Students have been hard to find at Labour conference.
There’s been plenty about universities, growth, skills, and place.
Most city regions with a growth plan want more graduates, although there’s less understanding of who’s coming and why they might be going.
Fewer still have worked out what that means for the years in between – that the people being recruited and retained also live there, and might reasonably expect a say in how the place is run.
With NUS MIA, pretty much the only session that has afforded students any agency has been a discussion organised by Russell Group Students’ Unions.
The question was how Labour could build a compelling offer to student voters. Will Jones, Liverpool Guild’s deputy president, chaired, and Sarah Jilani, Students’ Union UCL’s education officer, sat alongside an MP, a vice chancellor, a policy expert, and a pollster.
Rhiannon McQuone, a research associate at More in Common, described a gap between the sector’s language and the politics around it. Universities talk about civic agreements, contributing to their places, and giving something back. Around conference, pride in place means something different – roots, generations, and the ability to stay where you grew up and get on.
Deep down, you get the sense that wonks here think students are people not from there, and people who won’t stay there – which was likely their experience. When I was a student…
Either way, students still need somewhere to live, a bus that gets them home, and streets where they feel safe. Three years is a long time to wait for your needs to count.
Abtisam Mohamed, the MP for Sheffield Central, noted that housing, transport, and investment in communities already amount to an offer to students, because students live in the cities those policies are meant to improve. Put them inside those decisions and much of the supposed difficulty in identifying a student agenda disappears.
She described the joint student assembly run by Sheffield and Hallam SUs, which brings students together with politicians and local decision makers on housing, transport, and night-time safety. Sheffield SU gives it an explicit purpose – to hold those with the power to make change accountable to students.
Mohamed wanted to go further, with a student voice on the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority board where devolved money is allocated. Listening to students describe the bus they can’t afford has more potential if they also have a place in the discussion about what the transport budget should do.
Jones described the Guild’s existing work with Steve Rotheram’s team in Liverpool City Region. Chris Day, Newcastle’s vice chancellor, described a civic university working with its combined authority, connecting the university’s strengths to the regional economy and giving graduates reasons to stay.
Those two activities belong together, as long as the desire to retain graduates doesn’t swallow the question of how people live while they’re studying. A city can be ambitious about the skilled workforce it wants in five years and still make life needlessly hard for the people acquiring those skills now.
John Blake, director of the Post-18 Project, favoured devolution but added a caution – a model built for mayoral speed could reproduce centralised power with weaker scrutiny. Moving a decision closer to students doesn’t automatically give them more influence over it.
His more encouraging point was that organised students are among the most legitimate and best-organised groups available to hold those new centres of power to account. SUs already have elections, representatives, casework, and a constituency. A mayor looking for someone to talk to about student housing needn’t commission a stakeholder-mapping exercise.
McQuone’s account of her focus groups then complicated the familiar story of a country divided between demanding young people and resentful older ones. Older participants talked about grandchildren, housing, and food banks, and students defended pensioners over winter fuel. There was more recognition of shared financial insecurity than the generational argument sometimes allows.
She described students losing trust in the deal they’d been offered, worn down by political instability and short of control over their own lives. Follow the educational route, work hard, get the qualification, and secure a decent future – a hard promise to believe in when getting through the present requires another shift.
Jilani described students working several jobs and still struggling to cover their costs, and the growth of food bank provision.
Not normal but normalised.
RGSU’s March 2023 cost of living report found that 25 per cent of respondents to the relevant question regularly went without food or necessities because they couldn’t afford them.
Mohamed said that without a maintenance grant she probably wouldn’t have gone to university. At her Sheffield surgeries, students were coming to tell her they were struggling. She was also worried about those deciding much earlier, watching siblings and friends endure poverty and concluding that university couldn’t be for them.
A young person can believe every claim about the benefits of higher education and still conclude, perfectly rationally, that they can’t afford the years required to get them.
Blake’s starting point was that Labour should be able to tell someone they can go, they can afford to stay, and the experience will add value. He argued that all three promises had been degraded, and that conflating students with graduates was obscuring the most immediate failure.
An interest rate announcement can speak to the distress of watching a loan balance grow. But income-contingent repayments are calculated from earnings above a threshold, so reducing the balance through lower interest doesn’t by itself reduce the monthly deduction while a borrower remains liable. Nor, more importantly, does it increase the maintenance payment available to someone starting this term.
Jilani’s demands covered maintenance tied to the real living wage, repayment thresholds, postgraduate funding, and alternative finance for students who can’t take interest-bearing loans. A settlement designed around one imagined undergraduate will leave plenty of people struggling outside it.
Blake also warned about what happens if maintenance rises while the housing problem stays untouched. In a market where students have little choice, more money to pay rent can become more money collected by landlords. It was an argument for making support and housing policy work together, with some attention paid to who gets the benefit.
When Jones asked the panel whether they’d go to university if they were 18 again, everyone said yes. Of course they did – an MP, a vice chancellor, a higher education policy expert, a researcher, and a student officer were always going to produce an uncontroversial round of answers.
Jilani offered up a qualification. Her younger self wouldn’t have expected to be at party conference doing what she was doing, but if the financial pressures continue, university can stay worthwhile while moving out of reach. The benefit survives – access to it depends more and more on what your family can afford.
Blake also challenged the enthusiasm for apprenticeships that had followed him around conference. A route on which you’re paid and don’t incur tuition fee debt has an obvious attraction. We should be careful about reading that attraction as a verdict on the educational value of the alternatives.
Mohamed would choose university again too, while pointing to the difficulty of finding an apprenticeship for her nephew. She wanted humanities and creative subjects protected alongside the expansion of technical routes. A choice of routes requires the routes to exist, and the ability to live while taking them.
Day’s frustration was with a political conversation that expects universities to help deliver industrial renewal while repeatedly questioning their value. His account of opportunity, partnership, and confidence depended on talent having a chance to develop, students helping shape policy, and a credible relationship between education and the future economy.
The ambition also depends on institutions surviving in a state capable of delivering it. Mohamed argued that student support and university sustainability have to be addressed together. Protecting someone’s ability to enrol achieves less if the course, support, and wider opportunities they enrolled for are then steadily dismantled.
Blake wanted government to take a more active role in shaping the system – funding federations, mergers, and reconfiguration ahead of crisis, and using some form of student number control to direct investment strategically. His case was for more higher education, with more deliberate decisions about where and how it’s provided.
There are proper arguments to have about who should exercise that power and what should constrain it. A regional strategy could expand opportunities for people currently excluded, or narrow their choices to the courses local employers happen to want. A merger could protect provision or leave students travelling further for less. Calling the process strategic won’t settle those choices.
The people studying through the reorganisation will need something stronger than an invitation to describe its effects afterwards. Jilani’s point about mature, part-time, and carer students was especially relevant – those with the least time to advocate for themselves depend heavily on the institutions taking their fees to represent their interests.
Mohamed also challenged SUs to stop trimming their demands in advance to whatever they think government might concede. Ask for what students need, she argued, because the compromises will come soon enough.
RGSU had at least created a room in which those needs could be discussed together, and Mohamed’s proposal provided a test of what happens next.
As devolved funding decisions are made in South Yorkshire, will students get a voice on the board – and how much influence will it carry when their priorities compete with everyone else’s?