Tag: socialist students

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.

Funding Not Fees campaigner speaks at Socialism 2024

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Cas Middlemas, Aberystwyth Socialist Students

Like most students right now, I’m angry.

We are required to take on tens of thousands of pounds of debt to receive a university education, an education that politicians like Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves never had to pay for

After paying ridiculous amounts, we enter into university and are faced with budget cuts and course closures.

Like many other young people, until this July, a Conservative government was all I had ever known and all I could remember.

This July, despite my best efforts, I deep down had a little bit of hope that maybe things could get better. But let me be clear, my hopes, and hopes of all students across this country, were shattered. Not three months into power, this government broke their election promises and raised tuition fees.

We don’t just stand against this latest rise in tuition fees, we call for all tuition fees for both university and college students to be scrapped, and for student debt to be cancelled immediately.

We call for the reintroduction of living grants not maintenance loans, and for them to rise properly with inflation each year.

We also stand in solidarity with university workers to end low pay, job insecurity, and bad working conditions.

At the end of the day, what we call for and what students need is for universities to be properly and democratically funded, paid for by taking it from the super-rich, not by raising the bill for students.

While we carried out excellent work protesting on Budget Day across the country, the campaign for funding not fees has just begun!

Join Socialist Students!

Scrap fees, end campus cuts!

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For full public funding and an end to marketisation

Free education for all!

Students are once again in the firing line! A statement released by Universities UK (UUK) at the start of the Autumn term has called on the government to increase tuition fees in line with inflation – again passing the cost of the ongoing crisis of the capitalist system onto the shoulders of students and young people. UUK has said that each student now costs a university between £12,000 to £13,000 to educate.

One in five universities is in deficit. The government and so-called experts say the problem is fees being frozen and not keeping up with inflation. So they want us to pay more – and face cuts and closures on campus. But in reality, our universities have gone underfunded for years.

Since the introduction of tuition fees, and their trebling by the Tories and Lib Dems in 2010, government funding for universities has been continuously slashed. Students and campus unions have had to fight vicious cut-backs by management – cuts to entire courses, jobs, and attacks on staff terms and conditions.

Meanwhile the student cost-of-living crisis rages on. The rents we pay on average are more expensive than the average available loan – so how are we supposed to be able to live, especially considering inflation has pushed up the prices of food, travel, educational resources and other cost of living essentials?

 But it doesn’t have to be like this. Socialist Students is fighting to build a mass movement to win the funding that our universities and students need – to reverse the cuts which have taken place on our campuses, replace inadequate loans with genuine living grants for students tied to the cost of living, and to scrap the broken tuition fee funding model altogether. Education should be free, fully publicly funded, with grants re-introduced.

When Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader, the party’s manifesto estimated that scrapping fees and re-introducing grants would cost about £12bn. Starmer’s Labour government has made it absolutely clear that it does not intend to cough up the funding our universities need. That’s because, just like the Tories, Labour now represents the interests of the rich and powerful in society.

Why should education be run like a commercial business? Britain is the sixth wealthiest nation on the planet. The FTSE 100 biggest corporations have been paying around £85bn annually in dividends to their shareholders. The University and College Union (UCU) has called for a £17 billion “education levy” on “profiteering businesses”.

That’s a good start – but why leave so much wealth and power in the hands of big business, which puts profit before need? If the enormous wealth in society was democratically owned and controlled by the working-class majority, we could plan society to meet all our needs. That includes education – how it’s funded and how it’s run should be determined by education workers and students and the wider working class, not fat-cat vice-chancellors.

The recent strike wave showed how governments can be forced to pay more than they intended – and those lessons need to be built on. Mass organised action is needed to build the fight for free education. Building a student movement starts with getting organised on campus with democratic decision-making, linking up with campus trade unions and local college students.

But students also need a mass political voice to give expression to our campaigns and movements, as do working class and young people more generally. If the Tories and Labour both speak for the interests of the super-rich, then we need a new mass political voice to speak for what we’re fighting for – including against attacks on our education, against war internationally, and for a socialist world.

As part of our movement, at the upcoming ‘painful’ (in Starmer’s words) budget on October 30, Jeremy Corbyn and the four other independent MPs, as well as the suspended seven Labour MPs, could use their voice in Parliament to propose full public funding of education for all.

We need tuition fees scrapped, student debt cancelled, loans replaced by living grants for students, all funded by taking the wealth off the super-rich. Some of this has been won before – many of the current MPs had a free education. An organised mass movement can win again. But to make such rights permanent means fighting to end the profit-before-all-else capitalist system. Socialist Students fights for free education, as part of the fight for a socialist world without poverty, war and exploitation.

No to further fee increases – get organised on campus to fight for free education! Cancel student debt, replace student loans with living grants tied to the rate of inflation. Make the super-rich pay!

No cuts and No closures! Build democratic student organisations to link up with campus trade unions and wider working class to fight the funding our universities need.

Kick big business off campus! End marketisation of our education. Open up university finances to democratic oversight and control including by elected students’ representatives and campus trade unions, with the power to terminate all contracts and research tied to war and occupation and profiteering and exploitation while guaranteering jobs and funding.

Students need a political voice. Build a new mass workers party that will stand up for students and workers that fights for socialist policies.

Fight for socialist change – For democratic public ownership of the banks, monopolies and major industry to provide us with a future.

How students can build a movement to stop the slaughter in Gaza

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We have witnessed a year of brutal slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, and increasingly in the West Bank too.

It has exposed to the world how capitalist politicians do not value human life, despite what they say about wanting an end to the conflict. Many people here in the UK have felt anger at the situation in Gaza, and taken to the streets to protest.

Many students have also taken things into their own hands, protesting against their university bosses, calling for divestment from arms companies and companies that prop up Israeli state terror.

School and college students have organised walkouts and protests in solidarity with the Palestinians. Towards the end of last term, student encampments were organised up and down the country, exposing universities’ links to arms companies and banks. Socialist Students members were involved with many of these.

We fight for the 7-million-strong trade union movement to be central. It is the threat of workers getting organised and fighting back that terrifies the capitalist world leaders, including in the Middle East.

It is a mass movement of workers and poor people, democratically organised and fighting for socialist change, in Palestine and across the region, that can point the way forward to an end to war and national oppression.

We call for an end to the marketisation of higher education and an end of the tuition-fee funding model. Universities are becoming ever more reliant on money from big business, including from arms companies such as BAE Systems and Lockheed Martin, due to cuts in funding from government. University education should be free for all, and fully publicly funded by making the super-rich pay.

The huge determined protests against the slaughter in Gaza have defied attempts by politicians and police to intimidate them. That defiance led to the hated Suella Braverman being sacked as home secretary.

Pro-Palestinian campaigners standing in the general election had a huge effect in a whole number of constituencies. Jeremy Corbyn was reelected, in addition to another four anti-war independent MPs.

That must be built on to deliver the new workers’ party needed to give a voice to the anti-war, socialist opposition to Starmer. Student protests this term can have a big effect too – and Socialist Students is determined to make them as effective as possible.

If you want to be part of the fightback, get involved!

What Ideas should students get organised around?

DISCLOSE ALL FINANCES!

Universities should open their books to a democratic inquiry by elected students’ representatives and the
campus trade unions, with the power to terminate all contracts and research tied to war and occupation,
while guaranteeing jobs and funding.

END MARKETISATION!

The government must fully fund education to disincentivise universities from gambling our fees on dodgy companies and ‘vanity projects’. Scrap tuition fees, cancel student debt, and reintroduce living grants for all students.

WE NEED A POLITICAL VOICE!

Winning a free, democratic, and genuinely ethical education system means fighting to take wealth and power off the capitalist elites. Starmer’s Labour government won’t even begin to fight for this. We need a mass workers’ party, with a socialist programme to end the capitalist system that breeds war and oppression.

MAXIMISE OUR STRENGTH!

Our movement would be strengthened if more students and workers joined. Socialist Students is calling for students to join us with:

• Mass meetings open to all who want to discuss how we can build a movement against war, oppression and capitalism
• Stalls and leafleting sessions, where we can talk to other students about any upcoming protests and action, and encourage them to join
• A rally with speakers invited from local trade union branches, and students from other universities, colleges and schools nearby
• A lobby of our local MP or councillors alongside other students, workers and trade unionists, to demand they explain their position on the Israeli state’s onslaught in Gaza

See more of our campaigning:

Build a movement to smash racism!

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Tens of thousands of students and workers came out onto the streets to confront attempts by the far right to mobilise racist riots. This magnificent show of solidarity shows the potential to build a movement that can smash racism – and the decades of cuts and rising poverty.

Desperate to divert growing anger at their system, capitalist politicians of all varieties and backgrounds have used racist scapegoating of immigrants to try and divert the blame for the crisis of their system. But, as Malcolm X said: “you can’t have capitalism without racism.”

Reform’s Nigel Farage is one particularly odious politician who consistently spouts divisive racist and anti-Muslim rhetoric. He is the highest earning MP, netting a million pounds a year in addition to his MP’s salary, all the while peddling the fraud that he is an anti-establishment ‘man of the people’.

But to focus entirely on him and his party lets the rest of the capitalist politicians off the hook. The Tories spent the last years in government talking incessantly about migrants on small boats and taking part in the expensive political theatre of Rwanda deportation flight plans in the hope of diverting blame and anger for falling living standards away from themselves.

The cost-of-living crisis, high tuition fees and student debt, low wages, high rents, the collapse of public services. These are the results of funding cuts and privatisation carried out by both Tory and Labour capitalist politicians serving the interests of big business.

But the Tories’ crushing general election defeat showed the huge anger at the attacks on living standards of the working class. It followed the huge strike wave and mass protests against the war on Gaza which have brought students and workers together in a common struggle.

Starmer has said there is ‘little difference’ between him and the Tories on immigration, and continues to support the Israeli onslaught on Gaza. The new Labour government is committed to a continuation of privatisation and cutbacks to public services, making the working class pay for the crisis rather than taking the money off the super-rich.

Those who defend capitalism want to divide the working class including by using racism. That weakens our ability to unite and fight against them and the rotten profit system they defend.

This latest surge of racist violence serves as a warning as to what can develop under a Labour government which is continuing with the Tories’ austerity policies – already cutting pensioners’ winter fuel payments and promising billions of pounds of further cuts, including to the education sector and universities. The election of five Reform MPs is a warning too.

The only way to successfully cut across far-right ideas getting a platform is for the workers’ movement to build mass struggle to fight for a socialist programme that unites workers against the bosses – for jobs, homes and public services for all.

If the 6.5 million-strong trade union movement was to lead a struggle for those things – bringing together workers and young people from all backgrounds – it would give an expression to the huge anger and discontent that exists under the surface in society.

The task of defending our communities from racist attacks, strengthening the level of organisation of students and the working class, and developing a workers’ political voice in the form of a new workers’ party– all go hand in hand.


The effect of a political voice that stands for the interests of workers and young people not the fat cats was glimpsed in the 2017 general election. It is estimated that one million UKIP voters switched to supporting Jeremy Corbyn’s programme of cutting tuition fees, council homes, security at work, and more funding for the NHS and other vital services.

Socialist Students campaigns for students to get organised on campus to fight for all of this. We want to build a united movement of workers and students to overthrow this rotten system of capitalism for good.

We fight for the socialist transformation of society, based on bringing the commanding heights of the economy and the banks into democratic public ownership. Under the democratic control and management of the working-class majority, society’s wealth and resources could be planned to meet all of our needs. That is a necessary component of the fight to end racism and all forms of oppression and inequality for good.

If you want to fight back against racism, war and inequality, then join Socialist Students and get organised!

No to racism and the far-right! Build a united student and workers’ movement for good jobs, homes and public services – including free education for all!

Fight to build a political voice for the working class – a socialist alternative to Labour and all the capitalist parties. You can’t have capitalism without racism!

Fight for a socialist world free from exploitation and oppression!

REPORT: Socialist Students conference 2024

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Organising the fight for a socialist world in schools, colleges and universities

Queen Mary Socialist Students member addressing the conference (Photo: Berkay Kartav)

Nearly 100 young socialists met in Birmingham on Saturday 10 February for Socialist Students national conference. Held annually to decide the political direction of Socialist Students for the coming year, the conference brought together student organisers from over 30 university and college campuses, as well as young workers and trade unionists bringing solidarity as visitors.

This year’s conference took place in the midst of the huge protest movement against Israel’s brutal onslaught on Gaza, which has seen thousands of students across the UK protesting. Delegates from a number of Socialist Students groups reported on successful protests and walkouts they had organised in their colleges and universities. Conference agreed unanimously that Socialist Students should “continue its campaigning to build a young, socialist pole of attraction within the current anti-war movement”.

The importance of building support for socialist ideas to end war was underlined in the opening discussion on the global crisis of capitalism, which outlined the growing fault lines for conflict around the world. Added to the deepening environmental crisis, the soaring cost of living and attacks to our democratic rights, the recent outbreak of major wars – first in Ukraine and then in Gaza – shows the dystopian character of capitalism today. That’s why delegates voted for Socialist Students to “reaffirm our commitment to fighting for a socialist world, free of exploitation and oppression”.

The rest of the conference was all about how Socialist Students groups go about doing just that – practically putting forward what steps we can take now to organise the fight for a socialist world within our schools, colleges and universities.

Socialist Students organisers reported different initiatives that they had taken, or were planning to take, on their campuses – campaigning for things such as rent controls in student housing and standing candidates in student areas in the upcoming local elections. Speakers emphasised the need to link our immediate campaigning demands to the fight for a socialist system, as the only way for improvements to our lives to be won on a stable basis.

All of those demands – whether it’s defending our right to protest, or ensuring we can afford to keep a roof over our head – point to the need for a political voice to fight in the interests of students and young people in parliament and the council chambers. This year’s conference identified the upcoming general election as a crucial opportunity for Socialist Students to organise a political fightback among students – not just to kick out the Tories, but also to offer a socialist alternative to Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.

Multiple speakers reminded conference about Jeremy Corbyn’s time as Labour leader, which saw the biggest youth movement of the past decade in support of his left, anti-austerity policies – including the call for free university education.

Socialist Students organisers have previously stood as part of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) in local elections. This year, conference decided that Socialist Students should approach TUSC about affiliating nationally, as the best way to coordinate with other groups putting forward a “working-class challenge to the pro-austerity and pro-capitalist parties at the next election”.

The mood of delegates throughout the day was determined and optimistic. There was a real back-and-forth exchange of ideas among all the young people gathered, which continued into the breaks and the post-conference evening social. Dozens of speakers came in to speak throughout the day, including many attending their first Socialist Students conference. The sense among organisers was that we’ve got work to do now, and a world to win – and this year’s conference has put us in the strongest possible position to do that.

Read the conference motions booklet here to see all the questions that were discussed and debated

Socialist Students exclusive: Resist attacks against free speech on campus – fight for democratic students’ unions!

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At a time when a general election is taking place, and students are discussing how to fight for free education, affordable student housing, and a decent quality of life after university, serious attacks on democratic rights on campuses across the country are being perpetrated.

This includes the outrageous scandal of the blanket banning at Bradford University of all political societies by the Students’ Union.

This is in addition to news that at Sussex University the Student Union has banned students and societies from either campaigning or canvassing on campus during the election period.

Meanwhile at Southampton University, the Students’ Union has instructed societies that they will have to abide by a decision of the SU’s AGM on whether or not to support UCU strikers, or face being de-recognised as official societies.

These represent nothing other than a blatant attack against the right to free speech and the rights of students to organise, campaign and protest on campus.

These attacks come at a time when the salaries of university vice chancellors are at an all-time high – the average VC pay rose by 3.5% last year, from £245,000 to £253,000, while nearly half of VC’s were paid over £300,000!

At the same time, there is a huge fight back taking place in our society. University staff on campus are taking eight days of strike action between 25 November and 4 December against the bosses attacks on their pay, workload and pensions.

Meanwhile, students on campuses, as well as in schools and colleges, and young workers also, are discussing what is the best way to kick out the Tories at this election, and what kind of policies and programme a Corbyn led government needs to adopt to end austerity once and for all and fight for a future for young people.

These attacks against democratic rights are designed to undermine the efforts of staff striking back against austerity and marketisation on campus as well as students looking to fight to kick out the Tories.

Socialist Students demands that all of these anti-democratic attacks banning students from campaigning on campus are immediately reversed.

We also demand and campaign for the transformation of students’ unions into organisations which fight for students’ rights, alongside the restoration of democracy within all Students Unions, including the re-establishment of regular, all student general meetings organised by the local students union.