The changing role of students’ unions within contemporary higher education

Abstract

Despite profound changes to the higher education sector in the UK over recent years, which have tended to emphasise the role of prospective students as active choosers within a marketplace and encourage higher education institutions to place more emphasis on student engagement and representation as a means of improving the quality of the learning experience, the role of students' unions has remained largely unexplored. To start to redress this gap, this paper draws on a UK-wide survey of students' union officers and a series of focus groups with 86 students and higher education staff in ten case study institutions. It outlines the ways in which students' unions are believed, by those closely involved with them, to have changed over recent years, focussing on: the shift towards a much greater focus on representation in the role and function of the students' union; the increasing importance of non-elected officers; and the emergence of more co-operative relationships between the students' union and senior institutional management. The article then discusses the implications of these findings for both our understanding of the political engagement of students, and theorising student involvement in the governance of higher education institutions.

The construction of higher education students in English policy documents

“…The Office for Students (comprised mainly, of non-students) is seen as a more effective means of representing the 'student voice' than elected student representatives. While research has suggested that, in contemporary UK higher education, institutional students' unions rarely take an oppositional stance, and can often be very supportive of university management agendas (Brooks, Byford, and Sela 2015), it appears that they are still viewed with suspicion by policy-makers.…”

The Meanings of Student Engagement: Implications for Policies and Practices

“…Institutional staff have the choice as to whether to attend to those views or not, and to avoid seeking student opinion on matters which they consider students to have little to contribute. This type of student engagement is situated as merely one of numerous systems by which students express opinions and raise issues, rather than a vehicle for critical dissent or challenge (Brooks et al 2014). Through these formal feedback and representation systems students could, in principle, raise wider issues about the university community in those spaces, but while these are framed in terms of raising issues and feeding back on pre-defined categories, there is limited likelihood that they will do so spontaneously.…”

Students’ unions, consumerism and the neo-liberal university

“…As we have argued elsewhere (Brooks et al, 2015), there is some evidence from our research that students' unions and senior managers believed the values of the two groups were becoming increasingly aligned, largely as a result of external pressures within the HE sector.…”

“…Recent research on students' unions in the UK has suggested that, over the last few years, their role within the higher education (HE) sector and their relationship with their wider institution have both changed considerably (Brooks et al, 2015). Previous work has, however, tended to emphasise the political and organisational aspects of such changes.…”