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Wonkhe SUs · The 2026 webinar box set

The history of students' unions: where we've been, and where we're going

If you want to know where we're going, you'll need to know where we've been. This session digs into the origins of students' unions and summarises their role and history through the major higher education debates of the past century.

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Wonkhe's Jim Dickinson is joined by Mike Day – who has worked in and around the student movement for nearly fifty years – for a whistle-stop history of students' unions in the UK. From medieval Bologna to the Education Act 1994 and the arguments still raging today, it's a tour through where unions came from, why they look the way they do, and why the mix of representation and activities has mattered at every turn.

What we cover

  • The medieval roots of student representation – the student-led university at Bologna versus the masters-led model at Paris, and how each shaped Oxford, Cambridge and the Scottish ancients
  • The rector – from Frederick Barbarossa to Gordon Brown at Edinburgh – and how the idea of a student voice in governance reached Britain via Scotland
  • The first student representative councils and the first purpose-built union building, and how Scotland had unions and a national body (1889) decades before England
  • Why NUS was founded in the 1920s out of post-war international idealism – and the early split between "practical" and "political" approaches
  • The communist era, the wartime attempt to shut NUS down, the first woman president, and the Charter of Student Rights
  • The long argument over academic judgement, in loco parentis and the age of majority – and how good evidence on grants and welfare earned students a seat at the table
  • The 1960s and 70s: LSE, Paris '68, dropping the 'no politics' clause, and the radicalism that changed how students were perceived
  • No-platform, Conservative students, disaffiliation campaigns and some very early misinformation
  • The 1980s squeeze: the 1980 block grant change, attacks on student support, and battles over voluntary membership and freedom of speech
  • The showdown over the Education Act 1994 – what the government wanted, what it got, and why a similar fight today might go differently
  • The through-line: why the mix of representation and activities means unions should be nurtured rather than derided

Things to read

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