officer role around making that system understandable, survivable and responsive.
Their virtues – persistence, clarity, visibility, empathy – are real and badly needed. But the danger named back then has arrived. When an officer’s core promise is to explain the process, follow it up and stop you falling through the gaps, the officer risks becoming the friendly human interface bolted onto systems they do not control. A more polished, more compassionate version of exactly the trap.
So this summer, as we dust down the slide decks, our job is not last year’s job of amping ambition up or tempering it down. It is to help this clear-eyed cohort turn its diagnosis of the collision into a map of power – to connect the free breakfast to the catering contract, the rent to the surplus, the reading week to the education committee, the feedback form to the seat on Council. Because a union that only ever helps students absorb the collision lets the system keep producing it.
And as we argued when we last read this many manifestos, more and more of the real answers now sit outside the university altogether – in transport authorities, housing legislation, mayoral budgets and the funding settlement – which puts a premium on the ability to organise students into pressure, rather than merely represent them in a meeting.
None of this, in the end, is a consumer complaint – even where the language borrows from one. When students reach for “value for money”, they are mostly using the only vocabulary the institution reliably hears, and the narrow, consumer-law version of the argument, the one about refunds and non-delivery, would help them. But it captures only a sliver of the actual claim.
What this cohort wants is not its money back. It is what it was promised, not lectures alone but the whole advertised life – education, belonging, work, independence, transformation – made livable, rather than sold as a bundle and delivered as a collision. They are not at all demanding more. They are trying to make an impossible bundle fit inside a real student life.
Our plea to everyone who will sit across a table from these officers this year – the PVCs and registrars and directors of this and that – is the same as it always is. Do not read the leaflet and file the pledge under parochial, naive or undeliverable. Ask why, not what.
Ask why an intelligent, exhausted, committed student decided that a working microwave, an earlier exam timetable or a survey that actually gets answered was the thing to spend their one year in office on. The answer is almost always more revealing – and more damning of the system they are inheriting – than the pledge itself. Listen for the experience underneath the demand, set about fixing that, and you will find the same manifesto point stops coming back every spring.
Do that, and you will get more than a workplan out of them. You will get energy, creativity, commitment and an unguarded love of the place – which, whatever else is true of the sector right now, is not in such plentiful supply that anyone can afford to wave it away.
