Earlier in the day, delegates had engaged in futurecasting – but in the afternoon at Celtic Connections, it was time for a bit of nowcasting.
CounterCulture’s James Coe started by mapping the changing landscape of student democracy, and his opening observation cut straight to the heart of contemporary student representation – “Democracy is a process, not an event.”
His session, delivered alongside Phil Benton and Alan Roberts from Counterculture LLP (slides), challenged fundamental assumptions about how student voice operates in an era of profound change. Rather than tweaking existing structures, they asked delegates to imagine democracy rebuilt from scratch.
Three seismic shifts are reshaping higher education in ways that render traditional democratic structures increasingly obsolete.
The cost of living collision
The mathematics of modern student life no longer add up. Where previous generations might work for discretionary spending, today’s students work simply to survive. The maximum maintenance loan in England sits at £10,227 while actual living costs approach £19,000 annually.
This isn’t just about financial hardship – it’s about time poverty fundamentally altering democratic participation. When 71 per cent of less advantaged students work beyond the recommended 15-hour weekly limit, the traditional assumption that students have time for lengthy council meetings becomes absurd.
“I came from the background of not much cash,” one speaker reflected on their own student experience. “I got full grant bursary from my university that seems unbelievably generous now. It gave you loads of time just to fluff about, to hang about, all my minutes to build connections, to go to sleep.”
That luxury – the luxury of democratic participation through time abundance – has evaporated for most students. The challenge isn’t designing better meetings – it’s accepting that democracy must happen within the 20-minute windows between work shifts.
The composition transformation
Student bodies themselves have fundamentally changed. The presumption that democracy serves undergraduate audiences with “somewhere between three and seven years to kind of do stuff” increasingly mismatches institutional reality.
Degree apprentices have different needs from traditional undergraduates. International students face distinct barriers to engagement. Postgraduate numbers have surged while undergraduate patterns shift. Yet democratic systems remain “largely geared towards their home undergraduate base in most places,” creating systematic exclusion of growing student populations.
The vicious cycle becomes obvious: meetings scheduled for 2pm on Tuesday afternoons exclude working students, who then can’t influence the issues that meetings discuss, which continue to reflect the perspectives of those privileged enough to attend.
The sector’s structural crisis
Beyond individual institutions, the entire higher education landscape faces existential pressures. Universities are cutting costs, reducing support services, and questioning the value of autonomous student representation. Students’ unions find themselves simultaneously expected to do more with less while proving their worth through metrics that capture neither their advocacy nor their democratic functions.
This context shapes every democratic innovation. When institutions view student voice as a luxury rather than a necessity, experimental approaches must demonstrate immediate value or risk being eliminated entirely.
Mapping the possible
Coe’s most valuable contribution was visual – a matrix plotting democratic activities across two axes: from student-led to SU-led vertically, and from highly organised to organic horizontally.
Traditional democratic structures cluster in the bottom-left quadrant: officer elections, student councils, all-members meetings. These are SU-led and highly organised—the formal machinery of institutional democracy that emerged when students had time and institutions had resources.
But innovation happens elsewhere. Student-led referenda bypass institutional gatekeeping. Community organising builds power outside formal structures. Officers meeting students informally creates democratic moments without democratic machinery.
The matrix reveals democracy’s true landscape – most meaningful engagement happens through improvised encounters rather than constitutional procedures.
Participatory budgeting emerges as one promising innovation – structured enough to handle real resources, student-led enough to maintain legitimacy. When students directly allocate funding for priorities they’ve identified, democracy becomes tangible rather than symbolic.
Sortition – randomly selecting students for deliberative roles – challenges the assumption that only the politically motivated should participate. Communities of interest allow identity-based organising while maintaining connection to institutional decision-making.
But perhaps most intriguingly, the session explored how WhatsApp groups and informal networks increasingly drive democratic activity. One speaker described arriving at a consultation to find 20 students had already coordinated their response: “Don’t worry, I’ve got 20 students to contribute already. Here’s what they think.”
This isn’t democratic failure – it’s democracy adapting to technological and economic realities.
The stress test
The session’s most provocative element involved imagining extreme scenarios that amplify current pressures. Three “new rules” forced participants to think systemically about democratic resilience:
- Rule one limited all democratic engagement to 20-minute interactions – reflecting genuine time poverty among working students.
- Rule two removed all maintenance support, making full-time employment alongside study universal.
- Rule three eliminated central student unions entirely, locating all activity at department level.
These weren’t predictions but stress tests, designed to reveal what matters most when everything else gets stripped away.
The 20-minute rule forces efficiency and accessibility. The employment rule demands recognition that student democracy must accommodate working patterns. The departmental rule challenges assumptions about scale and collective identity.
Participants initially focused on problems these rules would create – loss of institutional memory, reduced collective power, fragmented advocacy. But the exercise included a second phase – identifying valuable innovations that might emerge even without these constraints.
In other words, if some ideas would fix these extremes, why not try these ideas in less extreme circumstances?
Now here’s an idea
Group 1 proposed using online forums for student discussions and created a “democracy ice cream van” concept, presumably a mobile tool for civic engagement. Group 2 focused on structural changes, suggesting comprehensive reprogramming of class schedules to accommodate different demographics and dynamics, along with investing in online platforms to diversify engagement opportunities through virtual and hybrid approaches.
Group 3 developed the most comprehensive set of solutions, including unique institutional hoodies to combat disconnection, multiple distributed social hubs rather than centralized spaces, and improved visibility of demographic processes. They also proposed implementing non-negotiable minimum policies for student organsations and inclusive leadership requirements that would reduce barriers to participation, alongside enhanced communication systems between different schools or departments.
James Coe referenced Henry Mintzberg’s organisational theory about culture being expressed through signs, clothing, and badges, validating the symbolic importance of some proposed solutions. The exercise concluded by having participants recognise that many of their constraint-based solutions were actually valuable improvements that could be implemented regardless of the original rule, demonstrating how creative problem-solving within limitations can generate genuinely useful innovations.
