Membership Services special

This week on Working for Students – live from this year’s Membership Services Conference – we’re looking at what shifting recruitment patterns mean for students’ unions as higher-tariff universities expand, lower-tariff institutions face increasingly difficult choices, and more students look to study closer to home. We also ask who should really be responsible for belonging and student development, whether students’ unions need to think less about delivering services and more about enabling students to organise for each other, and what happens to student voice when sabbatical officer numbers are reduced. Plus, there’s discussion of how unions can make better use of regulation, build longer-term strategies around the student interest, influence curriculum reform, and move beyond simply responding to university agendas. And as institutional finances tighten, we consider whether one of the sector’s most familiar theories of change is starting to break down: does a strong partnership with the university still reliably deliver better outcomes for students, or do students’ unions need to become a more visible source of pressure as difficult decisions are increasingly made on the basis of risk? With Alan Roberts at Counter Culture and Jim Dickinson from Wonkhe..