UCU demo must be step towards national fightback on cuts

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Adam Powell Davies, Socialist Students national organiser

Around 500 rallied in London on Saturday 10 May for the UCU ‘Protect Education Now’ national demonstration. The protest brought together workers from across the education sector to demand an end to cuts in universities, colleges and prison education.

Socialist Students brought solidarity, with members travelling from across the UK to attend. Our placard slogans and chants included ‘funding not fees, no staff redundancies’, and ‘money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation’.

Post-16 education faces its deepest funding crisis in decades. Currently one in two universities are cutting jobs and courses.

This Labour government, acting in defence of the capitalists’ profit interests, is determined to squeeze funding for education and all our public services. Only a mass campaign bringing together workers across sectors will be able to win the public funding that is needed to save post-16 education from the current crisis of marketisation.

That’s why this demonstration was significant – it was a glimpse of what can be done when a national lead is given. It was positive that UCU general secretary Jo Grady told the rally that the 10 May demo will not be the last national action in the campaign to stop the cuts.

Socialist Students supports calls by activists in UCU for 10 May to be a step towards building a concerted fightback, including properly preparing for UK-wide action, coordinated with other education unions.

The demo heard from UCU activists from Cardiff and Dundee universities, where staff have taken strike action and successfully halted compulsory redundancies this year. This shows the potential for UK-wide strike action to halt cuts. Any industrial action should be linked to a political strategy that demands full public funding, paid for by the super-rich.

Several speakers called for more lobbying of MPs. Socialist Students agrees with this approach, as it can help clarify who is on the side of our movement. But that has to be combined with a call for action from those MPs who claim they stand with us – like demanding they raise our campaigns in parliament.

Socialist Students has been organising lobbies of MPs through the Funding Not Fees campaign this year. In the run-up to the 11 June government spending review, we will be contacting MPs to ask that they submit an anti-cuts, free education amendment – to demand the super-rich pays for the crisis in post-16 education, not students and workers.

Socialist Students societies have also been busy organising Funding Not Fees protests and meetings around the country. This week at Bradford Uni we held a successful day of action against the cuts, with support from UCU and Unison branches.

Unfortunately, Socialist Students did not get the opportunity to address the 10 May demo. Two of our members asked to speak, to bring solidarity to UCU and talk about our campaigning. But despite being told there might be time at the end, the rally was cut short by 40 minutes without explanation.

There was one speaker bringing solidarity from students, NUS president Amira Campbell. Members of the Socialist Students steering committee will be meeting with Amira and NUS vice-president (Higher Education) Alex Stanley to discuss how to build a student movement alongside staff to end the crisis in higher education.

Staff and students unite against Bradford uni cuts

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TJ Diniz Mota, Leeds Socialist Students

Socialist Students held a successful day of action on 13 May, building a visible and defiant stand against devastating cuts proposed by university management.

Many shared sadness and disbelief at the university’s decision to axe its media and television course during Bradford’s tenure as the UK City of Culture. Culture means little to profit vultures.

There are proposals to stop their flagship chemistry course, close down the university nursery, and slash 300 jobs – an eye-watering 20% of the workforce.

The protest was backed by the University and College Union (UCU) branch. And staff from across the university came out in support.

Further solidarity was shown online by Unison union at Leeds uni, which promoted the protest in the days prior. Supporters of Bradford and Shipley Trades Union Council also attended.

Anger is growing

This action was the result of weeks of consistent organising. Through weekly campaign stalls, online promotion, and raising the issue at local trade union meetings, we heard the frustration and growing anger from staff and students.

Support wasn’t just garnered from the university community. Cars going by our action blared their horns in support, crowds across the street shouted their sympathies, and passers-by commended our efforts.

All of this just goes to show the growing awareness of austerity and the national crisis in higher education funding. Uni vice-chancellors are earning more than the prime minister, and making decisions at the cost of student’s futures and staff livelihoods.

There was overwhelming support for strike action in Bradford UCU’s indicative ballot. Socialist Students continues to organise, raise awareness, demand no redundancies, no austerity budgets, and free, fully funded education for all. Because a post-16 education is not a commodity.

College students fight back – fully fund our education

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Adam Gillman, Socialist Students national organiser

Further education is in massive crisis. Teachers and staff leaving, courses cut, high class sizes – the list goes on. Students face a cost-of-living crisis, unable to afford high transport costs and expensive food.

Afterwards, there is the prospect of crisis-ridden university education with mountains of student debt, or low-paid insecure work. Adult college learners have to pay sometimes as much as thousands to study.

Facing what can feel like it’s going to be an increasingly bleak future, stressed from exams, many students face mental health crisis, not helped by the terrible state of mental health services.

Further education has been underfunded for decades. Between 2010 and 2020, per pupil funding fell by 14% in colleges, and 28% in school sixth forms.

Further education faces a shortfall of £400 million. The Labour government has proposed a plan for £300 million, £100 million short, and way less than what’s actually needed for our education.

This is only the beginning. Unless we fight back and win, more attacks will come.

Job cuts

We can’t rule out mass job cuts, like what’s taking place at universities, where uni bosses have already announced over 5,000 job cuts this year.

The University and College Union (UCU), which organises college staff, has launched the ‘New Deal for FE’ campaign, fighting for more funding for further education, and better pay and conditions for staff. UCU is also opposing uni cuts with the ‘Stop the cuts: Fund higher education now’ campaign.

Students and young people should fight alongside the trade unions for properly funded, free education.

FE colleges are typically managed by education trusts, run as if they are businesses, with highly paid executives and board members. Students sit exams run by privatised exam boards too.

Socialist Students calls for colleges, as well as exam boards and all aspects of education, to be brought into democratic public ownership, with elected bodies of staff and students having control.

We fight for every step forward for students to get organised and fight back, including by developing and building student unions in colleges. Existing student unions typically have very limited democratic structures, shackled by college management. But every opportunity should be grasped to put forward what is needed.

The strike wave showed that by fighting back, we can win. When hundreds of thousands of teachers went on strike, they forced the government to give them a pay rise.

And students can fight back too. In London, Pimlico Sixth Form College students went on strike to protest racist uniform rules, and against removing black history month from the curriculum.

Hundreds of thousands of students and young people have come to the streets against the horrific genocidal attacks launched against the Palestinians. This led to the sacking of right-wing racist Tory home secretary Suella Braverman.

We’ve won before

During the Covid crisis, school and college student protests forced the Tories to back down on their plans to downgrade the exam grades for working-class students.

We can fight and win funding for our colleges too. That means fighting for a political alternative to Keir Starmer’s Labour – a democratic trade union-based mass workers’ party that fights for fully funded free education, against all the attacks on young and working-class people.

Funding Not Fees

Socialist Students is organising lobbies of our local MPs, to see where they stand on education funding, and whether they plan to actually represent us against this Labour government.

Will they join our movement for free, fully funded education, demand that big business foots the bill, not students and workers? Or will they stay silent, as this government destroys our lives and futures?

Funding Not Fees campaign – fighting for staff and students

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Adam Powell-Davies, Socialist Students national organiser

Socialist Students has stepped up our campaigning for a free, fully funded, and democratic education system.

We’ve protested against Labour’s rise in tuition fees on 25 university campuses. When sixth form teachers and university workers have been on strike, we’ve been on the picket lines.

Now we’re bringing our solidarity to education workers rallying against cuts at the ‘protect education now’ national demonstration, organised by the University and College Union (UCU) in London on 10 May.

The government is fuelling the crisis in education. Labour government ministers parrot their pro-austerity watchword of ‘efficiencies’ – cuts. That’s because the alternative – publicly funding education – is opposed by the big corporations and super-rich individuals that this government serves.

The best way to ‘protect education now’ is to build a mass movement for a real alternative to what this Labour government is offering – for free, fully funded education, paid for by taking the wealth off big business and the super-rich.

Socialist Students has launched the Funding Not Fees campaign to raise the kind of demands a movement could fight for now. Socialist Student members on the UCU national demo will be talking to trade unionists about the campaign, to ask if they would like a representative from Funding Not Fees to speak at their upcoming union branch meeting.

We also think that our movement needs a voice in parliament. That’s why Funding Not Fees campaigners are contacting MPs over the next month. We’ll be requesting that MPs meet with us, and pledge to raise a pro-free education amendment in opposition to any further attacks on staff and students in the upcoming Labour government spending review on 11 June.

Birmingham City uni: Build the strike against redundancies

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Tom Porter-Brown, Socialist Students activist at Birmingham City University

The University and College Union (UCU) branch at Birmingham City University (BCU) has begun strike action in reaction to the attacks by the vice chancellor (VC). A planned ‘restructure’ includes 36 academic staff redundancies.

The VC claims that his changes are to benefit students, but how is it in students’ interests when staff suffer job cuts, students are crammed into lecture rooms, and courses are at risk of closure?

It’s no coincidence that the VC chose to announce his plans at the end of February, because the time it took for the union to jump through all the hoops of the Tory anti-trade union laws means the strike has begun during exam season. Members think this is a deliberate move to try to cut across students supporting staff. He’s even gone as far as sending a mass email to students, telling us that “only 9% of staff have voted to go on strike and it should have a minimal impact on lectures”. 

He’s got that figure by counting all BCU staff, including, for example, caterers and cleaners, but has neglected to mention that not every staff member is part of UCU! Although the VC’s bending of the truth could come back to haunt him when students don’t get their grades back in time, and no doubt he’ll contradict himself and blame it on the striking lecturers.

UCU had a good first picket, staying for hours until the rally at lunchtime. At least 50 staff, students and supporters, including Socialist Students members, turned up.

Union members need student support, which several of them expressed, discussing with each other the best way to communicate the issue to their students. Socialist Students members are campaigning to help build that support.

Socialist Students members discussed anti-austerity and anti-war ideas with strikers. If Keir Starmer and his Labour government can afford massive military budgets, they can afford to plug the funding deficit in universities. We talked about how the unions need a political voice, a new workers’ party, to fight for that to happen, and that universities need staff and students in control of the funding and resources to run it for the sake of education instead of profit.

Youth unemployment: blame bosses not young people

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Tom Gibson, Bradford Socialist Students

One million people aged 18-24 are not in active employment, training or education, and have to rely on benefits or family support to ensure they don’t fall behind on rent, food and other costs.

Keir Starmer’s Labour government’s response to rising levels of unemployed young people – further attacks on the welfare state. This won’t increase employment but will instead drive more young people into poverty, making it harder to find job opportunities, particularly for those with disabilities.

As someone who has finished their degree and is actively trying to find work, it has been tricky. Even finding part-time work has been a struggle. In addition, finding financial support outside of the disability benefits which I receive (under attack by this wretched government) has been very tricky.

Young people are actively trying to find jobs or educational opportunities but, thanks to years of austerity, the decline of industry and the marketisation of universities, as well as rising housing prices and inflation, our living standards are rapidly plummeting. The capitalist system views young people as a resource to be super-exploited with low pay and bad conditions so pushes anti-welfare anti-education policies to “get them to work”.

Being out of employment or education shouldn’t mean being condemned but instead helped, both in regard to education and employment. There should be easier access to training programmes and an increase in well-paid public jobs. Unemployment and disability benefits should be increased and made easier to access. Being able to return to education, a luxury often only the richest can afford, should be accessible to all who want to learn a new subject or change their career path.

I am proud to be in Socialist Students which stands up to the capitalist narratives around young people, and fights for a system that would enable us all to live a stable and happy life. It’s not ‘shame on young people’ that so many are unemployed, it is a shame on our rotten capitalist system. While young people are stuck in low-paid jobs, substandard education or forced to rely on unemployment benefits, the richest in society are getting richer. The wealth and resources in society could provide decent jobs and decent living standards for all, if that wealth was used to democratically plan society for all our benefit instead of the profits of a few.

Unite for free education! Not war, poverty and racism

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Text from a Socialist Students leaflet

What future do young people have today? The wealth of the richest 1% soars. But all we get are countless wars and climate destruction. The cost of everything is getting higher and higher – from phone bills and food prices to transport fares.

Rent is unaffordable. Wages are too low. Education is under attack. And under Labour, things are only getting worse. In this cruel capitalist world, it’s no wonder so many young people struggle with their mental health. Some students don’t receive mental health support, due to underfunding – services for all young people are inadequate.

This Labour government has shown it is no different to the conservatives. Even before they were in power, Labour backed the Israeli state’s assault on Gaza. Since forming a government, they’ve raised tuition fees for the first time in nearly a decade, refused to end age-based pay discrimination, and announced plans to restrict disability benefits – including raising the age for young people to access Personal Independence Payment from 16 to 18.

Whether it’s enabling war and poverty overseas or attacking the futures of young people in Britain, Starmer’s Labour Party is always on the side of the super-rich elites and their capitalist system. Starmer has rolled out the red carpet for Trump to visit the UK, both of which defend the same capitalist system.

This capitalist system, prioritises short – term profit over the majority of people’s needs at every turn, from education and housing to healthcare, jobs, and the environment, as well as stoking racist and homophobic division.

There is an alternative

The resources exist to provide everyone with a decent standard of living. The top 100 UK companies hand over £80 billion a year to shareholders – money that could instead be used to fund high-quality housing, free education, public transport, and well-paid jobs.

If we took all the major corporations and banks into public ownership, run democratically by working-class people to meet people’s needs and not for profit, then everyone could have a decent well-paid job, a high-quality home, free public transport, and access to free education and healthcare. It would be a socialist society based on collaboration and solidarity between people, laying the basis for ending all war, oppression and where human need and environmental sustainability come first.

We can fight back!

We’ve seen the power of working-class collective action. When workers across the country took strike action in recent years, they forced both bosses and the Conservative government to make concessions on pay, conditions, and funding for our services.

If the trade unions can fight and win under the Conservatives, then they can do the same under Labour. Every young worker should join a trade union, get active and fight for a socialist leadership which could be fighting for a £15-an-hour minimum wage for all – with no exceptions based on age.

Students also have the power to fight back and link up with workers doing the same. Socialist Students members in colleges and schools have recently organised walkouts and campaigns against the war in Gaza, and also fought for the right to meet and discuss socialist ideas. We have seen huge movements initiated by students take place in Serbia, Bangladesh and elsewhere at the forefront of challenging capitalist governments power.

In 2021 students at Pimlico Sixth Form College in London went on strike to protest the racist uniform rules, and against the removing of Black History month from the curriculum. When we fight, we can win change.

But we need political representation for our movements. Labour won’t represent us. Neither will the Tories, Reform, or the other pro-capitalist parties. They represent the interests of capitalism whilst expecting young people to quietly accept a system that fails us.

We say: enough. It’s time to build a new political force – a mass working-class party with socialist policies that gives a voice to our struggles and a vision for a socialist future.

We say:

  • For fully funded, free education – introduce living grants for all students, scrap tuition fees and cancel student debt, and stop cuts to courses
  • Divestment from arms and big business – no place for profiteers from war and exploitation in our education
  • Mass trade union struggle for a £15-an hour minimum wage now! Ban unequal youth pay rates and scrap zero-hour contracts
  • End the housing crisis! For a mass building programme of high-quality, affordable council housing
  • Take the wealth off the super-rich! For the banks, monopolies and major industries to be owned and run by the working class to meet everyone’s needs, not the profits of a few
  • Build the socialist opposition to Labour, the Conservatives, Reform and all the establishment parties! Build a new mass workers’ party with socialist policies to give working class and young people a political voice!

Our education system has been decimated by years of cuts – first under the Tories, now under Labour. Class sizes have grown. Teachers are overworked. Mental health support is practically non-existent. Buildings are falling apart. And now, Labour is planning to raise tuition fees even further – while diverting funding toward STEM subjects and away from vocational and humanities courses.

Socialist Students is organising lobbies of our local MPs, to see where they stand on education funding – and what they plan to do to represent us against this Labour government. Will they join our movement for free, fully funded education – to demand that big business foots the bill for education, not students and workers? Or will they stay silent as this government destroys our lives and futures?

Find out more about the Funding Not Fees campaign

Socialist Students win free societies & more democracy at Herts uni

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Herts Uni Socialist Students featuring Morgan (middle)

Morgan Tritton, Hertfordshire Socialist Students

We started Herts Socialist Students in November 2024 and were frustrated by the inaction of the students’ union (SU) on our campus. At the University of Hertfordshire the SU has repeatedly defended the university’s actions over the interests of its own members – students ourselves. There is no real separation between the university and the SU which often echoes university management.

We investigated the SU’s governance, transparency, and action plan. We found little evidence of advocacy on urgent issues such as the cost-of-living crisis, tuition fee hikes, accommodation conditions, violence against women, and campus safety. What we did find, however, was stagnation – a culture that prioritises protecting the image of the university over fighting for the needs of the student body.

We raised our concerns at the November 2024 student council meeting. It took four months, and the submission of a formal motion, before any action was taken!

In April 2025, we submitted three motions: to improve SU governance and transparency, to allow free society memberships and open meetings, and to demand action on violence against women on campus. Prior to this, there had only been one motion passed in the last two years. We faced attempts to resist, delay, water down, or dismiss the motions entirely from SU staff. They downplayed safety concerns by citing a lack of official reports and claimed transparency had now been addressed and further student oversight was unnecessary.

We responded in full, challenged their narrative, and two days before the council meeting, the SU backed down. All three motions were debated and passed overwhelmingly. We came in force to a student council meeting to highlight inaction and received a positive response from students.

This fight is far from over. We are in contact with the SU President and Women’s Officer and will be meeting in the coming weeks. Our passed governance motion requires monthly officer updates, motion tracking, and scheduled council meetings, basic measures that should have existed already, and we will make sure these happen.

We are fighting to repoliticise and democratise our SU. We are organising not just for better policies, but for a shift in power on campus from unelected managers and bureaucrats to the hands of students ourselves, alongside representatives of staff unions. We must continue to scrutinise our SUs and question: who benefits from keeping students in the dark? Who benefits from an unorganised student body? University managements and the relationships they have with pro-capitalist politicians and big business.

The failures of Herts SU reflect a nationwide crisis across higher education, faced with a funding crisis universities constantly put their finances above the interests of students and staff.

As part of the Funding Not Fees campaign, we must confront every institution on campuses that facilitate poor student and staff conditions and rising costs for students. Compromised and undemocratic student unions, acting as extensions of university management, must be challenged as part of a broader fight for free, fully funded education, and fighting democratic student organisations must be built.

School cuts impact those that need the most support

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Protester on a demonstration against education cuts

Wren, North London

Due to the massive cuts to education by past Tory and now-Labour governments, many schools cannot afford to support every student that needs it.

This includes at my secondary school, where the number of both support and teaching staff has been cut drastically. In Year 7, I had a Learning Support Assistant (LSA), who helped with making sure I understood the content of the lesson, dealing with panic attacks and much more. However, in Year 8, she was fired and since then more LSAs have also lost their jobs.

There are now only around two LSAs per year group. This has put a massive strain on the school and has led to certain students being left behind because they are ‘high functioning’ and therefore do not ‘need’ support. Teachers either ignore those students because they do not speak in lessons, or they are deemed insolent and given detentions for asking a classmate a question that they would have asked their LSA if they had been there.

Staff shortages

Another example of how Labour’s cuts have impacted schools can be seen in how many classes are not even taught by the class teacher. Many of my classes are taught by a supply teacher, not because my teacher is not in, but because there are simply not enough teachers to teach every class. The English department in my school, along with many others, is horribly underfunded and understaffed with over half my lessons being taught by a substitute because the GCSE and A-level students have to have a teacher. This leads to many students being unable to learn the content that they will be using in their GCSEs because they are not taught by a subject specialist, or the supply teacher is sent the incorrect lesson content.

On top of that, students are overwhelmed with homework. GCSE students in my school sometimes take three different practice papers home from almost every class that are due in the next day or two to “fill in gaps in learning”.

Students overworked, taught incorrect content, and left behind because of staff shortages, because of Labour’s cuts to education. Students pay the price of these cuts, finding it harder to get jobs and suffering stress and depression as a result.

Socialist Students fights for:

  • A fully funded education system from schools to colleges and universities. Take the wealth off the super-rich. Pay teachers and school staff wages they can live on
  • End all academisation and kick private profit out of our education system
  • Democratic control of education by representatives of staff unions, student organisations and the community

Letter to NUS: Building a united movement for fully funded, free education

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The following is the text from a letter sent from the Socialist Students steering committee to Alex Stanley, Vice President Higher Education for the National Union of Students (NUS), on Wednesday 9th April.

Dear Alex Stanley,

As you will know, there is a major funding crisis in higher education which is hitting students, staff, and local communities. Over 5000 redundancies have been planned by the vice-chancellors this academic year, with up to 5000 more to come according to the University and College Union (UCU). Students continue to suffer from a devastating gap between our living costs and maintenance support, and our futures are stalked by uncertainty in a volatile world of increasing war, climate crisis and poverty.  

In response to the funding crisis in post-16 education,  UCU has launched the ‘Stop the Cuts’ campaign, which includes a national demonstration in London on Saturday 10th May. Socialist Students will be rallying as many students as we can to the UCU demonstration, because we think this event – organised by the largest trade union in higher education, as part of a national campaign against the crisis of marketisation – can be a vital staging point for building a united student and worker movement for fully funded, free education. But that is also why we believe NUS must do everything it can to seriously build for this demonstration.

We call for:

  1. NUS to encourage all students’ unions to arrange free or low-cost transport to Central London on Saturday 10th May, including financially supporting students’ unions to do so if necessary
  2. NUS to issue the call to all students’ unions to actively promote the UCU demonstration among its members – including: emailing details of the demonstration to students; organising leafleting sessions; and postering across campus
  3. NUS to produce a public statement in solidarity with the UCU ‘Stop the Cuts’ campaign
  4. NUS to hold a national online meeting, open to all who wish to attend, on the topic of, ‘How students can unite with staff for fully funded, free education’

We recognise that NUS has begun campaigning around funding for education, and welcome the ‘A Fair Deal for Our Future’ campaign, which includes the demand for better maintenance support. However, we believe student leadership has to go much further in raising what is needed for a genuinely fair and free education system for all. Socialist Students has launched the Funding Not Fees campaign this year, raising the following set of demands:

  • No to Labour’s tuition fee hike – scrap fees and cancel student debt
  • Living grants, not loans
  • Stop all cuts and closures on campus. End low pay and casualisation of staff
  • Divestment from arms and big business – no place for profiteers from war and exploitation on our campus

We would appreciate the opportunity to discuss further what ideas and strategy are needed to mobilise students alongside staff in a movement for free, fully funded education. To this end, please could we arrange a meeting at the earliest possible convenience between NUS representatives and members of the Socialist Students steering committee?

In solidarity,
Socialist Students steering committee